Guys, the trick is to get it partially built and then cancel funding. Then scientists will never trust you to fund anything ever again, and you get to act like science is a waste of money while you’re spending ridiculous sums on fighter jets.
Yes, I am still bitter about Waxahatchie.
I think we realized halfway through building that we couldn’t build bombs.
He’s a great video documentary about it by Bobby Broccoli if you want information and have two hours.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Then I saw I already liked it. 15 years sounds short but it’s actually a decent amount of time.
Only if someone sticks their head in this one too
Budget: Military Complex > CERN
Long term value to citizens: CERN > Miltary Complex
All historical CERN expenses combined are a tiny fraction of the yearly expenses of the combined EU miltary
But particles don’t make my dick feel big
Even quarks aren’t that small.
They call me quark cause I’m always down to top and up to bottom and I’m charmingly strange. Also I’m very very small
I’m just amazed that funding $22 billion is even an issue when the project is being backed by the EU, and partially the US, since we never built ours…
That’s a rounding error for both entities
US Congress: Audit NASA > Audit the Pentagon
EU: Audit CERN > Audit Luxemborg/Malta/
UK
This fucks, way better use of 22 billion dollars than usual
This is cheaper than two super carriers.
I’d rather spend 22 billion on this than in Israel or more weapons of war
STOP ACCELERATING PARTICLES! Years of research and no use found for particles any smaller than SAND!
They’ve played us for absolute fools.
See here from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the subject:
I’m pretty bullish on science investments, but I’ve heard multiple arguments that this thing is probably not worth the money. The most prevalent argument I’ve heard to the contrary is basically “we could discover something that might be interesting.” But like very little in terms of concrete measurable returns on investment for it.
This article does a good job of arguing against it I think. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
My mind isn’t made up on the topic, so like can anybody explain to me why this thing is actually worth 30+ billion dollars?
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any advance that didn’t at some point depend on people just dicking around to see what they could see.
“What happens if we spin this stick really really fast against this other stick?”
“Cool! What happens if we put some dried moss around it?”
“That’s nuts, man! Hey, I wonder what happens if we toss some of our leftovers in there?”
“C’mon over here, guys. You gotta taste this!”
At worst, a project like this keeps a lot of curious people in one place where we can make sure they don’t cause harm with their explorations. At best, whole new industries are founded. Never forget that modern electronics would never have existed without Einstein and Bohr arguing over the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Say the actual construction cost is $100 billion over 10 years and operational costs are $1 billion a year. Compared to all the stupid and useless stuff we already spend money on, that’s little more than pocket lint. We could extract that much from the spending of one military alliance and it would look like a rounding error. Hell, we could add one cent to the price of each litre of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and bottled water and have money left over.
Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don’t know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won’t know what to look for. That’s actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don’t know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can’t post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.
This meme got Sabine hossenfelder bricked up
