Originally posted by jimmyx
it's always been strange to me, what underlying "reason" there was to build the LHC. to spend billions of dollars, to employ highly educated engineers spending tens of thousands of man hours, and the fact that there is already colliders out there providing valuable insight into the makeup of the quantum world, just to satisfy some physicists curiosity, is not logical or reasonable, without expecting some sort of astounding, and most of all, profitable benefit. "always follow the money" has been my first line of research into the "WHY" of anything.
As a career engineer who worked on a number of projects, including experiments on LEP and now the LHC, I can assure you that your intuition here is wrong.
In some select cases fundamental knowledge can be turned into a technology and turn profit. In most cases, it just enriches our understanding of the Universe which is (as in Mastercard commercial) - priceless. It'll pay off over the period of maybe thousands of years, so it's just not a "business model" as you describe it.


lol
)
