03-23-2008, 08:43 PM
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Shank-A-Potamus
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: Atlanta, Georgia USA
Posts: 1,756
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SilentKnight
While I'm all for scientific advancement - I can't help but wonder how many people could have been fed for the money that's been pumped in to that project.
Hopefully it'll produce something beneficial to mankind in the future and justify its massive expenditure.
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I understand your POV, but check out what a National Geographic writer said in an answer to the same question.....
Quote:
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The cynic might say that there's no practical use for any of this, that there might be other uses for all the money and brainpower going into these particle guns. But we live in a civilization shaped by physics. We know that the forces within an atom are so powerful that, unleashed and directed against humanity, they can obliterate cities in an instant. The laptop computer on which I'm writing uses microprocessors that would not exist had we not discovered quantum physics and the quirky behavior of electrons. This story will be posted on the World Wide Web?invented, in case you hadn't heard, at CERN, by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. Maybe you're reading it while listening to your iPod, which wouldn't exist but for something called "giant magnetoresistance." Two physicists discovered it independently in the late 1980s, with not much thought of how it might eventually be used. It became crucial to making tiny consumer electronics that used magnetized hard disks. The physicists won a Nobel Prize in 2007, and you got a nifty sound system that's smaller than a Hershey bar.
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Just food for thought.
--T
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