MORE OLDER INFORMATION ON CERN CALLING IT “MAGNETORRESISTANCE” YES! NOW WE ALL KNOW CERN IS EVIL AND AGAINST GOD. USED TO MESS WITH ATOMS, STRANGELET BOMBS AND THE EARTHS MAGNETICS. IT IS AND ALWAYS WAS TOTALLY ILLUMINATI PROJECTS FOR THE REPTILIANS TO SCAB OUR MONEY FROM TAXES – THROUGH THE VATICAN AS THEY STEAL OURS AND OTHER THINGS THEY ARE DOING AS THE REPTILES WANTS TO CONQUER! THEY ARE REAL PROUD OF THEMSELVES WANTING TO DESTROY US & EARTH! THEY HAVE BUILT A JET FUSION REACTOR IN OXFORDSHIRE ENGLAND. WAKE-UP WORLD BEFORE THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF US. THE DEMONIC IDIOTS RUNNING AND RUINING OUR PLANET SEEM TO HAVE BUILT ANOTHER CERN?

Energy

Energy

Energy is an essential and expensive component of modern life, and how we generate it has huge effects on the environment. Our limited current investment in energy research doesn’t reflect the importance of improving it.

Civilisation depends on its supply of energy to function: we in the UK spend around £2200 per capita fuelling our cars, homes and factories. Energy research, by comparison, receives around £10 per person per year. That’s less than 0.5% of energy spending.

There’s a pretty strong economic case for scientific research into energy sources: the UK’s per capita energy spend has increased from £1300 per capita in 1997 to £2200 in 2011. This 60% increase has been driven largely by factors beyond our control: we depend on fuels whose prices are highly volatile due to global supply and demand, and market speculation. If we’re confident that science can make our energy even 0.5% cheaper in the long run, it’s worth investing significantly more than the £10 we do at present.

In addition, the fossil fuels that provide the majority of our energy are both finite, and damaging to the environment. To avoid dangerous (and expensive) climate change, we need to find new ways to either generate power without emitting carbon dioxide or sequester the carbon dioxide we do emit. These new or improved power sources will be made cheaper and more efficient through scientific research.

Nuclear fusion

To focus on one technology in particular, we spend £1.20 per capita—a mere 0.05% of our spend on energy—researching nuclear fusion. Fusion is a potential source of near-infinite, pollution-free energy, and the principles have already been proved. The JET experiment, based in Oxfordshire, has successfully generated 16 MW of power from fusion…albeit for less than a second. How far away is practicable nuclear fusion for electricity production? Cynics often joke that it has been thirty years away for the last thirty years—perhaps, however, given that the worldwide fusion budget is less than $1 per person per year, that’s not such a surprise.

Rather than a number of years, it makes more sense to think of fusion as a number of pounds, dollars or person-years’ work away: the more we invest in nuclear fusion now, the sooner we’ll crack it.

Whilst no number of experiments can guarantee that fusion will be able to generate affordable electricity, we do have a plan. The next big project in fusion research is a massive, collaborative experimental reactor called ITER, which has a budget of £13 billion, and should be showing results by the mid-2020s. This will be followed up by a similar scale reactor, called DEMO, designed to use the technology from ITER to actually generate electricity. ITER and DEMO will require other scientific support; for example, we need to test the new materials needed for long-term use inside a fusion reactor. Assuming all of this goes to plan, we could have nuclear fusion working after investing about £60 billion.

Though that might sound like an unimaginable quantity of cash, there are also a lot of people in the world: the population of the ‘high-income countries’ is just over 1.1 billion. This means we could develop fusion with a one-off payment of £50 each. In fact, the ITER collaboration represents over half of the world’s population, meaning it could be even cheaper than that: around £16 per head. It’s probably fairer if the rich countries pay a larger share of that, but still: I’d put my £50 on the table right now.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that: if a huge international collaboration clubbed together and wrote fusion researchers a cheque for £60 billion, we couldn’t have fusion next week; it would take time to build the labs, train new scientists to work in them and do the experiments to find out what works. But there’s a pretty compelling case that more investment would bring the results in faster. Plus, that means we don’t even need to pay that £50 each in one hit: we get a few years to scrape it together. (For more on making sense of the cost of large research projects, see the Big science page.)

Understanding fusion and developing it into a power source has only been possible thanks to foundations laid by nuclear physics and astrophysics, and we turn to this ‘blue-skies research’ in the next section.

