In Defence of the LHC

Something I have to get off my chest here, and its the constant bashing by the ignorant of the Large Hadron Collider. Whilst I am excited at the new possibilities that this awesome piece of engineering will offer I still hear the same grumbling from the anti-science mob "It costs too much" "It's not going to affect me" "could they not spend the money on something more worthwhile?" etc.

To those who say it costs too much, this project was undertaken with participation from 40 different countries - Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan Republic, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan. Costs being split (not equally) among them, Also what price do you put on building something never before attempted?. CERN is also a nuclear physics research group so what else are they going to do?. People like to just lump them with the general term "scientists" but the are a distinct breed of scientist, physicists and these are the tools of their trade.

"Its not going to affect me" to these guys I ask do you feel the same about general relativity theory ? some have said yes, that general relativity has no impact on their day to day lives. Yet I notice they all use cell phones, most have GPS in their cars as they drive home, some watch satellite TV, all of us pay attention to the weather forecast. So how are all these linked?. Satellites, All the way up there in the sky and keeping them up there would be much more difficult if we did not understand that planets warp the space around them. The deeper understanding we have the orbital mechanics around us had directly impacted out life in a huge way. The LHC is now going to push our understanding further answering the questions such as what is mass? are there extra dimensions? how exactly does gravity work?. The possibilities that await us as a result of these discoveries are endless and could impact us in every area of our life.

But it saddens me that every scientific endeavour now is met with a shoulder shrugging "so what" attitude. But put it like this for £6 billion 40 countries came together and put together the worlds largest machine. The LHC now employs over 100 different nationalities all brought together in the spirit of discovery. If you are a US citizen then the Iraq war as of 2008 cost near on $450 billion the LHC costs $9 billion. So for a 0.02% of the Iraq war you can push the advance human knowledge on the grandest scale yet.

Bargain of the century.