The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space. Everything else is merely thought to exist. —Democritus of Abdera
scientists on the payroll and the Large Hadron Collider running.
Joy has indeed descended upon “Mudville” as the mighty LHC smashed a home run and CMS and ATLAS scored in the bottom of the ninth — just as the lights were about to be turned off. It seems that “the cumulative budget deficit originating from LHC construction [believed to have cost $6.5 billion so far – up from a $4.5 billion budget] has not been [sic] payed yet”. Serious budget cuts are planned mostly for future R&D, pension funds are underfunded by $1.7 billion (Dollars and Swiss Francs are roughly equal in value) and the European economic crisis is having a negative effect on sponsor contributions. Design improvements for the Large Hadron Collider have been put off and ongoing operating budgets hover around $1 billion annually. Experts on the financial crisis are everywhere, but the most logical reason for releasing the somewhat preliminary results about Higgs (or whatever) boson comes down to: “It’s the money, stupid!”
Columbia University physicist Peter Woit . . . insists the LHC looks safe for the foreseeable future.
He says the impetus to rush out their incomplete findings this week seems to have been the start of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. In the world of atom smashing, this is a big deal. “I don’t think funding issues have much to do with this,” Woit told GlobalPost.
“As far as I know, CERN has no immediate budget problems. Their experimental program for the next few years is mainly just to operate the LHC, not build something new or upgrade the LHC, where funding might be a problem.”
Oh yes indeed, we should all buy into his rather bizarre argument. Gosh, after 35 previous international conferences, the scientists must have literally run out of things to say to one another about the “Standard Model“. Let the good times roll! But let us not forget about the software bugs . . . and a USB device connection error at CERN that required withdrawal of an FTL neutrino discovery claim, previously rated 6-sigma.
There are, of course, Higgs boson naysayers who got little press coverage. This appeared only in the UK Telegraph:
Dr Aidan Randle-Conde, a British physicist working on ATLAS, argues that rushing things, while good for PR, makes for bad science: “This is the worst thing we could do… The Higgs field was postulated nearly 50 years ago, the LHC was proposed 30 years ago … and we’ve been taking data for about 18 months. We should resist the temptation to get an answer now.”
From Science News comments section we find this reaction from scientist Robert L. Oldershaw, who asked: “Do theoretical particle physicists want the “Higgs Mechanism” so badly that they have lost scientific objectivity?”
It seems to me that theoretical particle physics is more religion than science.
If theories can avoid any predictions whatsoever (e.g., string/brane theory), or if theories can arbitrarily “adjust” their ersatz “predictions” (e.g., the standard model, especially QCD; supersymmetry; “WIMP” dark matter; etc.), then you do not have testable science. You have pseudoscience.
Albert Einstein showed many times how theories of principle can make definitive predictions that are prior, feasible, quantitative, non-adjustable and unique to the theory being tested. General Relativity is the archetypal example. That is what science aspires to, not fudged “model-building” which can only be viewed as temporary constructs that beg to be replaced by theories of principle.
We need to be less credulous. We need to demand theories of principle that can make and pass definitive predictions.
Scientists were first moved away from individualistic research when the United States government began the Manhattan Project (1942 to 1946) to develop the atomic bomb. Later, in 1957, President Eisenhower acceded to patriotically-motivated research when he approved formation of the NASA agency to catch up to the Soviets in space exploration. Ironically, Ike later warned against the destruction of economically sound scientific research by individuals in his farewell speech to the nation in January 1961.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Now CERN (and the European Union that spawned its growth) is showing the same bureaucratic expansion malady (forever driven by funding scarcity) that has destroyed the effectiveness of organizations such as NASA and the United Nations. Unfortunately, only the bankruptcy of whole countries in Europe will stop today’s scientific extravagance in Geneva.
incredible CLOUD experiment results at the Melbourne conference?
