Jan said:
CERN is a joke.
[The WWW] has nothing to do with the 'goal' (if any) that
CERN had or has.
And internet comes from a mil source.
That's not the point. At the time, only research institutes
and universities had the need to disseminate information *and*
the hardware to do so, creating a fertile environment to
build fancy software to make it practical, fun, even. Neither
the military, nor any commercial enterprise would have made
this freely available, but CERN did, thus spawning the
explosive expansion of ubiquitous networking we have witnessed.
[On DC transformers] Hall effect is not from research at
CERN I think.
I was referring to DCCTs, invented by Klaus Unser in 1969.
He was at CERN at the time.
OK, never met him.
I presume you are referring to the zero flux DCCT
(fluxgate with feedback for all I know).
Yes, but again, that's not the point. CERN's massive use of
that technology makes it more accessible for the rest of us,
because it provides the impetus to develop cost-effective
and innovative solutions to technical problems.
This is over simplified.
Sure you need research, as you point out.
But it is the market forces that push these,
even CERN is financed by taxes from profits in the markets.
No it isn't. It is scientists curiosity about nature that gets the big
breakthroughs. We would never have had lasers if it had been left to
beancounters and market forces. When they were first invented the price
was ludicrous and required large near perfect ruby crystals and huge
flash guns. Now every CD and DVD has one inside as do laser printers.
You can never predict where blue sky research will find applications.
These market forces and the research BY COMPANIES
(IBM researchers found the high temperature superconductors),
is what pushes to ever better solutions.
They were looking for better piezoelectric materials at the time. Same
with 3M and post-its the new glue was supposed to be super strong but it
turned out to have other useful properties. It could easily have been
killed at birth if the inventor had not found it a niche.
That is why the USSR was behind, no push from market forces.
Do you not remember Spudnik and Yuri Gugarin? Incidentally this year is
the 40th anniversary of the first man in space.
As to that 'www thing', the only 'invention' was the 'hyperlink'.
The hyperlink was invented in 1968.
The invention was the synthesis of global URL descriptors and a self
consistent text based way of specifying hyperlinks and content in a
graphical form. ISTR the Apple Mac help system was an influence on the
early web and that dates back to the mid 80's. Tim Berners-Lee put it
all together on the Internet and the rest is history. It was a genuine
spin-off from CERN no matter how much you may dislike the fact.
His intent was to make it easier for researchers to exchange data.
Handling the huge datasets from HEP has also spawned developments in
mapmaking - descendants of the same hardware that used to digitise HEP
film records in the 80's went on to digitise all the worlds maps.
Sure the C parser code was available for free from the CERN site, I downloaded it
and had a good look at it when I wrote this newsreader (it has some html parsing,
see the headers), many many years ago.
But from there it was pushed by the commercialisation of the web.
We had gopher, ftp, etc, what not.
ftp and gopher all predate the www. Most bulk transfers in those days
were done overnight as batch jobs to avoid upsetting daytime users.
Right, basic research is OK, but it should stay sane, and in proportion to results.
How can you possibly know in advance what the results will be? The whole
purpose of doing fundamental research is to find out something new that
is presently unknown or test the predictions of theory.
CERN and ITER are out of proportion, and have no results.
They do have plenty of results of interest to high energy physicists and
cosmologists. And the spin-off technology of synchrotron sources with
beam wigglers are now being used to power the coherent UV sources for
the next generation of chip making.
If you want to scrap something then the ISS is a pretty good candidate.
It is completely useless as a telescope platform and the "science" being
done in it would not look out of place at a school science fair.
That failed, all we got was brain dead parrots who parrot Einstein's equations
and write tissue paper about string quartets and wormholes.
Why is it that every nutter on the planet who cannot understand the
physics insists vehemently that Einstein was wrong?
I have nobody to quote but myself.
Scrap CERN, ITER, LIGO.
Just because you don't understand physics is no reason to scrap them.
If you cannot do it with those small particles (fusion power) on the desktop,
then you cannot do it in a machine the size of the universe (or city).
Have you ever noticed that the sun seems to manage to sustain a pretty
reliable thermonuclear reaction. Astrophysics can put a pretty good
bound on the minimum mass needed to have a star light up about
75xJupiters - at least sufficient to burn off the lighter easy isotopes.
Such Brown Dwarfs (no relation) are observed by astronomers.
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0303/
Regards,
Martin Brown