Is CERN worth what has been spent on it?

[BaalChatzaf]

CERN is the international scientific center that does the most advanced research into the subatomic particles that make up the world we can "see".   The latest triumph of  CERN was the proof that the Higgs boson (predicted by the Standard Model for Fields and Particles)  does indeed exist. Which means the Higgs field which imparts mass to some particles  exists.   Is there any practical use for the Higgs boson or the Higgs field?   For the Higgs Boson probably not.  It only last for 10^-21  seconds before decaying into  various other subatomic particles such as meson, muons,  a variety of quarks  and various leptons.  Its main claim to fame at this point  is it pretty well establishes the soundness of the Standard Model. So if you evaluated what is going on at CERN in  terms of immediate usefulness or economic return it really does not look like a "hot" investment.  My guess is that over the years a hundred billion dollars has been "sunk"  in CERN.  The LHC, its master machine  ran about ten billion dollars.

But not so fast.  Let us look at the side effects of CERN,  things that came from CERN but were not intended to happen.  One thing was the World Wide Web.  Tim Berners-Lee invented the hypertext software and the display capability to make it easier for the physicists at CERN and related installations to communicate their results and share their work.  And surely WWW did that.  But WWW did much more.  It became The Web   we we all know, use and abuse.  Probably the value add of The Web and its derivative   products and services   is well over a trillion dollars.  So CERN and its operations may not have created particle based technologies,  but it incidentally spun off The Web.   

Would we have gotten The Web without CERN.  Possible.  But what computer communication technologies were there before WWW?  Well there was the File Transfer Protocol  (FTP)   and  e-mail.  That was pretty much it;.  There were specialized data transmission formats including the seven layer protocol which is pretty much the rock bottom basis of all computer  communication these days.   But none these technologies produced the useful array of products and services which WWW  has spawned.   So CERN begat WWW and WWW  begat trillions of dollars of services and industries.  We would not have the likes of Amazon w.o.  WWW  and  e-book formats which in turn begat  technical elaborations of the cell phone.   The Selfie is the great grandchild of WWW.  

So we can truly say CERN was worth every cent spent on it. 

[atlashead]

No scientific research is sunk.  It's a type of suicide to not do research.  If you let induction take over, you will conclude every object is made up of objects, also, planets grab the closest thing; the obvious thing is to throw objects at each other in order to see if they stick or rip apart. This, in my opinion, is the right conclusion of induction.

[Brant Gaede]

On 11/8/2016 at 6:30 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

CERN is the international scientific center that does the most advanced research into the subatomic particles that make up the world we can "see".   The latest triumph of  CERN was the proof that the Higgs boson (predicted by the Standard Model for Fields and Particles)  does indeed exist. Which means the Higgs field which imparts mass to some particles  exists.   Is there any practical use for the Higgs boson or the Higgs field?   For the Higgs Boson probably not.  It only last for 10^-21  seconds before decaying into  various other subatomic particles such as meson, muons,  a variety of quarks  and various leptons.  Its main claim to fame at this point  is it pretty well establishes the soundness of the Standard Model. So if you evaluated what is going on at CERN in  terms of immediate usefulness or economic return it really does not look like a "hot" investment.  My guess is that over the years a hundred billion dollars has been "sunk"  in CERN.  The LHC, its master machine  ran about ten billion dollars.

But not so fast.  Let us look at the side effects of CERN,  things that came from CERN but were not intended to happen.  One thing was the World Wide Web.  Tim Berners-Lee invented the hypertext software and the display capability to make it easier for the physicists at CERN and related installations to communicate their results and share their work.  And surely WWW did that.  But WWW did much more.  It became The Web   we we all know, use and abuse.  Probably the value add of The Web and its derivative   products and services   is well over a trillion dollars.  So CERN and its operations may not have created particle based technologies,  but it incidentally spun off The Web.   

Would we have gotten The Web without CERN.  Possible.  But what computer communication technologies were there before WWW?  Well there was the File Transfer Protocol  (FTP)   and  e-mail.  That was pretty much it;.  There were specialized data transmission formats including the seven layer protocol which is pretty much the rock bottom basis of all computer  communication these days.   But none these technologies produced the useful array of products and services which WWW  has spawned.   So CERN begat WWW and WWW  begat trillions of dollars of services and industries.  We would not have the likes of Amazon w.o.  WWW  and  e-book formats which in turn begat  technical elaborations of the cell phone.   The Selfie is the great grandchild of WWW.  

So we can truly say CERN was worth every cent spent on it. 

Yeah--worth every cent, but, if I read you right, the WWW was a CERN non-sequitur. The scientists could have been working on something else and needed a WWW for that too. It's therefore, if true, fallacious to say without CERN there wouldn't be all those goodies. That's like saying we wouldn't have our understanding of gravity if an apple hadn't fallen on Newton's head and, no apple on that head, no Einstein theories.

I will say the world would be quite different if Hitler had been run over and killed by a wagon as a child, but no one alive today would have the slightest knowledge of the blessing of that "tragedy."

--Brant

(I read Hitler's life was spared by a British soldier in WWI [who was therefore responsible for the Holocaust?])

[BaalChatzaf]

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Yeah--worth every cent, but, if I read you right, the WWW was a CERN non-sequitur. The scientists could have been working on something else and needed a WWW for that too. It's therefore, if true, fallacious to say without CERN there wouldn't be all those goodies. That's like saying we wouldn't have our understanding of gravity if an apple hadn't fallen on Newton's head and, no apple on that head, no Einstein theories.

I will say the world would be quite different if Hitler had been run over and killed by a wagon as a child, but no one alive today would have the slightest knowledge of the blessing of that "tragedy."

--Brant

(I read Hitler's life was spared by a British soldier in WWI [who was therefore responsible for the Holocaust?])

WWW as not a primary target for invention.  It was a means to an end, and Tim Berners-Lee had no idea of what WWW would lead to.  He made it for the use of scientists at CERN and places like it.  He never intended it to serve as the backbone and infrastructure of an online industrial establishment.  You might say CERN was accidentally worth the money spent on it.