(June 2, 2015 at 10:48 am)Alex K Wrote: That's not really a good excuse. The way the SSC costs skyrocketed, adding fancy explosion special effects on top of it would have only cost marginally more.
We don't want added special effects! We want something real, with fire and/or explosions being an essential part. If you look at the massive fire coming out of a Saturn V rocket, that isn't just for looks, that is essential to it working. And with the atom bomb, the explosion itself is the point. (Which makes it a perfect example of the kind of project we want.)
We don't want some sissy thing that doesn't involve anything real, but has added effects to look like something. If we wanted that, we would just look at an action film coming out of Hollywood.
So, we need to come up with a particle accelerator that involves some real fire and explosions on a grand scale, or we need to be spending our money on something else that does. Now, a big laser beam that can vaporize a city, that would be something we could appreciate.
Maybe we should rethink the design of a particle accelerator and make it so it can be aimed at things, so it could be used as some form of weapon. Then we might be willing to spend the money for it. But somehow I doubt it would ever be practical for that purpose.
Really, how many people have been killed by the LHC? How can it be used to destroy things? If you can't even claim one death from it after all these years, how can you say it was money well spent?
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
