This LHC experiment....

If the history of science is anything to go by, then solving mysteries simply creates new ones. There may be technological applications years down the line, but personally I think it's great to be doing something just for the sake of knowing. I find it rather sad that people don't want to further our knowledge.

Oh no absolutely, maybe what I said came across wrong. As i said I find it really fascinating and I can't wait to hear what they come up with. But at the same time I find it interesting that some things like "dark matter" are so mysterious. Maybe some things are best left unknown? Its just one to ponder.

I agree AnnaBanana.

Also, all the money that's been spent on it could possibly have been spent to find a cure for cancer/HIV/World poverty etc. no?

I keep refreshing the BBC news website wanting to see any updates that come in on how it is going/how it went. Is there maybe a better website to follow it all on?

This is all a bit misleading anyway. They're just making one of the beams go all around the accelerator today. No collisions are planned for another couple of months or so, assuming today goes well.

BoB - who's to say something won't come out of this that has a genuinely useful application outside of scientific research? Plus I don't think it's necessarily the right thing to spend every last penny we have on 'worthy' causes - we simply stagnate as a race if we cease to pursue our understanding of the basic laws of nature.

I suppose not much is going to happen today, until they start colliding things?

Oh right, I did not realise that!

My son just rang me from school as all the kids are saying everyone is going to die , you could hear all the kids crying in the background i dont know wether to ring the head and maybe get him to talk to the whole school about it as loads are panicking , some of them are only 7 ffs .

i have calmed him down but i feel sorry for all the other kids

well, world povery wont be cured with 5bn.

besides, youre being a bit short sighted i think. the whole point of experiments like this is to hopefully find things like a cure for cancer. look at the space race - at the time people said it was a waste of money, but look what its given us in terms of advances in all kinds of areas. satellites anyone?

No technnology is "waiting" on the results from today, or the next few months, but it will generate all sorts of spin-offs, we just don't know what yet.

LEP, which was the precursor to the LHC, resulted in improvements in things like medical scanners (I think, but am not sure, that LEP may have been wholly responsible for PET scanners.)

The Grid, the need for which was driven by the LHC, but you can't really claim it was "invented" CERN, is already working to find treatments for Malaria, cures for AIDS and cancer, predicting earthquakes and tsunami, modeling climate change with an accuracy never seen before, studying the wheat genome to produce new strains that can cope with new diseases, environmental changes etc, used in hospitals for improved diagnosis...

Thanks FtG, that's really interesting. I think they should have mentioned that in the mainstream news, as for many people with non science backgrounds (and people who failed physics like me ?) it is all very out of reach in terms of understanding the practical elements of what the findings will be.

Most 'useful' scientific discoveries - vaccines, penicillin and the like - were all discovered by accident when people weren't looking for them so you never know, they may unearth something 'useful' as opposed to just 'interesting' entirely by accident!

Well yes they should, and that is what I spent the last year trying to get them to do, but it's not my job anymore so i don't care lalalalalalal ?

It's great to see some blue skies research being properly funded. The UK Government has withdrawn lots of money from physics research with no warning so unfortunately there's a lot less of it in the UK than there should be.

It's arguable whether you really discover anything from targetted, top-down research. You prove things that way, sure, but real leaps forward need intuition and "oooh I wonder what happens if I do this", not directed research programmes with a clear aim.

Ahem, part of the problem there is that they had committed a huge amount of money to the LHC, so when they made cuts it had to be from everywhere else. Non-particle physicists in the UK were less than happy about the LHC, astronomers in particular.

Possibly, but £5bn adds up to less than a pound for everyone on the planet, so it's not going to get very far! ?

Anyway, compared with other huge capital projects - the Olympics, for starters! - it's not that expensive, especially not if it actually produces something worthwhile. And I entirely agree with people who support scientific research just on a "what if?" basis - one of the many ruinous decisions made by Margaret Thatcher (a trained scientist, for God's sake!) was to refuse government funding for research that didn't have an obvious commercial basis.

I like this quote from Brian Cox:

I am in fact immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around and try to scare people. This non-story is symptomatic of a larger mistrust in science, particularly in the US, which includes intelligent design amongst other things.

The only serious issue is why so many people who don't have the time or inclination to discover for themselves why this stuff is total crap have to be exposed to the opinions of these half-wits.

Well I have learnt more about it by reading this thread than I have done through the media these last few days.

Anyway, my head hurts so I'm back off to BT to talk about babies and shopping ?

Someone actually posted a comment on a news website saying "Well, I hope they discover the God particle because it will prove that evolution is a lie!" ?

Normally, I'd discount that as obvious sarcasm, but since he was posting from Des Moines, Iowa, I'm afraid there's a passing possibility that he was serious.

(Then again, Bill Bryson came from Des Moines - "somebody had to" - and he's no slouch on the sarcasm front)

Ah yes. You're right of course. I think I meant that we need more of this in general, though not all for physics, obv. Though it's early and my brain is still reeling from not piling into a black hole before breakfast so I might not have meant that ?

Flowery, on Friday you explained how much data is going to be produced from the experiment...you said that if it was stored on CDs stacked on tope of each other, it would be x high. I can't remember what x was though. I've just been trying to relay this to my boss, but forgot the measurement you gave....a bit like forgetting the punchline of a joke!

I'm hopeful something 'useful' will come out of it. Maybe not this year or this decade but eventually I'm sure it won't have been in vain. Micro physics is how we came to have chemotherapy, radio therapy, etc so who's to say that this isn't the cure for cancer we're waiting for?

Like Hazel says, I think it's exciting when experts in their field do 'I wonder what happens if...?' science.

About 20km

Excellent. Thanks. I had 2.5 miles in my head so I was slightly out.

Talking of Concorde, wasn't the world going to come to an end when we broke the sound barrier? Or were we all just going to go deaf?

I'm not sure, but I think people were worried that train travel would rip us apart...

Yes, travelling above 60mph would cause us to disintegrate. Or something like that.

Check it out

http://www.google.co.uk/

I checked this morning to see if they had a funky drawing but htey hadn't put it up yet and was slightly disappointed ?

The first collision doesn't happen till October, but it goes fine...Nothing untoward happens and overseer Kang the Many Stomached (His Name Be Praised) has told me I can say that.

As long as STFC keep my money coming, I don't care what they spend it on. Mwha, ha, ha! ?

Seriously, it's all very exciting.

Two idits of my aqaintance have been texting me all day, with one very heavy bout twixt nine and ten saying simply "Are We Dead Yet?".

They both will be. Soon. (if it doesn't stop)

Ooooh.... The beam stuck!!! I wonder if kaks were pappered?