Can someone please tell me why we spend 8 billion dollars searching for that elusive Higgs boson or try to prove/disprove it's existence? What on earth is the practical use?

By "we" I assume you mean "numerous countries of the world". Well, 8 billion US dollars is a relatively tiny amount already on the scale of US spending (please remind yourself how much those wars are costing the US per month), let alone on a global scale, where it should be measured. Next, why should a (and in particular, your) fixation with only "practical" things be the way humanity as a whole works? Can you think of anything else we've done that you'd consider great that did not have an ultimate, practical goal? Aside from the deeper anwers to those questions, I can offer some simple, concrete ones: experimentation in high energy physics has produced many side products that have been very useful to humanity, and it continues to. After all, these are the most sophisticated machines in existence, so making them work pushes our basic materials science research, and innovations in electrical and mechanical engineering. And that's not even my thought-out response. Cheers.

tanuki:

Can someone please tell me why we spend 8 billion dollars searching for that elusive Higgs boson or try to prove/disprove it's existence? What on earth is the practical use?

he says, via the mechanism of the internet, itself a byproduct spun off from CERN......

tanuki:

Can someone please tell me why we spend 8 billion dollars searching for that elusive Higgs boson or try to prove/disprove it's existence? What on earth is the practical use?

Because technological advancement is good?

It's good that you asked that question. It might seem essential to some people to think that the 8 billion dollars could help us have technological advances. But to people like you and me, we believe that people come first before things, therefore that money might be more well spent by feeding the poor and sending smart-but-poor people to college. Or funding public programs to relieve people and families who are getting squeezed by high food and gas prices.

Yeah, we should take that money and give it people like Obama and his buddy Rezko. Make substandard housing that soon becomes unlivable and helps no one. That would be a better use for it.

Sheesh. Can't believe there are still serious Luddites out there.

Totally. The money spent on the Iraq War could have found much, much better ways of being used besides being flushed down the toilet though...

citygurl104:

But to people like you and me, we believe that people come first before things, therefore that money might be more well spent by feeding the poor and sending smart-but-poor people to college.

Ah, but reality simply doesn't work this neatly. First of all, the amount of money spent on science is relatively small compared to say ... the amount of money spent on helping the poor.

http://www.federalbudget.com/

Should we spend every single penny on the the poor until there are no more poor people? Have you spent any money that could've better been spent on a poor person? Obviously you have, since you have an internet connection. Why didn't you donate that $20 a month?

The next thing you ignore is that technological advances do help people, poor and otherwise. If we simply stopped funding science, advances would stop. Who would work on a cure for AIDs? Or for developing hardier crops? Or robotic limbs?

What you're referring to isn't a technological advancement in any sense of the word. In fact I'm sure those responsible for the development of the rebotic limb would stone you for comparing their highly practical work with that of a high energy collider who's end product isn't even a tangible asset nor even certain to clarify the already impenetrable maze of particle physics and quantum mechanics.

Ok, first things first.

The total US contribution to LHC (over a number of years) was 530 million dollars. Divide that by 300 million Americans, and your contribution won't cover a visit to Starbucks.

Now...for what we are getting for that (small) amount of money:

The physics at LHC is pure research that will advance mankind's understanding of the origins and nature of the universe, and the way matter and forces interact at the most fundamental level.

Research like this attracts some of the best scientific minds to universities, where they work for a lot less than they could get in industry, for a chance to be part of endeavors like this. While they are doing this, the best scientific minds also happen to be teaching science to new generations of university students, some of whom stay in academia and many of whom enter industry after they graduate.

So consider it a small investment in the future.

Well I'll restate my opinion in case you missed it.

If you can do all those things with private funds - go for it. I won't stop you, try to steer you, or jeer you.

But when public funding becomes part of it, I'll let my voting speak for me. All I'm asking for in return for that small investment in the future (which I believe it CAN be) is to have that research made available to the public in a clearly understandable format. I want it dumbed down so that expertise in the field isn't a requirement to determine if there is value in it. The word of a physicist that it is valuable isn't reliable so far as I'm concerned. If you can't accomplish that, then you aren't providing any investment in my future - only YOURS.

the short answer is that we are stuck. at the energy levels we are at now, roughly 200 gev, we aren't able to learn anything fundamentally new. the LHC goes up to 7 or 8 tev, 40 times more powerful than the relativistic heavy ion collider.

It's an open question as to whether those 8 billion dollars would be better spent elsewhere. For instance, building the james webb space telescope is only 4 or 5 billion, half the cost of the LHC, and it seems to me you get more actual science out of a space telescope than you do a collider.

The problem with colliders is that to get to that "next level" the energies keep going up by an order of magnitude. So for instance, the cyclotron was only 15 mev and you could build one yourself in youro back yard, anti matter was discovered with a bubble chamber, basically a water cloud, then things like mesons were discovered with synchrotrons at 100's of Mev or sometimes a few Gev, and with each factor of ten or so, we would discover something new.

Well, now we are at the point where to go up another factor of 10 requires a tremendous amount of financial and engineering support, that's why it costs 8 billion.

If we want to do any particle science we have to spend this much. Is it worth it? Depends on who you ask. Ask a particle physicist he will say that's the only way he can do science. Ask an astronomer, you might get a different answer.

oh, the tevatron is the second largest particle accelerator right now it goes up to 1 Tev (why it's called the tevatron). it cost under a billion dollars.

Eigenvector:

Well I'll restate my opinion in case you missed it.

If you can do all those things with private funds - go for it. I won't stop you, try to steer you, or jeer you.

But when public funding becomes part of it, I'll let my voting speak for me. All I'm asking for in return for that small investment in the future (which I believe it CAN be) is to have that research made available to the public in a clearly understandable format. I want it dumbed down so that expertise in the field isn't a requirement to determine if there is value in it. The word of a physicist that it is valuable isn't reliable so far as I'm concerned. If you can't accomplish that, then you aren't providing any investment in my future - only YOURS.

they stash it in the military budget under particle beam weapons