The Importance of Research

This is one of those topics that's just sort of close to my heart, so I thought I'd throw a post on it out there.



A week ago Tuesday, my partner-in-crime and I gave a lunch presentation on our summer's work up until that point. We had ten minutes to introduce the spin physics program at Brookhaven, and explain our work on ensuring that the calibrations were done in the right way. The first question asked of us was "Why does this matter?"
That can be a hard question to adequately answer for a general audience. In an economic climate where 9.2% unemployment is coming, where the idea of a nation's debt collapsing is no longer unimaginable, where the US government may have to begin default on it's debt, how can we justify spending government money on investigating the spin of the proton?
Because, while the spin of the proton may just help physicists clarify our models directly, the industry surrounding the project continues to revolutinize the world. In colliders, the data-taking is done on the nanosecond scale. Within a couple nanoseconds, the computer systems tied directly to the detectors have to decide if an event is useful or not, and whether or not to pass it along for further investigation. In the end, massive amounts of data (on the order of 15 petabytes/year at the LHC, or 42 terabytes/day, or 510 MB/s assuming continuous operation) are produced, stored, and transferred between member institutions. Physicists are constantly pushing the limits of data storage and transfer with collider experiments, and those improvements eventually trickle down to every-day users.
The engineering behind the detectors is also amazing. In a detector the size of a small house, relativistic particles are tracked to within centimeters. The detectors themselves are top-of-the-line scientific instruments. However, they are also not cheap. In the case of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland/France, nations came together to build the accelerator, and smaller groups came together to build the detectors. For the level of precision and complexity our scientific community is dealing with today, no small group can afford to push against the frontiers. It is only by throwing the resources of a larger entity behind a project that we continue to push forward.
The technologies directly developed by the project are not the only reason to invest in them. The science we uncover can have unintended benefits, or unlock new phenomena that greatly improve our everyday lives. The science and physics that we are looking for now is that which we are aware of at some level. The really interesting stuff is the stuff we haven't seen yet, who's impact we can't predict. It's only by challenging the known, and pushing the limits of what we know further, that we discover the new physics that could have society-changing implications.