Jon’s Blog

The Large Hadron Collider (the latest particle accelerator at CERN) will be switched on this Wednesday and might destroy the world (read the full risk assessment here or a summary here). If it doesn’t, I wonder whether we’ll feel the UK’s £500m investment was worth it.

In the 90s particle physicists were racing to detect the top quark so that we could confirm that part of our current best model of small things. They were successful in 1995 and won themselves a Nobel prize but apart from that I can’t name any real benefit to humanity that has come from proving that the top quark does indeed exist. I’m all for trying to understand why our universe is the way it is but I can’t help feeling the money could be better spent.

Then again, the US military’s budget for 2007 was about £220 billion (that’s over £400,000 a minute, by the way) so maybe spending £500m on doing some (possibly) harmless science isn’t so bad.

Also in today’s news: Save the world, eat less cow – UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Science.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.