Energy-Saving News

When compared to the other investments and expeditures and polluting endeavors of society, CERN is but a blip in the ocean, yet the possibilities for the returns are limitless.

The work achieved at the LHC has already given back so much (including the World Wide Web and it’s next incarnation, the Grid, is on its way), no one can predict what may develop in the future, which may well be of huge significance for the understanding of harnessing clean energy.

If there’s one thing worth spending our time and efforts and focus on, it’s the work that they’re doing at CERN. At this point in the game, you don’t start closing one of the few doors remaining left to walk through that might take us towards a better future. And this is the one with the great odds.

So, the LHC gave us the internet? That statement in itself makes the rest of the sales pitch seem silly.

Yeah, hopefully he means CERN gave us the world wide web, otherwise he is quite wrong.

He does explicitly say CERN gave us the world wide web. Tim Berners-Lee developed http in 1989 whilst working at CERN which was then the largest internet node in the world and the first website was produced there. And as other James also says CERN is now pioneering GRID computing (also known commercially as Cloud or distributed resource computing). You may argue that advancing our fundamental understanding of nature by say, searching for Higgs doesn’t directly benefit humanity but these academic undertakings also lead to the development of many directly useful technologies in the process. My favourite is that people are currently looking into the development of particle accelerators for the treatment of cancer as protons can be made to deposit their energy in a much more contained region of space than x-rays. You can kill a tumour without destroying the surrounding tissue. Aside from that the fundamental knowledge we gain may turn out to have direct benefit in ways we currently can’t foresee, there are many examples throughout history of this.

I wonder if anyone has figured out the carbon footprint of creating, moving and maintaining 96 tonnes of helium? It has to continually be replenished, and is a significant amount of the available liquid helium on the planet. This is a diminishing resource.