LHC: Certainly / Bailout: Maybe
In the last few days I was reading someone, speaking of the recent "$700 Billion Wall Street Bailout"* who said "and we don't even know if it will work!"
This put me in mind of the Large Hadron Collider, because that's the way my mind works and because I know the laws of physics work quite well compared, say, to the pseudo-laws of the so-called "science" of economics–not to imply that The Bailout is in any way based on economic principles to begin with.
The Large Hadron Collider will end up costing about €6 billion, and we have a very, very good idea exactly how it will work and what we'll get out of it. There is still the uncertainty about whether the Higgs Boson exists, of course, but that's the excitement of discovery that is being paid for, and that excitement costs only about 1% of The Bailout. Good return on the Euro, I'd say.
You may recall that the US was once going to build its own version of the Large Hadron Collider, called the Superconducting Super-Collider, or SSC.† It was to be built near Waxahachie, Texas for a projected cost of about $12 billion. The project was canceled in 1993; the Gingrich congress found it an unworthy expenditure.% Now we're forced to sit idly by as we wait to see whether the Swiss and the French create the black hole that will eat the Earth.#
I guess I don't have much of a point, here, except to express my wry, bitter amusement at the relativity of cost and value.
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*It seems now to have become more a title than a description, doesn't it? Rather like the recent spate of "Million X Marches" where the title is rarely a description of the number who actually show up, although in the case of The Bailout it seems likely that the titular figure in dollars is more likely to be an understatement of fact.
†For what it's worth, I always found this a very unattractive name.
&The Berlin Wall was down, Germany reunified, the USSR had collapsed, so we no longer felt the same urgency about demonstrating that the US had the bigger dick. Well, at least until the Bush II administration came along, and then it was all about over compensation for fear of penis inadequacy.
#I jest, of course. Physicists are certain that any black holes created by the LHC will evaporate in fractions of a second and pose no Earth-eating threat. (We're less certain, however, about the $700 Billion Bailout.) Far more scary, I think, are the reports of conversations in Los Alamos just before the Trinity Test about whether detonating the bomb might ignite the atmosphere! Evidently, it did not.
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on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 at 03.29
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I'm coming to the notion that our country has lost something vital and precious.
I see evidence of this loss in our music — the vast gulf in beauty and quality between Benny Goodman's music, Frank Sinatra's singing, and the third-rate rap crap that passes for popular music any more. I see more evidence in how foreign automakers had to scare our automakers into boosting innovation, durability and dependability, in the fact things like the super collider are being developed elsewhere.
At least part of our economic mess is the result of becoming a country that's all but given up on invention, innovation and production of useful and intriguing things in favor of marketing and making money off of money.
Somehow, World War II brought out the best in Americans and made them stronger and more full of life. Somehow, our wars such as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq seem to have done the opposite. I don't know if that's a parallel phenomenon or causative factor. I do know what's happening is tragic.