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highwaystar101 on 18 November 2010
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WereKitten said:
highwaystar101 said:
Kratos_36 said:

I like the whole LHC thing. You have to like a machine that looks like that. 

But... I'm not a professor , nor a super smart scientist , so , what is the use of crashing these atoms into each other ? Yeah , to find out more about our universe wen it was very young. But aren't there more useful things to put those billions of dollars in ? Like finding something as an alternative to oil , medical development , space exploration ? 

Well as we've mentioned in the thread, the formation of anti-matter atoms is allowing them to be studied for the first time, and antimatter may hold potential for producing massive amounts energy. So that's something practical.

But, as always, we wont understand the full applications of what we discover until we've discovered it (although we can hypothesise).

An analogy would be Einstein's theory of general relativity. When Einstein developed it nearly 100 years ago it had no foreseeable practical applications, but since then we have used that knowledge to develop many practical things like satellites. What seemed like a theory with few practical applications theory now underpins modern society.

There's a quote that fits well here, but I can't remember who said it right now. It's something like "I can't think of anything more useless than the invisible light that has been discovered".

By invisible light he meant the non-visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is now responsible for things like television, radios, x-rays machines, microwave ovens, space telescopes, etc. It seemed useless at the time, but it turned out to be one of the most important discoveries of all time.

Well said.

Plus, by trying to achieve big scientific goals, even the most distant from what you commonly think as everyday's life, we often give birth to useful technologies as a side effect.

Trying to detect gravitational waves led to build big apparati, and in turn to develop new dampening engineering techniques and peculiar materials that will be used in precision machinery all over the world.

Statistical analysis of biological and astronomical data was the reason for the development of much of today's parallelized computation techniques.

And obviously as the most self-evident example, let's not forget that HTML webpages were born at CERN, originally as a way for physicists to exchange hypertextual documents.


That's a good point too. In fact, I bet the engineering and construction knowledge gained from building the LHC at CERN is incredible. It is possible the biggest engineering accomplishment to date.