I shall be watching closely …. especially as I am only about 150 km away!!

Yes and no …….. sometimes one has to say “STOP”; this particular bit of research at this particular time isn’t right. Few politicians have the courage to say “STOP”, especially if Europe can be NUMBER ONE!!

I have nothing against research into fusion …. we need it. But to learn what happened just after the Big Bang? Pointless. It’s a particle too far.

Besides, even if a thing may be interesting or even useful to do, that doesn’t mean we can AFFORD it …..

And we already know a VAST amount which for poorer people on the planet HASN’T YET BEEN PUT INTO USE. Let’s put our resources into that.

What is the point of learning more if it is NOT APPLIED, especially when people’s lives are at stake?

Thanks for your contribution …….

Have a good day …..

PS a lathe was USEFUL ……..

|Sometimes you think too much, and occassionaly in the wrong direction!

Pure research is what got us where we are today, whether we should be where we are today is a different kettle of fish,; depending whether you are an angler or a jockey.

Were it not for pure thought we would still be hunter gatherers on the plains of Africa while the rest of nature had evolved better and more efficient ways of killing humans; they would not have had the brain power to fail to evolve, only we would have.

Pure thought gave us the cave paintings which enabled the hunters to know where to hunt and the gatherers know where to gather more efficiently, which fed us better so that we grew bigger and stronger.

The first lathe enable man to make a better lathe and so on ad infinitum.

If we stop thinking impossible thoughts before breakfast we die as a species.

I don’t like Muslim fundamentalism any more than you do, but the Catholics weren’t much better in the Middle Ages … the extremist Muslims just need time to work it out of their system, like we did eventually …

Well, off to my siesta for now …I hope your post doesn’t give me nightmares ….

A+

PS None of us should hesitate to say what we really think. I for one am too old for pretence.

I hesitate to say what I truly think. Wolves eat mice, and so do cats. How? They outsmart them.

How did we beat the Nazis? We outsmarted them. The French and the British saw that time was working in favor of the Nazis and their American and Soviet accomplices, so they declared war when the Nazis had barely started their militarization effort. It took 6 years, and immense sacrifices, but we got them. The USA used the occasion for self aggrandizement, but they can be outsmarted too, even if their president is the world’s most peaceful man.

There is logic everywhere. That of the sheep is not that of the wolf. For example, we are asked to bleat, and call Gandhi a man of peace. Thank him for having mentally financed the future humongous thermonuclear war between India’s democracy, and the Qur’anists.

India did not have to be “decolonized” the way it was. If the Raj was still what it used to be, with the Queen as the head of the state, no thermonuclear war within the Raj would happen.

In the times of the AOF and AEF, there was a French hospital, with French doctors, every 100 kilometers. it was part of so called, what is insultingly called, “colonialism”. There were, in truth, no French “colons”. Just French army and French administrators, and those pesky French doctors. To ask the French to go away was to ask for war, famine, and no hospitals. Got all of those.

We want to be ever smarter, so we want to understand the universe ever more. This is what our civilization does. So we want CERN. The superconducting plant there, the world’s largest, got a severe problem, a problem any plant of that unprecedented size may have had, because, well, we just did not know. Now we do, a bit better.

In Pakistan, a Muslim fundamentalist state, one has to be Muslim to be a full citizen. Others can be killed for insulting God, or the analphabetic desert epileptic who is venerated, etc. They don’t want to know the universe, just to kill according to a recipe book which violates Western law. Fine. But let’s be ready to outsmart them, as we did the Nazis. There are security clearances in high energy physics: it’s not just about wanting to know why flowers bloom, but how to build better weapons.

Why do we need better weapons? Well, it’s such a small planet, there is space for just one civilization, it will turn out. Soon enough.

To help Africa, it’s best to not send money anymore, in the millions, to rich men such as the Prince of Wales and their agriculture. Agricultural subsidies for the rich have been a disaster for Africa. Those subsidies are orders of magnitude greater than CERN. So is Goldman Sachs. Actually the casino in the sky of derivatives is about twenty times world GDP. It produces nothing, except a new world aristocracy.

Let’s fight that misdistribution of world capital, not knowledge. Obscurantism only brings war, death, horror. Meanwhile, let the decolonized enjoy their decolonization. And the Muslims their Jihad. Their morrows may be distinctly bitter, if at all. If the wolves are smart enough, though, them, at least, will survive.

Morality is good, but it’s best when it allows to survive.

Patrice

Thank you for your riposte, which slams the ball firmly back in my court! My thesis was essentially not that this research in itself is not interesting, particularly to particle physicists, but that it is the wrong priority for our times.

