Random Ramblings

One more science post for the day ... one that I've been meaning to get around to for a while now. This image comes from Scientific Computing magazine, it is the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider (atom smasher) at CERN.

This project is expected to cost nearly $8 BILLION (US$) ... although costs are spread across 34 countries.

I'm all for the progress of science, and I realize we need to do the "out-there" research in order to learn new things and do new science ... but $8B to find out the next smallest sub-atomic particle? That's more than $1 for every man, woman, and child on the entire planet! I don't even want to think about how many people that could feed, how many jobs that could create. At what point do scientists have some obligation to say, "This is good research, but it doesn't need to be done now" ???

FYI: the image comes from http://scientificcomputing.com/