Thanks for that Pete. Where does the money for these projects come from. The private sector or government or a private sector doing the leg work with the government providing the funds?
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Monday, September 12, 2011 5:14 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] 2NYTimes.com: Where the Jobs Aren't 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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
