*spacy - if nothing else the cost of lhc was astronomical. of course, still a piss in the ocean compared to costs of military hardware around the globe

Adding video to channels (Spacy) - requested by kulpims.

Right fucking on!! My new hero, too.
The big, conceptual breakthroughs come from basic research, where no one is expecting them. Applied research is for improving the stuff we already have conceived.
Never tell a scientist what he can and can't look in to.

There is always a danger in expectations. We do this research for knowledge. Fundamental knowledge. The more thoroughly we understand the universe, the more control we have over it, and over ourselves. But if you expect practical results, you will start to get funding tied to profits. Thankfully that isn't happening in this case.

Remember kids, scientific research is a long term investment. Very, very long term.

Of course it is also important to put money into energy alternatives, but they need to come from separate budgets and have separate levels of expected results.

Brian Cox is awesome. I was smitten by him ever since since he explained LHC at TED. What a well spoken young man. Kids should idolize him instead of Lil'Wayne or Whomeverisinthechartsnowadays.

>> ^aspartam:
Brian Cox is awesome. I was smitten by him ever since since he explained LHC at TED. What a well spoken young man. Kids should idolize him instead of Lil'Wayne or Whomeverisinthechartsnowadays.


Right on, here is that talk, by the way http://www.videosift.com/video/Brian-Cox-at-TEDtalks-on-the-Large-Hadron-Collider

More Paxman vids on the sift please!

"SNAPS"? Please.

Who snapped? and antiscience? Are we watching the same video here? One scientist here is young and curiousity/exploration driven. One is older, more hypothesis driven and more dedicated to immediate, practical advances in science. Neither is anti-science at all. Given, I'm with Cox on this one, but I have no problem with people who ask where the line should be drawn be it a temporary one.

*nochannel *science *british *1sttube *engineering

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Adding video to channels (1sttube, British, Engineering, Science) - requested by MarineGunrock.

completely irrelevant, but he looks like a cross between rupert grint and cillian murphy-- magic and biochemistry?

I would imagine someone already asked the question of whether or not the LHC money should be spent, seeing as it was. Obviously someone(s) in politics understands the worth of the LHC and decided to fund it. Why debate about it now? If the LHC is a failure, then the failure should be analyzed, and based on that analysis a line can be drawn. But what if the LHC points to more and more possibilities?

Brian Cox is right, the 19-20th century advancements were founded on the type of exploratory science that propels the LHC project.

Its a gentleman's disagreement. Disagreement and debate is how you address challenges in an efficient way.

Assigning funding to address the unknown is always up for disagreement.

The line for scientific research should never be drawn, not ever.
Look what happened in the arab world when the ruling class at the time around 500 AD decided that questioning the unknown is encroaching on gods doorstep, essentially drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more research, what you don't know now, you never will, cause it doesn't suit our needs".

How many nobel laureates are from the mid-east ?

1...and he shares it with a british fellow.

Seriously, there should never be any kind of discussion where drawing a line in the sand is ever a consideration for research, ever.

CERN invented the internet, they invented MRI, they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites, they invented super conductors, as Brian mentioned, they've also come up with a new method of cooling, they've even invented and built a brand new parallel internet with massive capacity and the ability to have distributed processing / applications running over it (google "The GRID - CERN"), they invented the integrated circuit, the transistor (and as a result, PLENTY of other complex digital structures)...

ALL of those technologies came as a result of EXPLORATION DRIVEN SCIENCE, where noone doing the research at the time had any kind of insight as to what might come of it.

You cant simply sit there and claim that exploration driven science should be stopped because it costs too much, AND you cant foresee its benefits, that's just a failing on your imagination, not on the scientific process.

As much as I admire the older chap for his position within the british academia, it is people with attitudes like him that enable the idiots of this world to hang shit on people with a passion for understanding how it all works.

Once you start saying "maybe thats a bit too far", you open the door for a lot more, just look at what Bush has done to the credibility of scientific reporting by essentially removing the ability for the scientists to report their findings without running it through the "washington filter" first....a disaster.

As a physicist, I too think that we put too much emphasis on theoretical particle and condensed matter physics. I would like to see more theorists working on physical biology and materials research.

I am not saying people shouldn't work on the LHC or do theory in these areas. I am saying that we need to take a step and decide not just which problems are the most interesting, but which problems need solving. And we can start by strategically increasing the funding in those areas.

>> ^HenningKO:
Applied research is for improving the stuff we already have conceived.

That is just foolish. Applied research is not just for things that have already been conceived. This is why so many letters in APL and PRL have to do with a whole host of issues ranging from modeling biological interactions to verifying density function perturbation theory and their ilk in materials research. Absolutely no one would say that CMR was already conceived when von Helmolt published his paper. And only a fool would argue that it is not an applied physics topic.

In fact, almost all of the last Nobel Prizes in Physics have almost entirely been given to people who did practical applied physics, and along the way discovered something fundamental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Physics

And there is a big difference between saying "you can't study this" and encouraging people to study applied research.

>> ^charliem:
= CERN invented the internet, they invented MRI, they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites, they invented super conductors, as Brian mentioned, they've also come up with a new method of cooling, they've even invented and built a brand new parallel internet with massive capacity and the ability to have distributed processing / applications running over it (google "The GRID - CERN"), they invented the integrated circuit, the transistor (and as a result, PLENTY of other complex digital structures)...


CERN:

1)invented the internet. False, invented at MIT. Though it is true, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

2) they invented MRI. False, it was invented at Stony Brook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging

3) they invented the concentrated x-ray for blasting cancer sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_Hounsfield

4) they invented super conductors. False, discovered by Onnes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes

I don't have the time to debunk all of this. Most it is wrong, half truths, or misguided.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN is where you can see there accomplishments.

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Saturday, September 13th, 2008 8:47pm PDT - promote requested by MycroftHomlz.

The US spends $12 BILLION US per month on Iraq. Ultimately it will cost in excess of a TRILLION adding up all costs for the 'crusade' then refitting/replacing all the equipment when they eventually end occupation.

The LHC is worth every penny, and then some. At least the scientific community is trying to push human knowledge forward. Money for scientific purposes is well spent. Money for meaningless wars over oil/power is not well spent.

*Upvote for a healthy debate, with good points on all sides, that had nothing to do with any governor of Alaska.

>> ^MycroftHomlz:
>> ^charliem:
<insert mammoth rebuke here>


Foot-in-mouth syndrome n)
Characterized by incoherent rambling and spewing of thought stream without regards to the contents of the message.

By "they", I was referring to scientists working purely for exploration research purposes. None of those achievements could be possible without a basic understanding of the underlying principles of how the laws of physics, which govern their operation, work.

They didn't start out with an idea to create an imaging machine without a foundation of understanding field theory, maxwells equations, EM theory etc.

Somewhere down the line, it had taken an exploratory researcher the time and grant money to figure out those basic laws. Without which, we wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of amazing tech available to us today.

Any argument that says "bah, its only theoretical, it cant benefit us at all" and uses it as an excuse to cut/reduce funding, needs their heads examined.

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Awarding geo321 with one Power Point for fixing this video's dead embed code.

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