As thrilled as I am to see the Higgs Boson particle–the so-called “God Particle”–was almost definitely discovered by the Large Hadron Collider, it brings to mind that America, with all its amazing academic science departments, should have been doing work on this scale. Not every federal project, even ones that fail, are bridges to nowhere, but in this political climate anything the government wants to invest in is treated as suspect. The free market is great, but you notice it didn’t lead to a collider here that is on par with the European one. How do we find thousands of lives and a trillion dollars to spend on a war that we don’t need to fight but not 1/100th of that for something that could put us at the vanguard of science?
As I recall, the LHC was mocked initially because of difficulties that slowed it down. Similarly, the Hubble Telescope in the U.S. was treated as a punchline when it encountered problems at the outset of its use. But both have turned out to contribute greatly to scientific knowledge.
And what if they hadn’t? What if they had been failures? Science and engineering are about searching and there is always an element of risk, sometimes a high one, in building something new with just a blueprint. But there’s a difference between folly and failure and we should be willing to risk the latter in the name of progress.•
••••••••••
“Without engineers, none of this would ever have happened. There would be no disasters–but also no achievement”: