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Comment by mattheww | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, nobody knows what kind of potential applications could come from these measurements. But by the same token, nobody knew that Fermi's splitting of the atom would lead to nuclear power (and weapons), measurement of Hydrogen line splittings would eventually lead to semi-conductors, and the study of bacteria would eventually lead to antibiotics.

Besides the giving us applications that we can literally not imagine today, the "engineering" feats required to do cutting edge science always brings new technologies that benefit the real world. Just think that accelerators that would have been used for cutting-edge particle physics 50 years ago are now commonly used in hospitals to treat cancer.

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I agree completely with the second statement (and it is a big reason why I support NASA and space exploration in general), but Uranium, Hydrogen, bacteria... these are all things we can study easily and interact with all the time, and studying them can produce uses for them. The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia.

I really hope you are correct and this expansion of our knowledge about the makeup of the universe proves to have some real world benefits down the line, I just find myself a bit unsure about the truth of that statement these days.

This is pure speculation on my part about possible applications to measuring the Higgs.

Since it is the Higgs Field(?) that gives matter its mass, I suppose in the future, though this may be pure science fiction, that after our understanding of the Higgs is enough, we may be able to use it to change the mass of things, which would have an extreme amount of potential in transportation as well as other things I am not thinking of right now.

The Higgs is something we have to spend 7 billion dollars (admittedly a pittance in the grand scheme) just to have the potential to observe it, so surely you can see why I (and many others, I'm sure) might be a bit skeptical about ever having a use for any knowledge we gain about it outside of academia.

Similar arguments can be used to suggest that we should rid colleges of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, sociology, large swaths of psychology and economics, most fine arts, probably half of research-level math, and so on, leaving only the fields that consistently give actionable real world results (basically leaving only the pseudo-vocational fields like CS, education, and engineering, and a very trimmed list of research fields like chemistry, bio, medicine, and the few cherry-picked bits of practical physics that we need so that the other fields can still progress).

We reject these arguments, though, because as a society we value (and fund accordingly) the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, even in cases where it's highly disputed whether there's any "knowledge" to speak of at all (I won't name names, but that list above...).

Of course, then the matter of cost comes in, and I certainly wouldn't claim that 7 billion is an amount we should shrug our shoulders at, whether information about the Higgs alone is worth that amount of money or not is definitely up for debate...as much as I might like to bitch about how inconclusive, statistically flawed, and poorly conceived most psychology studies are, they're not costing billions of dollars to run.

> Similar arguments can be used to suggest that we should rid colleges of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, sociology, [...] most fine arts,

you say that like it's a bad thing. sounds like a win. at least in terms of reducing burden on all taxpayers (Fed backed student loans) and parents (esp middle-class: too rich or too white for enough financial aid, too poor to foot the skyrocketing fees) and the larger economy (no job degrees). Keeping in mind you can study anything you want, at any time, at any point in your life, for free or at least much cheaper if no universities involved. Also certain fields are not as much anchored to objective reality as they are to the opinions of a small subset of like-minded people. I can come up with an elaborate theory on an owl-based patriarchy and write a book on it, and even recruit some other nutters to back me up but it doesn't mean it's provably true or actionable and constructive.

". I can come up with an elaborate theory on an owl-based patriarchy and write a book on it, and even recruit some other nutters to back me up but it doesn't mean it's provably true or actionable and constructive."

or some idiot could study ant trails and provide data that could improve the solution to certain algorithms.

Sure, life would be simpler and more controllable if we knew what we were going to discover before we discovered it, but we dont. Come up with an elaborate theory on owl based patriarchy that gives some other smart chap an epiphany about the behavior of whale tribal groups, and who knows what improvements your investigations might provide for.

Of course, if you just make it all up, you are not practicing science, you are practicing fraud.

I think you missed the point of what I was saying. :)

My owl patriarchy comment was an off-the-cuff made-up example intended to standin for the soft sciences and fuzzy academic fields, like women's studies, literature theory, philosophy, etc. which really don't exist or have any objective use or application outside of academic circles. And which are, at the same time, topics you don't necessarily have to go to university and spend tons of time and money to become "educated" on. Even the need to be certified in those fields is only required for you to go on to become a certifier of other future potential certifiers, a sort of incestuous perpetual motion machine.

I was not talking about science or experiments or data or anything like that. And yes, we agree, synergy and serendipity and cross-pollination between subjects is a good thing.

The problem I had is that I can equally well imagine someone making that kind of point about the idea of spending money to study ant trails, without the benefit of hindsight the idea is just kind of ridiculous. sure that will lead to new ideas in computer theory and AI.

I think you will find that there are practical uses for at least aspects of literature theory (ask google).

And philosophy has driven humanity forward for thousands of years, the fact you bring it up as possibly useless tells me that you have failed to educate yourself as you should.

I cannot speak about women's studies, as I have no idea what they cover, but on the whole history tells me that where a subject drives people to think deeply about something, humanity generally wins out eventually.

Here is a wikipedia page on the history of logic. Note its roots in philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic

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