hi glyph,
Like the positive attitude.
Knowing mankind, as I think I do, if any useful technology is revealed by this research it will be either patented
by the sponsors or used for weapon production.
Its ironic were asking the big 'WHY' of the universe by building a multi-billion pound atom smashing machine
that will be obsolete in 10 years time,
yet in the UK, hospitals cannot get deliveries of radio active isotopes for cancer treatment.
The atomic bomb development in WWII, was as you say:
Dont take this personally Glyph,,, I hope the hell I'm wrong.
In terms of patenting: Yeah, good ideas are sometimes buried due to patent laws. the glimmer of hope there is that patents expire. Electricty and the associated early technologies when it was first commercialized was patented, sure it made some people disgustingly rich and shut out other people but that's in the past now. Now everyone in every country can access basic technologies associated with electricity. Electricity changed the world. If the LHC produces something interesting then we might not access it (we as in the public) for decades, but eventually we will... I guess i'm just gushing with optimism.
as for budgetary considerations between health care (or any social program for that matter) and basic scientific research... I agree it's a very touchy issue. One which i am certainly not qualified to address. Personally i think if you're spending billions on health care then allocating a few million to spend on long-term research that might help create better/cheaper treatments is worth it. Like those radioisotopes you mentioned, they are produced in expensive nuclear reactors, but who knows, LHC might unlock the secrets behind metastable nuclear activation or something even more wonderful and exotic that might allow radioisotopes to be created at will in table-top devices.
The problem is like spending all your money on treating a disease, and spending nothing on finding a cure. Might be worth it, in the long run, to spend a few percent of the budget on a research for a cure. if it pans out, you don't have to treat the disease anymore, if not, you only wasted a few percent.
Ofcourse i'm not advocating allocating large chunks of money to half-baked projects that might never produce anything. but i think it would be just as bad to allocate nothing.
I don't think any of the participating countries in the LHC spent excessive sums. the total cost works out to 10 billion dolllars, but the individual costs are pretty small since it was all spread out and there were alot of countries participating.
Oh well, don't flame me for that, its just an opinion. i'm not a politician nor do i want to be.
Webpages were originally invented at CERN. who knows what other spin-off technologies might come outta this.
EDIT:
Its ironic were asking the big 'WHY' of the universe by building a multi-billion pound atom smashing machine that will be obsolete in 10 years time,
One last thing, the machine will become obsolete, but you have to understand that it obsoletes *itself*. If its never built then the research cannot be done and it will always be needed and never obsolete. now that its built, once it takes measurements it'll eventually reach a point where it cannot learn anything new, then its obsolete.
The more powerful colliders coming online after the LHC cannot be fully designed until the LHC itself points them in the right direction. Some proposed ideas for experiments at the higher energy colliders might be proven worthless at the LHC. If the LHC finds something new, we'll need to design the higher energy colliders to explore that new phenomenon better. So the cheaper LHC is needed first to figure out how to make the higher energy colliders. Gotta crawl before one can walk.
Yes the LHC is expensive, but its not like if we spent nothing, then in 10 years the knowledge would have come to us anyway. Its not a waste. At least i don't think it is.