CERN is not a huge money pit. The US Defense Department is a money pit. Middle class entitlements is a huge money pit.
I agree on all, but CERN is most definitely a money pit. At least The DoD has something to show for the trillions we have spent on it, and the entitlements are more lower blue collar class than middle class. What exactly is a "middle class entitlement" anyway? The middle class is not collecting welfare or using food stamps or getting Farm Aid or Black Lung Benefit or utilizing housing subsidies.
CERN was built specifically to find the Higgs Boson at a cost of 10 BILLION dollars and has cost more than a billion each year in operation. What have they given us that is truly useful? Like Eniac and the Cray I in its day, they were large scale projects which (at the time) were the cutting edge tools available to work with. Today, they would be as useless as the old computers in Crystal Mountain seen in the Terminator 3 movie. The Large Hadron Collider cannot tell us anything about the Strong and Gravitation forces because it is a COLLIDER. Colliders cannot do this. They cannot explore these forces. And they will not find the Higgs Boson because the "particle" itself cannot exist. The 40-year old Standard Model is 40 years out of date, but then so is most of physics (or much longer out of date). But other "discoveries" will happen whilst they are searching for it. The point is that the purpose of the collider is to find the mathematically appealing Higgs particle, and from all the data collected, it does not appear to exist AT ALL.
I am not just some loony layman tearing down the tenets of physics because I have a wild hair up my ass. I have an intense interest in physics and it frustrates the hell out of me that so many resources and so much money is being WASTED looking in the wrong places. Colliders cannot tell us what we need to know. Fermilab showed us that, and the LHC at CERN is just more waste.
I take a look at Stephen Hawking's work and shake my head. An entire career studying black holes has yielded "Hawking Radiation" which is supposed to be radiation emanating AWAY from a black hole due to quantum effects. But how does this differ from Unruh radiation or thermal radiation? Mathematics which are using any sort of light constant will be inherently flawed. Colliders cannot induce fusion reactions as they occur in space or on the subatomic level, because particles do not smash into each other in that fashion. My analogy of earth being "studied" by smashing a moon sized body into it is a perfect example. What exactly can you learn about performing such an experiment except perhaps determining the constituent parts of the planet (as seen in the chunks)? This is what the LHC does on the subatomic level. The Tevatron is no better.
I found it amusing that CERN announced the "discovery" of the Higgs Boson particle on July 4th 2012. Oooh...how dramatic
. And I wonder how many people are aware that the EU and the US were competing to "discover" it first? The reality is that it may not exist AT ALL. To me, after looking at what the Higgs Boson is supposed to be:
A "massless particle" which generates a "field" which gives mass to other particles.
RIDICULOUS. They are essentially saying that this particle is a shadow with no mass, but it gives mass to other particles. The all-powerful "Higgs field" is said to permeate the entire universe. Again, RIDICULOUS. These theories are made possible by the Standard Model which is being more and more disproven as the search for the Higgs Boson continues. In this instance, the Standard Model is the culprit.
The ROI is dismal for the facility. The advancements made at CERN are mediocre considering the cost of the projects. There is even a subset of parasitic private entities which sell specialized chips and hardware specifically for the facility and survive solely on their vendor relationship with CERN.
You have the links. Anyone looking at the problems to solve in physics will see the fallacy of thinking that a collider will give 100% of the story.
