Re:The World Doesn’t Need a New Gigantic Particle Collider
by kergonath on Sunday June 28, 2020 @02:15PM
(#23670809)
Oh yes, good point about the Web. I know there’s a lot of cutting edge research on storage and computing distributed across the world to handle the sheer amount of data coming out of the LHC. It’s not implausible that this could help improve the Internet’s architecture.
I entirely agree with your second point. I’ll add that it is also important to keep these people (from highly specialised technicians and physicists to diplomats and support staff) employed in positions where they can keep their skills sharp. Some of them then go back to their countries of origin to apply this experience and knowledge to help improve research and policy at home, whilst retaining personal links with their counterparts abroad.
In the grand scheme of things, the expenditure is a rounding error anyway.
In my opinion, another important reason to support of keeping these large accelerators alive is there is a very real chance that the expertise to build these kind of devices could atrophy or be lost entirely given the long timescales involved. Even if one is opposed to building this specific collider, I think the prospect of losing this kind of institutional knowledge is concerning (though if one finds these things useless, you might care less if we lost that capability).