World Science Scholars

3.4 The LHC and the Higgs

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    • The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest scientific undertakings in all of history. It is estimated to have cost somewhere around 13.25 billion dollars (USD), including operating costs of about 1B USD/year since it became operational in 2008. Do you think that’s money well-spent? Why?

    • of course. we discovered the higgs boson with that. which is a staggering breakthrough in particle physics and quantum mechanics.

    • Absolutely – peanuts when compared to some of the military budgets around the world.

    • Affirm

    • The spin off technologies from basic research like with the LHC should be promoted more when trying to securing and continue funding for these large scale experiments.

    • Asolutely.

    • I think so as these megaprojects usually generate more innovations and new business in every segment involved.

    • Yes, but also for the fact that it proved the importance and the power of international collaboration – Should inspire more people…

    • In general, spending money on scientific research is money well spent.

    • Yes, of course.

    • It appears history will have to make that judgement. Spending money just because it’s “science” isn’t always a good idea. There should be a payoff at some point. A case in point: nuclear fusion. A fusion reactor would change history, making cheap, nearly limitless, clean energy. But for the past 50 years, a workable fusion reactor has been “only 20 years away.” That may prove to be money not well spent. The LHC could very well have a large payoff in how humans live in the future in ways we don’t yet understand. But today, I’m not particularly sure we understand that payoff yet.

    • Yeah it is a great thing but still today, many of us don’t have any strong Evidence for how and what is dark Energy made of and in June 2020, Cern announced to make a future particle accelerator which is way more accurate than the LHC. We humans have always looked to understand the deeper truths of Reality and we have expanded our imagination and know ability and I think, we can make a good collider.

    • In the context of the Standard Model, the professor talked about aquiring

        mass

      without explaining what mass is. Is it energy? Something else?

    • Yes, as there is no cheaper ways to attain such knowledge. And like someone said, it’s peanuts compared to military investments.

    • I don’t know if there is a good invertion in the way that it generates a very higth waste of energy. It solves and discovers the most problematic situations in the modern physics but it generate too many problems like contamitation, waste of energy and all this situations that are relevant too. So it’s a very good invertion in the field of research yes… it generate new problems beyong more the physical situations, yes too

    • Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

      The money spent on the LHC is well spent.

      The discovery and validation of the Higgs leads to further science.

      It may be that a collider in Alaska could be more cost effective than one put in space to further increase 20x the accuracy of Higgs discoveries. Circumpolar biomes are outter-space biomes.

      In my opinion, the best investment for space companies right now is a start-up on Kodiac Island. It has a proximity to space that allows greater science- the goal of huge and expensive constructions.

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