If the Higgs Boson Is Found I'll.....
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Re:Finding the God Particle is nice and all... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really fundamental research if it has to have "some hope of return on investment" (note: "has to have", not "has").
Re:Bluffing? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not cynicism. That's naivete trying to dress up in cynicism's clothes.
Re:Finding the God Particle is nice and all... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great for science (Score:5, Insightful)
Also banging on the practical applications drum is getting tiresome. Fundamental research should be carried out for its own sake.
I could cite the everything everywhere* that says practical applications of fundamental research come eventually but that is beside the point. This machine we call civilization is spending most of its energy doing nothing but spinning its gears. Spending more and more effort to produce widgets and convince people to buy them so they can wind up in landfill, or spending a significant minority of world effort on building militaries just in case the other guy attacks.
Looking at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
Even a tiny country like New Zealand could have easily funded the thing alone rather than buying obsolete second hand fighters. Australia could do it in a single year with change -- and that's not even getting into countries with a military that would do anything on a world scale. *I challenge you to find a single artefact created in your lifetime that did not involve knowledge of EM -- 'what nonsense, making a needle move, where are the practical applications?' -- somewhere in the production of it or the tools used to produce it
Re:Great discovery but (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Understand the origin of Mass (Score:5, Insightful)
Does a lot to Explain Mass (Score:4, Insightful)
As far as "explaining mass", however, it does almost nothing
No, actually it does a huge amount! The bit you are missing is that if you give particles mass then they break very important symmetries of nature (which in turn means that we would expect to see violations of conservation laws which are not observed). The Higgs mechanism gets around this by saying that while the laws of physics are symmetrical the universe is not. So while on the face of it may seem not to do much for mass behind the scenes it lets us have both the particle masses and the symmetries which we need to explain the universe.