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Re:Some US scientists consider moving overseas to continue t... by T-A on Sunday October 06, 2013 @07:23PM (#6505869)
"jobs, dicoveries, and innovation" from particle physics? Really?

I'll go with jobs, but only tax-financed ones. I'll go, tentatively, with discoveries, although everything to come out of the LHC so far is simply confirmation of the same old Standard Model we've known since the 70s. The SSC would have been able to probe higher energies, but as things are standing, there is no indication of new physics; if it exists, it could easily be out of range for both the LHC and the hypothetical SSC.

More to the point, the economic value of those discoveries is almost certain to be 0, for simple reasons of scale.

As for innovation, what has particle physics brought which would not equally well be brought by any number of other large scale technological projects? We all know the "WWW invented at CERN" story, but surely we also all realize that the physics input to the WWW was exactly 0, that any large organization needing to handle large number of documents over a heterogeneous network would have come up with something similar, that others probably did, and that the real reason CERN's solution took off was it's being free open source?

Particle physics is a luxury. At best, it's pursued for reasons of intellectual curiosity. Trying to portray it as an economic engine is not going to convince anyone worth convincing.

Re:Some US scientists consider moving overseas to continue t... by TYPE_FASTER on Sunday October 06, 2013 @09:13PM (#6506116)
You know...I just don't think that's the case. We can't predict what products or societal changes particle physics will result in until we actually do the research (the Schrodinger's Cat of research?).

One thing is for sure: if we don't do the research, we won't know any more, and we won't have gained any further understanding of the universe. I just don't think understanding our universe, and the world we live in, is a luxury.