I got the fundamental forces part wrong in the OP and rewrote it.
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Originally Posted by BadNick
Besides detractors who got tired of the Y2K panic and are looking for the next fantasy panic attack, I think a lot of people admire the science in something like this but might question the priorities as far as spending money/resources for this vs spending more for fighting hunger, disease, poverty, etc.
I hope the LHC will have enough practical spin-offs to justify all the effort. I like leading edge science so the LHC gives me a Large Hardon...relatively speaking.
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This isn't about making money, nobody is going to commercialize the Higgs Boson or weaponize quantum electrodynamics, it's all about knowledge and understanding, humankind at its most pure of intentions.
The Grid, the processing supercomputer farms, and the detectors will contribute to advancement of technology in the way that the Hubble Telescope was the point at which CCD sensors could be made profitably en masse for nonmilitary use, but nobody expects to see a return on investment. We might see something come out of it, but don't hold your breath.
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Originally Posted by Martian
Note: This is not the LHC's full power. The LHC is capable of an energy of 7 TeV per particle, giving a full collision energy of 14 TeV. It's scheduled to reach that level some time in 2012, from what I last read.
And I enjoyed the retrocausality article. Thought it was hilarious.
That was a joke, right?
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It's at max power for the first year and a half, after which it will be shut down and upgraded to the new full power. This is the part where it's its own prototype, we need to do stuff first before we go all the way. It's at full power until they upgrade.
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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
I have a question!
What does this all mean?
I mean, is this a secrets of the universe sort of thing with a wide variety of applications?
Will we see new cancer treatments, more efficient energy production, and 2.5 terahertz microprocessors in our cell phones?
Will I get to see Mars?
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Look at my old post linked in the OP for the significance of this. We don't know what 96% of the universe is, we've unified three of the four fundamental forces and the best we've done so far is doing math while being all "What the fuck is the difference between W and Z bosons, which mediate the electroweak force, and the masless photon?" We have a pretty good idea of this mass-giving gauge boson and how it will behave, but it's come full circle to where we were as early cavemen, and our best method of observing the world is by swinging things around, smashing them into each other, and seeing what happens.
Basically, we don't know what causes mass to exist. We won't see a cure for cancer, and we will not produce any cancer because there are safety measure in place to prevent radiation from hurting people or someone being dumb like
Anatoli Bugorski and sticking his head in the particle beam. Although if you managed to sneak in and get in the way of the beam, it's high enough energy that it would literally blow a smoking hole through you. They have a huge slab of carbon 8 or 12 feet deep to absorbed dumped beams.