Cambridge Consultants Blog
Will finding the Higgs boson have any impact on our lives?
By Alan Richardson - Last updated: Thursday, September 8, 2011Arguments are often put that money that is spent on research should be targeted on things of economic value. Currently a large multi-national effort is going on to find the Higgs Boson in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Particle physicists say that our current understanding of physics fundamentally explains the evolution of the universe from the point after the first fraction of a second to now so is this worth the billions of pounds it is costing?
This is not a new argument. For all terrestrial purposes and the overhwelming majority of solar system issues, Newton’s 17C Theory of Gravity is entirely adequate and Einstein’s General Relativity of 1915 an elegant and obscure refinement. However, the GPS system is based on orbiting atomic clocks and the computation of position has to take into account the General Relativistic correction arising from the accelerating clocks. So safety in navigation and a host of consumer goods and location services would not exist without General Relativity. If a set of politicians had insisted on a set of proposals for research with application to navigation, it is extremely unlikely that the proposal would have included work out why the orbit of Mercury is odd and in so doing enable precise navigation anywhere on the planet. Fundamental understanding of the way things work is the first fundamental step in innovation but it is unlikely that a particular business would fund CERN because with this kind of research, the application errors are highly uncertain. The UK should be increasing its funding of science research if it believes the knowledge economy is going to rebalance an over dependence on financial services. So my bet is that finding the Higgs Boson (or proving it doesn’t exist) will have spin off benefits but they’ll be decades down the track before we recognise them in every day life. This should not limit our enthusiasm to fund it as understanding the universe is fundamental to being human.