Blue-skies research

Blue-skies research

Research with obvious, short-term applications such as that in energy and health is underpinned by a vibrant base in blue-skies research.

This kind of research is not necessarily driven by a specific goal, but is simply exploratory: scientists aim to understand the world around them, and tend to stumble across all manner of interesting and applicable surprises along the way.

It’s vitally important that we fund this so-called ‘basic’ research, but it’s much harder to draw catchy comparisons between the investment we make and the size of the objectives scientists are aiming for—often because, in the curiosity-driven world of blue-skies science, there aren’t any objectives other than understanding itself.

A high-profile contemporary example of blue-skies research is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at CERN in Switzerland. It’s the largest scientific experiment ever built, an incredible engineering feat which accelerates protons to 99.999999% the speed of light—very nearly the fastest it’s possible to go—to probe the inner structure of matter and understand the fundamental workings of the Universe. Indeed, 2012 saw the discovery of a particle called the Higgs boson which explains why other particles like electrons have mass. This confirmed a theoretical prediction made in the 1960s, and won Peter Higgs and François Englert the 2013 Nobel prize.

This kind of fundamental research may sound intellectually decadent, but the LHC’s predecessor accelerators have been responsible for a variety of spin-out technologies, from health physics to microchip manufacture. In fact, if it weren’t for scientists at CERN, you might not be reading this at all—the lab provided the setting, in 1989, for the development of the World Wide Web. This is the kind of totally unforeseen spin-out we sometimes get from basic science: CERN’s high concentration of bright people and networked computers just happened to be in the right place at the right time. But when you write a grant application to investigate some obscure aspect of the nature of the Universe, it would be pretty bizarre to write ‘one in a million chance of revolutionising society’, even though that chance is implicit in many basic research projects.

Whilst we can’t be sure what application discoveries made at the LHC may have, the UK subscription to CERN sets us back just £1.50 per person per year; almost the same as the amount we spend on peanuts. In other words, discovering the Higgs boson literally cost peanuts. With the potential for hugely significant, totally unforeseen discoveries from a project at the cutting edge of our understanding of the Universe, this seems like a bargain.

The riposte from scientists working on renewable energy (which receives only a little more public funding than CERN), or stroke (at 37p per person per year), might be to observe that their fields too cost peanuts, but have very concrete applications. The answer here is surely not to cut funding the LHC—it’s to devote additional funding to those other areas. We have no idea what the cost would be of not learning what the LHC will go on to discover, so we’re each effectively buying a lottery ticket a year to fund CERN—except it’s a much more interesting gamble, with far better odds.

Unexpected discoveries

The LHC follows an illustrious heritage of projects with no specific social goal which have resulted in technologies which are all around us. Below are three examples that were extremely scientifically significant—all three resulted in a Nobel Prize for their discoverers—but have had an even more significant, unpredictable impact on our everyday lives.

Lasers

Developed in the early 1960s, lasers started out as a scientific curiosity, but their inventors could never have dreamed of their huge range of applications: from laser eye surgery in medicine to laser cutting in industry; from barcode scanners in supermarkets to DVD players and laser printers in homes and offices.

Antibiotics

The serendipitous discovery of penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, is so well-known as to be almost cliché: Alexander Fleming, a Scottish biologist, noticed that bacteria weren’t growing in a small halo around some mould which had contaminated one of his samples. When the substance the fungus secreted was isolated, it turned out to be highly toxic to bacteria but largely harmless to humans. It wasn’t previously known that antibiotics even existed, but penicillin and subsequent antimicrobial drugs have saved millions of lives.

Giant magnetoresistance

In 1988, separate research groups in Germany and France observed a strange effect when dealing with very thin layers of magnetic materials: depending on their relative direction of magnetic alignment, it became significantly easier or more difficult for an electrical current to pass through them. This was an exciting piece of new physics, and earned its co-discoverers the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. However, technology moves faster than the Nobel Prize committee; it was a decade earlier that materials exhibiting this effect had found their way into hard disk drives…and they’re still there; if you’re reading this on a computer, it’s probably making use of this effect right now.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2007/

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2007

Photo: U. Montan

Albert Fert

Prize share: 1/2

Photo: U. Montan

Peter Grünberg

Prize share: 1/2

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2007 was awarded jointly to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg “for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance”