Perhaps I've been a little unfair.I was rather scathing of the media in my last post (which they deserved), but having been through the coverage of the LHC on the BBC website, it's actually rather good. I'm very heartened by the sheer amount of media coverage this project has attracted. Of course, it's huge, it's expensive and it's strange, but it is in fact, one of the most important projects undertaken for a generation (or maybe two or three).
People have taken to likening it to the Moon landings, but in fact, scientifically, they were a white elephant. The Moon was a political target, not a scientific one. What we see at CERN is real, meaningful and cutting edge science, unfolding before our eyes. We may not understand how it all works, but we can be inspired by the purity of the quest for knowledge and the incredible level of international cooperation.
There are so many aspects of the project which push the boundaries, from the large scale use of super-conductors and the associated cooling required, to the massive computing power needed to make sense of the vast swathes of data being produced. In a time where everything is made to a price and cost engineered it's fantastic to see something which brings together so much innovation on such a grand scale.
... and just to lighten up, my juvenile sense of humor rather liked this.
1 comment:
After my last comment I better not go into my theories of the moon land and why the Americans want to get there before the Chinese find out it was a great conspiracy.
I will just say that I agree, otherwise this is going to be another rant :-). But to shorten my response lets try the “White hole” method… here we go… World end, black hole, very scared, public want to know, media scared to tell, bored, switch, mindless pap, they can understand, sad…
This could have been better but at 2am it the best I can do :-)
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