Grow up!

Everything it seems is born, grows old and then it dies. Interesting then to compare humanity to a human lifetime.

Overindulging on scientific confectionery

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator facility at the Swiss-French border, accelerates protons which create other subatomic particles as they collide. One does this in order to test and expand the theories describing the subatomic world. At first sight, the research would appear to be purely academic with no practical applications. That however is not quite true.

The most common reasons raised against funding research such as the LHC include the premise that the money could be spent on more ‘valid’ causes and that this sort of research has no practical application, hence it is just scientific indulgence. Here I look at the latter premise.