I think CERN is lying.

Hi Jessicka,

Originally posted by Jessicka
I admit that at first, with no knowledge of anything before hand, that I was freaking out a little inside.

Perfectly reasonable when you don't know the facts. Hell, I'm still nervous about it, on the off chance that some *really wierd* effect comes into play that no one could have imagined which incorporates new dangers.

I think also that I read this is not funded by tax payers, but the money is privately donated.

Actually, it is funded by taxpayers from many nations across the world. I could be wrong, but I don't think there are any significant private donors.

Eventually, if the human race wants to survive, humans will have to find a way to exist on another planet. I think this is a step in the right direction for that.

Possibly. Of course that's the problem with this kind of research. Politicians and the public justifiably ask "If I give you $6 billion for a new collider, how will society benefit from it?" This is an impossible question to answer because no one knows. If you lived 3000 years ago, why would you want to fund the Greek philosophers to spend their days playing around with triangles and numbers? If you lived four hundred years ago, could you have predicted that some guys studying the motion of stars and planets would be inspired to invent calculus - the prerequisite for almost all technology since then? If you had lived 150 years ago, would you have funded scientists to understand why people get static shocks when they touch metal on a dry day? Power plants, anyone? Who cares what the smallest pieces of matter are and how they behave? Well, guess we wouldn't have computers if no one had studied that. So really, we have no idea what benefit this kind of super-fundamental research at the LHC will have for society, or if there will be any. But we do know that if such research hadn't been done in the past, we would have a much lower quality of life today.

I know you weren't disagreeing with this argument, but others have complained in this thread that this kind of research is nothing but a pointless waste of taxpayer money, so I thought I'd manufacture an excuse to respond .

Actually my boyfriend brought me home a National Geographic from work and it does state that the money does come from all over the world.

I did read on other websites that the money was privately donated. This just makes me think that alot of people, that have no knowledge of anything, just type stuff to make it seem better/worse than it actually is, just to make the arguments tilt more their way. So at this point I have no idea what to believe anymore. The people working on it say nothing will go wrong, and a lot of regular everyday people think we're doomed.

I admit that I'm a little nervous still, and now reading that it is taxpayer money from around the world, I do really think it is kind of a waste, especially short-term. I thought it was a bunch of rich physicists running this whole thing, maybe using their money or maybe the money CERN has. The money aspect of this does make my feelings change a little. With all the talk of gas prices, economy problems, prices of food rising, etc-its honestly a questionable decision that they decided to give some of our tax money to build the LHC. While my family here hasn't been impacted by gas prices or anything, I do feel for the people who are hurt by this, since my mom and dad got really behind on their mortgage, and have turned off everything except for the water, electricity, and gas. I'm lucky that my boyfriend has a pretty good job working for the paper, and the worse things get, the more news there is.


I hope something good does come from all this though. I now have to look for more information. Even though America pitched in on this, it's not really in the news as much as you think it would be.

Does anyone know why they don't set a specific date as to when it gets turned on? Are they going to just decide one day that it's ready to start and turn it on and then tell us later? It seems weird that the startup date is so unclear.

reply to post by Jessicka


Hi Jessicka,

I believe the LHC is expected to turn on sometime in September for a sort of "test run". This run will be conducted at lower than design energies and luminosities. The energy will ramp up to its maximum in 2009, and the luminosity will ramp up gradually over many years (luminosity basically means rate of collisions). The dates are somewhat fluid because of technical challenges. No one has ever tried to make such a complicated machine before, and unforeseen problems can arise.

I understand your feeling about how the money could be better spent elsewhere, and to some extend I agree with you. But let me try presenting the other side of the argument in one other way. As I recall the US has spent something like a billion dollars on this project over a many years. Sure, that money could have been spent on other things, but it is only a small fraction of a percent of the ~3 trillion dollar annual federal budget, divided over many years. Maybe this investment will pay off with great discoveries and technological applications and maybe it won't - that's the uncertainty of research. But our civilization is built on the discoveries of such fundamental research. And even if no great discoveries are made, the technology developed for the LHC has significantly pushed forward worldwide expertise in precision silicon devices, magnet technology, and high speed computing. In fact, we are having this discussion on the world wide web, invented in CERN (the same institution where the LHC is being built) for use in similar experiments. This is an example of an indirect benefit of such research through the tools that are developed for use in it, but I think it shows that our investments in particle physics have more than paid off our investment.