Big Science Funding Debate
The cluster centers on debates about the value of spending billions on large-scale scientific projects like the LHC or fusion research, questioning if it's wasteful or beneficial compared to alternatives like education, smaller experiments, or other priorities.
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"Do you really think that 550 billions of dollars are spent each year on something that doesn’t work?" ...yes.
As long as not funded by voluntary donations, such an extremely over budget investment is waste with little to no actual gain for humanity.
that's a lot of money to waste on an unproven design that has limited applicability to today's problems
The question of spending money is the question of politics, and there is a finite budget. I would argue the reason for all of these inventions is the increasing number of educated people (not only physicists) in the world. So maybe investing this money into education is better. Also, of course the physics will birth all of these inventions, it would be useless otherwise.
you realize that the 42 billion dollars isn't burnt in a furnace right? it was spent on research, labor, hardware. that money reaches new hands. it can be spent again.
what else would they be spending money on? money has to be spent. might as well do it on a low probability potential breakthrough
They should spend gigawatts on something more useful instead.
If in fact the $64B could be spent on your proposals, you have a point. Otherwise, it is better to spend the $64B in this landmark project vs. it being diverted somewhere else where neither you nor me could figure out what happened to it. This is a landmark project - let it happen. Your future generations will thank you.
> 300 million is a lot of money, I wonder if it would have been better spent elsewhereAren't you just repeating part of dahdum's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18470584)?
They give a lot of money to things that are yet to be proven.