Congrats Peter Higgs
This is the most significant discovery in particle physics in decades and fills the largest remaining hole in what is known as the Standard Model (explaining the fundamental forces and particles in the universe). I've always loved particle physics for the fact that it's trying to look at the physical world from the most basic level possible.
One reporter I saw covering the story asked something along the lines of, "Well what does it matter? Are there any foreseeable applications?" That's a fair enough question if you are financing the project and are expecting a return on your investment, but I'll admit that I find irksome the lack of appreciation for knowledge that is all too prevalent. Doesn't it seem absurd to apply such a question to something like Thomson's discovery of the electron? Who could've foreseen the ripples that stretch from most all of our chemical understanding to superconductors, electronics, etc. It's really quite a ridiculous question. I get the feeling that people are looking for something like, "This discovery will make the iPhone 6 ten times faster than it would have been."
Government funding of "big science" is another issue. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg argues that our lack of science spending constitutes a crisis. His solution is to raise taxes:
"I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science."
The discovery of the Higgs does accentuate questions along these lines. The US had planned and started construction on a particle accelerator called the Superconducting Super Collider. The SSC could've been constructed for about the same cost at the LHC ($10 billion), would've been 3 times more powerful, and would've been completed a decade earlier. The question is now, would it have been worth it? $10 billion to have the Higgs be an American discovery, and to have advanced science all that much sooner. For most people, I'm guessing the answer is still no.
Comments
Suppose a certain scientific discovery had no practical application ever. It didn't lead to other knowledge that had a practical application. It's only benefit is that it produces knowledge. And suppose we knew this at the outset. Would that be a discovery worth pursuing?
Love Weinberg's assessment of the knowledge of Macroeconomics!
Do you think it would have been worth it? And if we don't measure the benefits in terms of applications--even applications 100 years in the future, how do we even begin to answer this question?
"Suppose a certain scientific discovery had no practical application ever." Good question. A tough one too. I think there are plenty of lines of research that do fall into this category. Much of particle physics and cosmology come to mind. One problem with this type of thinking is that you never really know what will result from a given research topic, so there's a danger of throwing out the fruitful with the unfruitful. Take Newton for example. His laws of motion had an abundance of immediate applications, but Universal Gravitation that governs orbiting bodies didn't apply to technology until the 1900s. Today satellites are rather useful.
On the whole I do feel that scientific revolutions are the basic engines of technological revolutions (turning to Newton again, I don't see the industrial revolution happening without him), so science can be a dangerous thing to be skimping on.
I also do think pure knowledge can be worth pursuing. Understanding the structure and likely fate of the Universe could very well never lead to a practical application, but I sure find it interesting. In the least I think it has the potential to inspire the human spirit, inform the philosopher, and broaden our vision. And who knows if harnessing dark matter or energy might one day change the world.
"And if we don't measure the benefits in terms of applications...how do we even begin to answer this question?" The magnitude of the knowledge that could possibly be gained is one possibility. Not that that's always easy to quantify, but answering a question regarding the origin of matter after the Big Bang for example might hold more weight than measuring the conductivity of tungsten at 2500 celsius.
"Do you think it would have been worth it?" I definitely think it would have been cool and that I could find plenty of things the government has spent $10 billion dollars on that were less worth it, but if I were a congressman with a vote I think I would vote no. Though it is hard to say what effects it might've had on our prowess as a world power (it would've been something more to point to and say that we are the world leaders at this) and on inspiring people to go into the sciences.
Any yet, there are institutions other than NIH that fund research, like the Howard Hughes foundation. And, while Hughes foundation funds more flops, it also has more homeruns:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/06/jonah_lehrer_on.html
I think knowledge for knowledge sake is a hard sell--especially when you want other people to fund it. But your right, the big problem here is we don't know what we're going to discover and we don't know at the outset whether it will lead to anything other than knowledge without much practical application.
People have limited on resources. Eventually, we are going to have to do some cost-benefit analysis to decide which projects are worth undertaking. is knowledge for knowledge sake a benefit? Yes. Is it as good a benefits as the discovery having a practical application? Doubtful.