191–200 of 223 posts
Why wait so long? Surely the tunnel is the easiest part of the project, and the Swiss are very good at digging tunnels. The article goes on to talk about funding issues, but I'd imagine they'd be able to start digging the tunnel now and round up funding over the years by expanding their organization or lobbying the EU harder.
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What do you mean with 'new physics'? And no, the higgs was a theory, now proven right (maybe you mean that by 'new physics'?) Sorry but your view on the world is just depressing, its like we need 'new science' 'new physics' whatever that means, but building the experiment to proof a theory is right, is too expensive? And no the JWST is a space telescope NOT something completely different from hubble, it's a telescope…
JWST covers different wavelengths than Hubble, which is a meaningful difference as far as telescopes go. The proposed LUVOIR or HABEX telescopes would be the successors to Hubble.
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You know "spending" is not the correct expression, that money flows directly back into the economy (and supports thousand other scientific fields, like material science, sensor technology and often goes to small highly specialized corporations). And if you compare the money that flows into the military with ZERO gain for the World...those 23B are a water drop on a hot stone.
The money is an accounting detail. Lots of actual resources will be allocated to this that could be allocated elsewhere.
Program cost: 37.30 billion
Unit cost: 12.998 billion
Something like that?
Or 12 new Columbia-class Sub's?
109.8 billion
You see those 'lots' of resources should be cut somewhere else.
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photoelectric effect in 1921 was definitely not blue-sky research with no practical applications; it was one of the core problems in physics at the time.
> it was one of the core problems in physics at the time. What were the specific "practical" problems that investigating and figuring it out that were solved?
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>What did the previous collider discover? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson >why do we think that building a bigger microscope will be any different? Why do we think building a bigger telescope then Hubble will be any different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope is an interesting case. It has gone hugely over budget. The original budget was $1.6 billion and is now around $10 billion. In 2010, the journal Nature called it "The telescope that ate astronomy" because its expanding budget was stopping other important astronomy projects. [1] The JWST is also hugely behind schedule, to the point that XKCD mocks it [2]. Originally scheduled for 2007, t…
The Large Hadron Collider went over budget by about double, which is bad but frankly for these sorts of cutting edge systems hardly unprecedented. Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs.
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I tend to think of this xkcd [1] comic when people talk about 'solving the big problems we face' instead of doing blue-sky research. [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/
> [...] instead of doing blue-sky research. In 1921 the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein won a Nobel, was blue-sky research with no practical applications. Fast forward a few decades and it was used as the basis for making laser: you know, those things that all modern communication uses to transfer information over long distances. While it is up to debate how much to spend on "blue-sky research", cutting off…
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Why not evaluate (estimate) the expected value of sample information of the different experiments, and compare the costs of the different experiments to the EVSIs? Is it too difficult to estimate the EVSI ?
Any metric you can imagine is nothing more then a guess. That's why it's research. The researchers guess and tests. Some guesses can be observably better but that's not quantifiable. At least that's what I think.
If you fail once, fail again but bigger... who cares it’s not our money and the bigger our project the more we pay ourselves...
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The James Webb Space Telescope is an interesting case. It has gone hugely over budget. The original budget was $1.6 billion and is now around $10 billion. In 2010, the journal Nature called it "The telescope that ate astronomy" because its expanding budget was stopping other important astronomy projects. [1] The JWST is also hugely behind schedule, to the point that XKCD mocks it [2]. Originally scheduled for 2007, t…
What a strange comparison. Why would you compare it to a space telescope when you could compare it to another supercollider, operated by the same organisation? The Large Hadron Collider went over budget by about double, which is bad but frankly for these sorts of cutting edge systems hardly unprecedented. Some of that was ironically due to budget cuts causing delays which in the long term increased costs.
If you want a prime reason things go over budget this is the prime one, not fully funding a project in order to save money. If you look at well executed projects they spend years setting up and then execute as fast as possible.
Made this comment below but spending billions on another collider in an attempt to essentially validate SUSY is irresponsible. A few years ago, a bunch of physical philosophers tried to justify this turn of particle physics in general away from experiment, particularly suggesting the search of symmetries and mathematical beauty (I guess) was enough of a justification for the work even though it essentially is contrar…
Honest question, what are some engineering spin-offs that could come out of this? I'm asking because I'm reminded of a Peter Thiel interview where it's mentioned that, despite changing our view of the universe, no "real world" applications came out of the quark model discovered in the 1960s. This is different from a project like ITER, which is also hugely expensive but could be a game changer.
However, it does seem apropos to mention that the web itself was a spin-off of work at CERN.