
Restarting the LHC: Why 13 Tev? - bmease
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-tev
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melling
Is 13 TeV exciting? It's too bad science isn't exciting to more people.

[http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4499048/joel-hefley-kill-
ssc](http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4499048/joel-hefley-kill-ssc)

If we had been we'd have had 40 TeV almost 2 decades ago.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collide...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider#Comparison_to_the_Large_Hadron_Collider)

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ISL
As a physicist, I'm compelled to note that the SSC was projected to exceed its
initial budget by a huge margin, perhaps 300%. If we can't constrain costs, we
don't get to have nice things.

The loss of the SSC was a tragedy, but the fact that Congress was willing to
allocate $4B for such a project (>$7B in today's dollars) would suggest that
there was widespread national support for such a thing. At the time of
proposal, that was $18 _per person_ in the United States, ballooning to
$54/person as projected. That's one heck of a bake sale.

~~~
IvyMike
True, it's sad that it was going to overrun costs. But it was ambitious--
imagine how ahead of its time it was if it could have achieved 40TeV 20 years
ago.

It's also depressing when you consider what we did decide to spend money on.
The cost of air conditioning alone in Iraq was $20B.
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-
mi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-military-
cost-nasa_n_881828.html) Edit: I'm not suggesting we go to war and not keep
our troops air conditioned--it was a necessity given the conditions. I'm
suggesting that when such a tiny fractional cost of the war more than the cost
of the SSC, maybe our sense of relative costs was warped.

~~~
timr
Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a
given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended
up spending on the Iraq war.

For all the money that the EU has spent on the LHC, it hasn't really paid off
to that extent. Even if you consider "the web" as part of that payoff, it's
not the equivalent of guaranteeing every person in the western world stable
access to cheap energy.

(I'm not saying I agree with that rationale for our adventures in Iraq, I just
don't think it's _quite_ fair to make the comparison you're making. There's
more at stake in Iraq than a stable democracy for a small country.)

~~~
btilly
FYI, "the internet" can be fairly credited to DARPA in the USA.

It is "the web" that can be credited to the LHC.

~~~
Retric
In a lesser known twist there was heavy debate on the SGML working group that
documents shuld have embedded links. For various reasons that did not come to
pass but it Effectivly pushed back the web by 5 years until HTML showed up.
Presumably if DNS has been out just a little bit sooner the web would have
taken off much sooner. Though computer cost and limitations may have set
slowed adoption.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_L...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language)

~~~
lolive
The web phenomenom is the appearance of four major components in a very short
period of time:

    
    
        - HTML
        - HTTP
        - a graphical browser that even my mother can use
        - freely deployable web server software component
    

Sure, HTML is an important piece of the cake. But the most important one is
definitely ... (well, choose for yourself :)