Sadly, the answer is politics. Even before the results of CLOUD were in, scientists and politicians were condemning the project for minimizing the claim of the anthropogenic (human-caused) nature of global warming and for repudiating the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.
The CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) laboratory experiment, CERN believes, will show the mechanisms through which the sun and cosmic rays can influence the formation of clouds and thus the climate. The CLOUD project will use a high-energy particle beam from an accelerator to closely duplicate cosmic rays found in the atmosphere. This will be the first time this technology will be brought to bear on global warming, the most controversial scientific question of the day.
Also for the first time, very basic answers about the drivers of climate change may surface to dispel the general paucity of data on the subject. “By studying the micro-physical processes at work when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, we can begin to understand more fully the connection between cosmic rays and cloud cover,” CERN explains. “Clouds exert a strong influence on the Earth’s energy balance, and changes of only a few per cent have an important effect on the climate.”
The experiment was highly successful not only delivering all expectations by verifying the effect of the Sun’s gamma ray flux on cloud cover but also corroborating previous Danish experiments conducted by Dr. Henrick Svenmark. Nigel Calder, who introduced the cosmic ray concept to CERN’s Jasper Kirkby, speculates what would have been, if climate scientists had been offered an explanation/proof of the high correlation between solar cycle lengths and global temperatures — before the pseudoscience of AGW theory became a meal ticket.
Retracing those 14 years, what if physics had functioned as it is supposed to do? What if CLOUD, quickly approved and funded, had verified the Svensmark effect with all the authority of CERN, in the early 2000s. What if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had done a responsible job, acknowledging the role of the Sun and curtailing the prophecies of catastrophic warming?
For a start there would have no surprise about the “travesty” that global warming has stopped since the mid-1990s, with the Sun becoming sulky. Vast sums might have been saved on misdirected research and technology, and on climate change fests and wheezes of every kind. The world’s poor and their fragile living environment could have had far more useful help than precautions against warming.
CERN’s wholehearted support of a climate-controlled-by-the-sun premise could be saving the world’s economy billions upon billions of dollars annually. When will we ever learn?
Crossposted from gad-fly
Hey, do the Earth Monkeys want an Alcubierre warp drive for their starship or not?
Just another example for the right-wing anti-science supporters to latch on to—complete with quotations of a few disgruntled scientists.
Probably because the CLOUD project is ongoing, only the results of initial experiments are in, and the full implications of those aren’t yet known. From a CERN press release about the initial experimental results:
The right wing media, of course, has already determined that the initial experimental results somehow prove that global warming–which they sometimes acknowledge and sometimes don’t–has nothing whatsoever to do with human activity, and that the fact that CERN has not made a public announcement to that effect is just more compelling evidence of a vast, multidisciplinary conspiracy on the part of most of the world’s scientific community.
Does it bother anyone that cutting edge scientific research now takes place somewhere other than the United States? While the European Union funds an ambitious endeavor such as CERN, some in the United States want to drastically reduce public research funding, believing that more can be accomplished by private industry guided by a quest for profits and their corporate bean counters. It’s actually rather pathetic.
Greg, I’m not the brightest bulb in the tulip patch, but what I think is really the case is this:
If scholars and science itself had not been “dominated”, as Eisenhower warned of in ’61, “by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money,” we would have been building the 3g Starship Enterprise by now.
But no, they got “dominated”. And intellectual curiosity got killed.
Spending trillions over the last century and a half on useless “studies” pseudosciences further diminished the available resources for real scientific advancement. Transgender Midget Studies. Tenured positions available. Patriarchal Hegemony and Global Climate Change Studies. Sure I can make up anything. Just to get those grants. And that is what happened. Countless trillions wasted on whatever anyone wanted to call a “science” just for grants, tenure, world travel, lives of luxury, and parties where they stand around and sip their own farts out of champagne flutes.
So called ‘scientists’ today list their Government Grant-getting history first on their leech university resumes now.