As I said, our planet and race face a multitude of problems, many of which are very practical and need a lot of resources. For the price we are paying for CERN we could equip and staff several African countries with medical clinics. I spent the first six months of thie year teaching in Africa. As a white man (the only one around) I was naturally presumed to be “rich” and a considerable number of local people came up to me to ask for money to buy medicine for their children, who had malaria or worse. Now some of these may have been lying but I happen to know that the majority were not.

I have also in recent months been trying harder to put myself in the position of my fellow humans who are less well off than I am. Were I a poor Congolese villager, probably without any regular income, I would find the whole concept of CERN an obscene Western indulgence.

It is often said “Oh well, if the money weren’t spent on that it wouldn’t in any case go to build clinics or whatever in Africa.” Well, that is what is said but it is of course total rubbish. The European Commission and Parliament could quite easily have said: “Look, we can’t justify this humungous expense on such theoretical science, interesting though it may be. Let’s instead make a deal with Botswana, Lesotho and Madagascar to build and staff 30 hospitals and clinics in their countries.”

It is INCREDIBLY easy to make excuses for not doing what is morally right. It is in my opinion of course immoral for us to spend such a sum when scarce resources are urgently required all over the place. You don’t think it should or could go to Africa? OK, then let’s spend more on research into food production, water conservation, cheap energy production, even housing and so on. There are hundreds of thousands of people even in Europe who do not own a house and/or live in appalling conditions. There are millions of working and lower-middle class parents who cannot afford to send their children to university. What do you think THEY think about CERN? As I previously said, I have nothing against primary research into, for example, fusion power or some other means of proving cheap, clean energy, which is our Number 1 priority at this period in our history. We already HAVE this facility, at Cadarache in France, another European project. Let’s bung more into that perhaps, but the Higgs boson? Let it alone ….

But it is not even RESEARCH where the money needs spending. We already KNOW lots more than is currently being put into practice. We CAN do so much more with more and better investment, but a vast sum sucked up by CERN is ill-spent.

BLACK HOLES? As it happens, I HAVE read Stephen Hawkins’ book. In fact, I have read a lot about black holes. As a layman, it seems to me nonetheless that this is all theoretical, and based largely on mathematical calculations. That tiny black holes evaporate is as far as I know not proven. You yourself say that black holes are just a theory. My contention in this aspect is that this is potentially dangerous. This danger from rogue black holes may be infinitesimal, but scientists do not have the right to take even infinitesimal risks with my child’s life.

I have also read as it happens some accounts of the detonation of the first atom bomb. Scientists were not completely sure that the whole atmosphere would not burn up. Sure, theory said it shouldn’t, but they heaved a sign of relief when it didn’t.

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY? We already know a lot about this; what is needed is investment to exploit what we already know. How on earth can the search for the Higgs boson give us superconducting machines? They are looking to explain the history of the first milliseconds of the universe; that is of surpassing irrelevance both to African villagers who need medicine to prevent their kids dying or indeed to the imminent needs of the planet. It is a question of priorities.

Some of this research is intrinsically too dangerous. However, it is the cost in terms of priorities that I cannot accept. And of course it is my money that is being spent but I had no say in it.

And what other reasons could there have been for creating CERN? It couldn’t just possibly be that Europe, in all it majestic self-important grandeur, wanted to become a “world-leader” in the most expensive and esoteric of theoretical sciences, could it? It couldn’t all be just a vast ego-trip in competition with the USA, could it? Or am I being cynical?

“Knowledge is good”. What, ANY knowledge? And what about – when resources are limited – the APPLICATION of knowledge we already have to those who need it most?

Black holes are also just a theory, and, although something like them exist astronomically, it is not clear than anything less than astronomy could generate them. The devil is in the details of Quantum mechanics, which we do not understand. Conventional black hole physics should be viewed as worst possible case (once again, moderated by Hawking radiation).

Also why don’t you direct your ire against the accelerator in Chicago (which reaches the highest energies at this point, and is within the max odf CERN by a factor of only 3)?

We do not need ignorance back in power. Knowledge is good. More knowledge is better. Just the technology of CERN will be civilization saving (because low temp superconductivity has the potential of saving at least 10% of the world’s energy; CERN is the largest industrial machine of thei type, worldwide, followed by Fermilab).

Trust me, there is a lot to be learned. Although I do not like Quantum Filed Theory, I recognize it has enormous industrial apllications in this civilization already, and nearly infinitely more is coming soon, if we feed it (vacuum energy has a lot of potential, to crack up a joke that will make laugh anyone with enough of a physics education).

Respectfully,

PA