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Set high on a mountain plain in China, an ambitious observatory will offer a unique perspective on the origins of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that rain down on Earth. Construction has started on the project, which will probe, for the first time, ultra-high-energy γ-rays — bursts of radiation thought to be produced alongside cosmic rays in our Galaxy, but whose origins are easier to track.
The 1.3-square-kilometre site near Daocheng in Sichuan, close to Tibet, received the go-ahead in January, after an environmental report convinced the government that construction would not harm the threatened white-lipped deer (Cervus albirostris) and other animals in a nearby nature reserve. Now, contractors are installing infrastructure for the 1.2-billion-yuan (US$174-million) Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO).
"This will be the leading project to clarify questions of cosmic-ray physics," says Giuseppe Di Sciascio, a particle physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Rome. Di Sciascio, along with researchers from a number of countries, including Switzerland, Russia and Thailand, hopes to collaborate on the project. Chief among the physics questions that LHAASO will investigate is what accelerates cosmic rays — charged particles such as protons or atomic nuclei — to such high energies. Some cosmic rays that hit Earth have energies millions of times greater than the energies produced by the most powerful human-made particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists have proposed certain celestial phenomena, such as black holes or supernovae, as origins, but no one has confirmed this conclusively.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17 2017, @06:51PM (6 children)
It takes the courage to defend a budget line item (often a big one) against people who think like you and are on the prowl to cut stuff.
Which despite my no-doubt fearsome reputation to the contrary, doesn't take a bit of courage. Nobody in China will lose sleep over my disapproval of their spending of Chinese peoples' money on prestige projects.
it takes seeing further than the tip of one's nose, and being bale to convince others that dismissive one-liners are not gonna keep the US ahead of international competition.
Then where's the evidence that you can see beyond the tip of your nose? You have said nothing about the utility or feasibility of this particular research. You just approved of the act of spending the money, which apparently is good enough for you. I consider that a sign of economic and scientific illiteracy.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday March 18 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
> You have said nothing about the utility or feasibility of this particular research
People competing for available grants had 1.2 billion reasons to convince the approver that the money was better spent elsewhere.
This reminds me of a previous grandiose project reported on SN, where someone announced that they were ready to invest two billions on something, which our local armchair scientists/investors quickly deemed completely absurd.
Because people who control that amount of cash love to invest in worthless shit to prove they can waste taxpayer money unaccountably.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @04:51AM
Because people who control that amount of cash love to invest in worthless shit to prove they can waste taxpayer money unaccountably.
Not feeling it here. Just because politicians, financiers, etc squander lots of other peoples' money on worthless shit, doesn't mean that they do it because they have some need to prove that they can waste the money unaccountably. The most common cause is simple conflict of interest.
This reminds me of a previous grandiose project reported on SN, where someone announced that they were ready to invest two billions on something, which our local armchair scientists/investors quickly deemed completely absurd.
Here's my view. I may well have been one of those naysayers. But if it's their money, I ultimately don't have a problem with how they spend it as long as they aren't harming people by spending that money (eg, paying terrorists/thugs to kill people, etc). But if that money actually came from other people, such as public funding, then I'm usually outright against the expenditure.
My view is that a lot of this spending doesn't take courage or foresight. It takes skimming a portion off the top. Or it's buying votes. Or it's stroking some politicians' egos.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @01:51AM (3 children)
> ...where's the evidence ...
The evidence is all around you, in things we all use that were originally based on pure & applied math and/or theoretical & experimental physics. Hell, George Boole had no idea that playing with 0's and 1's would eventually let khallow post on SN. Luckily(?) for us, someone funded his work in pure math.
If there is a gap in physics and it can possibly be filled by this observatory, I'm all for it, whoever puts in the effort to get it funded and whoever winds up paying for it. I'm happy that a tiny fraction of my USA taxes funds other similarly "short term useless" physics in USA.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @05:20AM (2 children)
The evidence is all around you, in things we all use that were originally based on pure & applied math and/or theoretical & experimental physics. Hell, George Boole had no idea that playing with 0's and 1's would eventually let khallow post on SN.
All of which had near future application. While Boole's specific work never was implemented in a practical situation, mechanical calculators, analogue computers, etc were developed from that sort of research and widely used.
If there is a gap in physics and it can possibly be filled by this observatory, I'm all for it, whoever puts in the effort to get it funded and whoever winds up paying for it. I'm happy that a tiny fraction of my USA taxes funds other similarly "short term useless" physics in USA.
Notice what is missing here. Any consideration of the cost of the experiment. If we have this hole in our knowledge, then the solution is to plug it up with money without regard either to the cost of the experiment or the opportunity costs of the other things that could have been done with that money. Even if we outright ignore the non-science needs, there is an unlimited variety of science that could be done. And there's a limited amount of resources in a society. That means that one always has to pick and choose what science to do - even when science is the most important priority.
Both bob_super and yourself have made the mistake of ignoring the economics here. We can't plug every gap in our knowledge. We simply don't have the resources to do so. So when bob_super goes on about how important it is to conduct useless experiments (under the straw man of not immediately profitable), I have to wonder just how committed he really is to science.
Another matter here is the cost of the project. $174 million is not much by developed world standards, but it is more than an order of magnitude more expensive than a similar project [nature.com] a quarter the size completed in Mexico in 2014. At this point, I wonder where the kickbacks will be going. That excess money will be going somewhere, but not into scientific research.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 20 2017, @12:12PM (1 child)
Resources aren't infinite, but somehow the self-proclaimed defenders of fiscal responsibility are not batting an eye to dump many tens of billions on a "great wall" that won't work, but it does appease the ego of the toddler-in-chief (these grand economic geniuses will also tell you that you're going to balance the budget and reduce the deficit by cutting paltry amounts out of discretionary spending). You can take the money that this one, very stupid and ineffective solution will cost, and it would pay the R&D budgets of all the agencies for the better part of a decade. A few million dollars is HUGE to ordinary people, but is a paltry drop in the bucket when compared to things that can make a real fiscal difference. For instance, it is costing about $60M a MONTH to keep the First Lady in New York (not to mention how much of that goes DIRECTLY in to the President's pocket), and it is costing almost that much for the President to go to his grand resort EVERY WEEKEND. If you want to cut millions of dollars out of a welfare program, at least be a man and live by example; President Carter said "turn down your thermostat and put on a sweater", and you know what, that's exactly what he did at the White House.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 20 2017, @02:36PM
but somehow the self-proclaimed defenders of fiscal responsibility are not batting an eye to dump many tens of billions on a "great wall" that won't work
Because you aren't supporting that project. I oppose that as well. You miss the point of the funding game. The purpose is to create sacred cows to protect spending like on the "great wall". Because anyone who will cut the funding of the big wasteful projects will also cut the funding of the wasteful research projects you happen to support or benefit from.
This is particularly the case with stuff like Social Security/public employee pension funds, and public health care programs. Roughly half the US budget (including "off budget") is in that sort of program. Any serious budget cutter has to deal with those as well. Either risk pissing off a huge number of voters, or fail to make a dent in the US budget. These programs are an ongoing ugly bribe to the voter to look the other way while tens of billions of dollars go poof.