Government Spending Madness?

OPINION by Patrick English

In the week when it has been revealed that thousands of us have paid the wrong amount of tax to the government, it seems topical talk about one of the most controversial spending agreements of the past governments, to fund the building and research of the Large Hadron Collider.

Costing around $10 Billion US, taking 14 years to complete, and crashing to a halt a mere few hours after its grand turn on, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is tasked mainly with finding the highly illusive, theoretical ‘God particle’, around which our basic understanding of what gives things mass revolves. Governments, including ours here, have funded the main bulk of the project, in the hope that it will answer the most burning question in physics to date. However, early results are not looking promising, and in an article from BBC Focus magazine (Issue 220), Proff Stephen Reucroft said thus:

“It is very unlikely that the Higgs boson will be found”

I dare say, this is hardly what the public, scientists, governments, and especially Mr Higgs, will have wanted to hear. But the reality is, it’s looking increasingly likely that $10 Billion US has been spent proving our own grasp of science, wrong.

In fact, this wont come as much of a shock to those who know a thing or two about physics. The basis of most of our understanding of particle and quantum physics is that we prove something right, by proving all other possibilities, wrong. However, this leads the door wide open for ‘wrongness’ in the result itself. What if there are alternate possibilities not thought of at the time of theorising to try and prove wrong? What if there are certain conditions that we cannot physically test that would prove our ‘right’ theory to be ‘wrong’?

It is in fact the latter which was the reasoning behind the international scientific community deciding to build the LHC in the first place; scientists wanted to recreate conditions seen directly after the big bang, in order to observe the particles and their nature at this point in space and time. They had an idea of what to expect; some quarks, heat, and hopefully a Higgs boson or two, but no solid theory. In fact, the entire basis of quantum level physics is about as solidly founded as the UK banking industry, so why pour billions into it?

Truth of the matter is, if indeed the Higgs boson does not appear, it will be back to the drawing board for particle physicists, and a new theory will undoubtedly emerge. Why is it important that we find out what goes on at such miniscule levels? This article sums it up nicely:

http://io9.com/5597216/why-it-matters-that-were-close-to-discovering-the-higgs-boson-particle

The fact of that matter is, if we can establish the building blocks of the universe, it opens all kinds of doors for future discovery; in the universe, the formation of the earth, and life itself. Invaluable scientific information could be just around one of CERNs conrners.

But should the taxpayer be paying for such scientific costs? Well the UK’s contribution to CERN is around the 500 Million pound sterling mark. The bank bailout figure from the The Independant quotes 850 billion pound sterling. Thus, the actual cost to the country isn’t such a large chunk out of the wallet, and is only around one tenth of the overall budget given to science and technology projects and companies by the government.

In all, there will be forever arguments raging about where taxpayer’s money should go, but often the money spent on the more controversial ones is peanuts compared to what the government raises through taxation annually. So should we be funding mass scientific research? Well, without science progressing, you can almost guarantee technology and society wont advance much further either.