We coulda been a contender! But no, we had to abandon truth, reason, and logic. So 90% of “scientists” could steal trillions of dollars for nothing, and end each grant proposal with a tear-jerking plea for more grant money, because really, it’s for the children.
We could have had the Starship Enterprise by now.
We “rightwingers” are not “anti-science”.
The snake-oil tent-revival leeches who are calling themselves “scientists” are.
We are the priests
Of the Temples
Of Syence.
Apologies to RUSH.
@Taqiyyotomist:
Without the motivation of public dollars, the private sector will research nothing that doesn’t promise to make a quick return in fairly short order. Pretty much every major technological innovation from the mid-20th Century onward resulted directly from, or is built on a foundation of, research that was funded with public money.
Would private interests ever have built the Large Hadron Collider? Never in a million years. They haven’t even figured out what it’s for. (Because no one ever really knows where such basic research into the underlying nature of the universe will lead.) Nor would they ever spend the untold billions required to eventually change the face of the planet with a working fusion reactor. We can do that, but it takes time, a lot of public money, and big government supporting the brightest minds on the planet to get such results.
@Greg:
And without the promise of a return to the researchers, as happens at our public institutions, the incentive to actually discover something new is diminished, and the standard becomes doing as little as possible to get the biggest grant possible.
I’m pretty sure that statement is pure horsecrap, and especially if one considers the pharmaceutical industry.
You don’t know much about nuclear energy, do you?
Greg:
As I pointed out in the article, CERN was second kid on the teet for this experiment, confirming Svenmark’s findings from the late 90s – but as Nigel Calder has observed, Svenmark didn’t ask permission to run his experiment, so CERN pretends it didn’t happen.
The warmists are in command of climate science and that needs to change, else we will chase the false condemnation of life-giving CO2 forever. Nothing else is required of science with regard to the CLOUD – except publish the implications that our Sun is in charge of our climate. Unfortunately – responsible and responsive governments are another matter entirely.
Everything must start with scientific ethics. When that happens, scientific inquiry will likely keep these folks employed, but they may have to work a bit harder. Just think how much money there could be saved if we knew enough about weather just to accurately forecast it. Last year’s overplaying hurricane intensities on the East Coast was a travesty – and NOAA was in the middle of it all.
@johngalt, #8:
Did I say something suggesting that? I’m curious what it might have been.
I consider myself to be a reasonably well-informed layman.
@Greg:
Bahahaha you might be a comedian, but you’re no well informed layman or even remotely close to layman in knowledge.
And Johngalt’s statement about your lack of knowledge about Nuclear energy is still relevant, considering the discussion is about Sol (the largest Nuclear energy producer near Earth.)
@Greg:
Yes, Greg, you did say something about nuclear energy, or don’t you remember?
As for being a “reasonably well-informed layman”, that is a laugher, Greg.
I have 10+ years of experience in the Navy’s nuclear power field, as well as a small amount of schooling towards a nuclear engineering degree, and, at best, I am nothing more than a “reasonably well-informed layman”, considering the amount of knowledge that I do not have about it.
Do you have any personal experience in the field? Any education in the field? If not, you have no clue about it, and that includes talking about nuclear fusion energy, which you did show above when you talked about a working fusion reactor in #7 above.
@Liberal1 (objectivity): What a load of BS my friend. You should try reality sometime.
@johngalt, #12:
Something incorrect, revealing profound ignorance on the topic, apparently. . . It still escapes me what it might have been. I don’t recall having claimed any unusual degree of expertise.
Do you disagree with the thought that controlled fusion is the world’s great hope for a virtually endless source of energy, or with the thought that it will be so difficult to achieve, that doing so will require decades of focused research and effort?
I’m really not getting what the point of disagreement is here. Other than stresses around the usual conservative/liberal fault line.
