So, just how excited are you about the discovery of the Higgs Boson?

[RATTER15]

Im really trying but........

[excelsior-1]

as a 'closet scientist', i'm interested in the discovery - but not excited.

i am pleased for the scientists concerned .. they have spent a lot of time, energy and money on the project.

[Zippolover]

It is absolutely riveting - oh look, a butterfly

[Zacs-Master]

I'm so excited I've shat myself. But in so doing, I did muse that without the HB field it simply woulnt have been possible.

[askyourgran]

Not excited but interested. To think that these scientists had even visualised the concept of creating the 'Big Bang', and building a machine to do just that in itself is something quite awesome.

[Anngel123]

At least the world didn't implode into a manufactured black hole....yet!

[DaisyNonna]

What did it cost?

[RATTER15]

DaisyNonna

"The Large Hadron Collider is nearly 30 years in the making - and costs the member countries of CERN and other participating countries an estimated €4.6 billion (about US$ 6.4 billion). Like those late night infomercials, however, we can say "but that's not all!" Extra things like detectors, computing capacity, and extra warranty (just kidding!) cost an extra €1.43 billion.

The United Kingdom, for example, contributes £34 million per year, less than the cost of a pint of beer per adult in the country per year (Source).

The United States contributed approximately $531 million to the development and construction of components for the LHC (with the US Department of Energy shelling out $450 million and the National Science Foundation kicking in the remaining $81 million)."

from: http://www.neatorama....t-were-afraid-to-ask/

[jomifl]

or 1 lipstick per year per woman Ratter, just so as not to be sexist.

[Mojo-Jo-Jo]

Woah! Too many currencies right there. What do they all cost in one currency Ratter?
I rather like science spending as it goes.

[DaisyNonna]

Thanks for your answers. How much medical research would that fund?

[jno]

Now what do they do with that massive tunnel under Switzerland....?

I believe Bernie Ecclestone has expressed an interest

[jomifl]

Daisy, as much as 1 lipstick per woman per year.

[pdq1]

What it seems to me was all those years ago Higgs came up with a guess that their is another unknown particle out there. For this he will probably receive the Nobel prize.

However since then hundreds/thousands of scientists have created formulas and invested in a multi billion machine to blast the protons.

So his guess was right but the majority of the work has been trying to prove it right.

So whats to stop any amateur in future coming up with a ridulous idea and 50 years later getting the credit for it if proved correct?

[jake-the-peg]

The nobel prize committee will have a big headache with who to award on this one - there's Higgs and his collaborators but there's also all the experimentalists and whether both the Atlas and CMS teams get credit.

Anyway as for "coming up with some ridiculous idea" I think the TV coverage may have done Peter Higgs a discredit.

People seem to have got the idea that he was wandering on a mountaintop and thought "Oh what if.." came down and everybody went off and spent a king's ransom on seeing if he was right.

In fact there will have been a lot of work in creating mathematical models to convince people that the idea had merit, creating predictions from those models that could be tested etc.

Peter Higgs predicted this in 1964 - it was over 30 years before the work really started on the LHC

[Old_Geezer]

A bit unfair to classify a plausible explanation as merely a guess. Were these things to be dismissed so easily would anyone bother to try to find explanations for things ?

Ridiculous ideas tend to fall at the first hurdle.

[jake-the-peg]

Hmm well it's their own fault really!

Scientists do love to tell tales from Newton and his damn apple tree to Peter Higgs walking in the mountains!

Schrodinger even claimed to have come up with his Quantum Mechanics equation after a night with a colleague's wife!

The reality is almost always somewhat different especially nowadays but If you tell tales of blinding inspiration you shouldn't be surprised when it bites you in the bum!

[Old_Geezer]

Interesting to see the questions regarding cost. Of course one ought not waste money on nonsense, as much of the art world seems to, but on the other hand finding out why & how things are what they are is as good a reason to exist as one can think of. Should one get overly concerned at funding such a noble aim ? There will always be other things to spend money on, for example always medical research to still be done, but it's not as if we don't have budgets for that too. Sometimes throwing money at something doesn't create faster progress but more waste. And as has been hinted at, one can hear of huge sums in terms of our personal everyday experience, but when analysed the cost per person is trivial.
Recall too that wealth flows in circles. Regardless of what future benefits may come out of such research, money spent on physics projects now employ scientists and allow them to eat and live, which in turn allows the grocer and builder to work and live, which allows the taxman to collect taxes, to fund scientific projects. The wealth is not wasted, but accumulates as the activity of wealth creators gradually add to the pot.

[MoonRocker]

daisy, the medical world has up to now benefitted enormously from this kind of work. Various scanners, Xray machines, countless detectors and monitors. Most of the medical profession would say it's money well spent.