Regarding the SSC, Alex said: "The merit of the knowledge to be gained from having a giant collider has to be balanced with the cost. The money would’ve been better spent doing other (smaller and more numerous) science projects."
It doesn't work that way. Smaller projects - no matter how numerous - simply cannot achieve the same energy levels as a large supercollider and therefore can never duplicate the sorts of experiments that the supercollider was intended for. By their very nature, small experiments can never garner us the same knowledge as the supercollider would have. And as for the "cost-benefit" analysis... How can we meaningfully assign dollar amounts to knowledge? Our increasing understanding of how the Universe works on its most fundamental levels is one of the primary causitive factors in many of the most important technological advances of the last century, and the benefits we could gain from a true supercollider are incalculable! Knowledge is not part of a free-market, producer-consumer relationship, you can't dismiss it as nothing more than an economic factor!
"The merit of the knowledge to be gained from having a giant collider has to be balanced with the cost. The money would’ve been better spent doing other (smaller and more numerous) science projects."
It doesn't work that way. Smaller projects - no matter how numerous - simply cannot achieve the same energy levels as a large supercollider and therefore can never duplicate the sorts of experiments that the supercollider was intended for. By their very nature, small experiments can never garner us the same knowledge as the supercollider would have. And as for the "cost-benefit" analysis... How can we meaningfully assign dollar amounts to knowledge? Our increasing understanding of how the Universe works on its most fundamental levels is one of the primary causitive factors in many of the most important technological advances of the last century, and the benefits we could gain from a true supercollider are incalculable! Knowledge is not part of a free-market, producer-consumer relationship, you can't dismiss it as nothing more than an economic factor!