@Greg:
What I disagree with is your insistence that it would take massive amounts of “public” money, or big government supporting the brightest minds. I disagree that government can do any of this without blowing it bigtime. If they could, then solar, wind, and many other alternative energy sources much, much simpler than nuclear power would be popping up left and right across the country. Successful alternative energy source projects, mind you, not the countless failures like Solyndra.
So, either you think that failures like Solyndra are actually successes by the government, so that any nuclear fusion venture, simply by receiving public money would be a “success”, or, you think that nuclear energy is simple enough that more money thrown at the problem of creating a viable fusion reactor will result in success. Either way, you show little understanding of nuclear energy, processes, or engineering, which prompted my question.
@<a href="http://floppingaces.net/2012/07/15/the-omg-particle-if-greed-is, #15:
The Manhattan Project, which eventually led to the end of the Second World War, might be another example of something that couldn’t have been accomplished without big government using public money to fund the coordinated efforts of thousands of the brightest minds. The same is true of the space program and the Apollo Program. Much of our modern economy has been built on developments and breakthroughs that can be traced directly back to one or the other of those endeavors.
Military research is almost entirely a matter of public money spent. We can trace computers–which the modern world could not function without–directly back to ENIAC, which was developed to compute artillery firing tables for the Army. IBM didn’t build it, nor did Microsoft. They were eventually build on it. Research funded with public money made them both possible.
When you invest public money to achieve goals like that, you don’t expect to have a 100% success rate with all of the various avenues that are funded. Research and development generally progresses toward any difficult goal by fits and starts, while leaving a trail of failures and false starts behind it. Occasional failures like Solyndra are inevitable. Nor was Solyndra necessarily a total loss, except in the unimaginative little minds of myopic corporate bean counters. Solyndra’s work pushed forward the development of thin-film photovoltaics. They may have ultimately gone bust, but somebody is going to pick up where they left off and build on their breakthroughs.
Private industry capitalizes on public funded research that it most often couldn’t afford, wouldn’t place bets on, or couldn’t see any clear need for in the first place. If you took all of that research out of the equation, we would be living in a very world having a very different level of technological development.
gadfly
good post thank you,
even for ignorant like me, but what is the question?
I think it is; DOES GOD EXIST? DID HE CREATE THE HEAVEN AND EARTH?
WHERE IS HE NOW?
that’s many questions which those atheist will never answer, no matter how much money they spend,
because they are from the beginning denying his existence,
I think GOD reveal himself to the believer, the one seeking him, more than the one trying to prove he is not, he has not create this heaven and earth , and that he is nowhere because he doesn’t exist,
but the fact is that we are in awe with all there is going on in heaven and earth,
is the proof that GOD IS, WAS, AND WILL BE FOR ETERNITY,
and does it look like a repeat of the BABEL TOWER
TO REACH THE SKY,
just my opinion
bye
gadfly
I think I found it, tell the scientist to put the caldron on hold,
I was eating my tomatoes from my garden, and it hit me,
the GOD PARTICLE IS IN THE SEED, ANY SEEDS, IT GOES IN THE SOIL
FERTELIZE BY THE CLOUD’S RAIN, ENERGIZE BY THE SUN DROP IN THE SOIL BY HUMANS
OR BEAST OR BIRDS, AND VOILA, THE ABUNDANCE OF FOOD FOR ALL LIVING THINGS TO
BE SUSTAIN BY LIFE IT PRODUCE,
ALL THAT FROM THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS,
ALL THAT FROM THE HUMANS ONLY, TO SCREW UP, BY MANY SCIENTISTS WHO WANT TO FIND A GOD THEY SUSPECT TO NOT EXIST, THAT THEY WILL DO TILL THE LAST HUMAN IS ALIVE,
BYE
as a side note, imagine today on the ATLANTIC COAST, A MONSTER HURRICANE,
COMING NORTH EASTER, ON A FULL MOON, WITH BIGGEST TIDES, DEVASTATING
THE CITIES ON HER PASS, SUNDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2012 WITH 9 DAYS FOR ELECTION VOTES,