LHC

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Large hard-on collider

[robvalue]

Lovely hair curlers

[Alex K]

Large hard-on collider

That joke is so 2009

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'm just bored by people reading about some science thing they don't understand, and all the sudden remembering all those "urgent matters" it should be sacrificed for.

What's the current price tag on JSF development, 300 billion? LOL. The LHC cost about as much as the new train connection between cologne and frankfurt. Guess what people will remember in 100 years? That we found some fundamental principles behind the laws of nature, or that I can go to frankfurt airport in an hour from my house (yay!).

The money spent on building a supercollider all goes into the know how of privatr contractors getting experience building machines to specifications hitherto unknown to engineering. It goes into the education of thousands of phd and master students who go on working in IT and industry, and tech companies having better materials, electronics, worldwide next generation high speed networks.

[SteelCurtain]

'm just bored by people reading about some science thing they don't understand, and all the sudden remembering all those "urgent matters" it should be sacrificed for.

What's the current price tag on JSF development, 300 billion? LOL. The LHC cost about as much as the new train connection between cologne and frankfurt. Guess what people will remember in 100 years? That we found some fundamental principles behind the laws of nature, or that I can go to frankfurt airport in an hour from my house (yay!).

The money spent on building a supercollider all goes into the know how of privatr contractors getting experience building machines to specifications hitherto unknown to engineering. It goes into the education of thousands of phd and master students who go on working in IT and industry, and tech companies having better materials, electronics, worldwide next generation high speed networks.

I could not agree more. People have the same argument for NASA, and while I think NASA's days are numbers, the private sector has greatly benefited from the things NASA had to invent to make shit work.

From the experiments done at the LHC we are learning fundamental things about our universe. Things that will have FAR reaching effects in the private sector. CERN in general is doing fantastic things that we all will benefit from.

While I do not pretend to even remotely comprehend the experimental physics that is happening there, I do understand how important it is.

[vorlon13]

No kidding, back in the 50s the US government had letters from constituents terrified the atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean would blow a hole in the seafloor and let all the water out.

There was a brief concern nukes might set the air on fire, but the maths showed it just wasn't possible. And that goes for both a chemical reaction oxidizing all the nitrogen, and a propagating nuclear fusion reaction burning the world to a cinder. Turns out kindling a fusion reaction is rather difficult and takes an extremely clever and well designed thermonuclear device to pull it off. Just supplying a random gigantic spark of energy to the atmosphere doesn't come close to doing it. Even setting off the largest possible nuclear bomb we could build at the center of Jupiter wouldn't ignite it, and it is orders of magnitude closer to being so than our air, or even the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

[Alex K]

Yeah - but let's not compare colliding two beams 100 meters underground with the power of an average freight train to detonating hydrogen bombs. One is a huge explosion with a mile wide fireball, and when the other goes wrong, you have some fried coils, an annoying helium leak and a nice hole in the wall (although the automatic beam dump mechanism is very very fast and kicks in before a magnet can say "puff")