Ray, I trust you won't mind if I just excerpt from your post a
question I can offer something of an answer for...
On Sat, 10 Sep 2011, Ray Harrell wrote:
What is happening to all of those huge science
projects with no practical application for small merchants, in capitalism.
Is CERN the only one left or is another being build in some communist
country?
There are many projects around the world of that nature, in various
fields. None, I think, are near as expensive as CERN has been over its
lifetime, but there are lots that are still formidable. Lots of
institutions like TRIUMF, where I work, that are largely, but not
entirely, devoted to pure rather than applied research (CERN also has
some applied research projects going on; the LHC is just the biggest
device there, there are many smaller projects going on all the time, as
well). The accelerator lab in Japan, where we are running the neutrino
experiment, was built from scratch starting in 2000. It is somewhere
between TRIUMF and CERN in scope and cost, probably about halfway. There
are lots of small, and several medium sized labs around the world doing
the sort of particle and nuclear physics that we do at TRIUMF, and all
are typically evolving over time, elaborating themselves as new areas of
enquiry open up.
Here, it has only been about five years since the last big addition was
finished, which provides a beamline for accelerating very short lived
radioactive atoms (as ions), which are produced by the main proton beam
of the original machine. These are mainly used for developing an
understanding of the behaviour of such atoms in the only place they
exist in nature, in the heart of a small percentage of stars under rare
conditions as they approach supernova. This is a pretty non-commercial
area of research. However, we are now just breaking ground for the next
expansion, an electron accelerator originally intended to compliment the
existing systems by providing neutron rich atoms, rather than the proton
rich atoms that the proton beam produces. With the project already well
along in the design phase, it was realized that one of the isotopes that
it would be able to produce would be Tc99, an item suddenly in much
demand for medical applications, now that all the existing nuclear
reactor sources for it are proving to be in one sort of trouble or
another, and of dubious reliability going into the future. So,
unexpectedly, it may turn out that this project will have a commercial
application after all.
Beyond accelerator institutes, I can first point to remote detector
arrays, which are popping up all over the world. For instance, there are
a few detectors in Antarctica, the biggest being an array of photo
detectors distributed through a cubic kilometer of ice deep in the
ice cap, which are watching for light generated by particles impacting
the ice. They will be mainly seeing neutrino-induced decays, but
there will be a variety of other sorts of things as well. Similar
detector arrays are in place in deep water, one offshore somewhere in
the Mediterranean, another in Lake Baikal. And then there are the
arrays of photodetectors in remote valleys, which are opened to
the sky at night, and watch for things like micrometeors.
Next, I can point to extraplanetary projects, like the Hubble
Telescope, which is a pretty expensive piece of hardware when
the cost of launch and servicing is included. And it is due to have
a successor soon, to which we can add a great number of other
platforms and probes out mapping the stars and planets, including
gamma ray and x-ray telescopes, the Kepler planet finder, various
planetary probes, astroid landers, and I don't know how many more
of different objectives.
Those are the sorts of Big Science research projects that I'm
immediately aware of, sort of within the range of my field of interest,
but I expect there are more in other fields of which I'm not
aware.
-Pete
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