I understand that the LHC will help answer some physics questions, but is all this expense and effort going to contribute to any practical technology gains? Will it help us find new energy sources? What will we actually get out of it??
There's some irony that twenty years later you're able to use the very technology spawned by that proposal to write a comment asking whether all the expense and effort of the LHC and CERN will have any practical technological gains.
We are where we are now by trying to "answer some physics questions". Imagine if humans had not done a single thing that didn't seem to them to have a practical application at that point.
Quite so. Blue sky research has a much longer payback cycle (and sometimes doesn't pay back at all), but often has an astronomically high rate of return.
For many years the laser was considered to be a "solution looking for a problem", yet today they are absolutely ubiquitous in numerous applications and have contributed to the well-being of human-kind in innumerable ways (surgery, communication, safety, etc.)
When Maxwell studied the theory of electromagnetism it was absolutely blue sky research with questionable practicality. Yet the fruit of that research served as the foundation of innumerable inventions in the 19th and 20th centuries, easily responsible for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of goods and services to be produced and delivered to people.
Yep that's great I'm all for that. Just wondering if there are any practical applications that they hope to one day achieve, or is it more like sending a satellite into space without any idea what's out there, just hoping to find some cool stuff.
Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
altogether.
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." ~A. Einstein
To address your question, I am sorry, I don't really know if they have any practical applications in mind. But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.
The understanding of the atom world lead us to nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, a better understanding of the quantum world might lead us to similar discoveries (for example, quantum computers or anti-gravity). The bottom line is the more we know the cooler things we can build :)
