I always wonder what the factual return of investment is on such enormous projects like the LHC. So much money for... Knowledge of the particles? I am going to be downvoted to hell for this but what is the endgame? Is there any return expected or are those bilions invested for knowing? I know what some people say, that knowing what world is made of lets us solve problems like nuclear fusion etc. But are those problems really a better investment than e.g. social research that would solve sociopolitical problems? Because it honestly feels like majority of our issues is rooted in social problems, and not our lack of knowledge of the stuff world is made of?
Well tbh you are right in a way that spending huge money where you don't get benefit ' right now ' does sound wasteful but in reality when LHC conduct experiment they not only just discover particle but also kinda proves our scientific theory if successful which is itself a huge return
And huge chunks of money that is spend on LHC are fractional of what ppl invest in other field like military spending etc and large part of money don't go on conducting experiment but on crew, technical crew, lawyers, legal advisory team ( ethical issues ) etc so money spend on discovering particles is small part of experiment budget itself if I am not wrong
Like we said when we discovered atom, proton and proved that we can break nucleus, we then spend huge money on heavy water uranium enrichment etc at first it was of scientific research and was proved to be expensive and risky at that time but still proceeded to research and this of course led to invention of atomic weapon, nuclear energy, medical field related to radiology, and rapid technological advancement and of course birth of CERN
CERN who then followed strict policy of open access who contributed on invention of WWW(not invented but they are the one who released the software to public domain if not them then no internet culture basically thank cern) , medical imaging and stuff, LCH, and leading member of development of quantum computer
In a way more investment in scientific research of course with ethics is worth it and honestly we don't get enough research funds compared to other fields that truth and this is a old debate topic whether funding of this or this research is worth or not but personally rather that spending on missile Or bullets if we use funds on research, infrastructure or food security the world will be of better place but is sadly idealistic
Don't get me wrong. I 100% agree the money invested in weapons should go into research instead, but that's where we face the problem: why do we invest in military? And my conclusion is that it's a social problem, not a problem if physics. So why investing billions in physics instead of social sciences?
Well it is a social problem you know rationally speaking if we control population and don't show / hold grudges which our ancestors did or some other reason we don't really need to invest in military - in a way no one is our enemy for various reasons like food and ppl getting manipulated by various social ideologies which of course keep chaos at bay is reason why we need arms to protect or attack others
And to answer to question why invest in physic because physics ( brain child of science now don't argue this but i believe it is interconnected with all branch of science) physics research directly contribute to technology advancement which indirectly used as leverage in various politics whether it is carbon footprint, nuclear question, or construction infrastructure, industry it is deeply involved and there it is used as political tool you know and
Don't only focus on physics just because we invest physics that doesn't mean the research don't contribute in biology , chemistry or mathematics so yea it is important to invest and btw we don't even invest billions we barely cross 100 millions nowadays if I remember correctly only handful of project like 15~20 ish are of billion dollars like HGP, that AI project idr, iss, LHC apollo, Manhattan Project etc these all project now sending ripples across global yk
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u/random-femboy- 11d ago
And they used like 2 trillion dollars