Randi Rhodes Forums

Fascinating work. I'm always happy to read about the purely theoretical research that we humans conduct. There's not a buck in the isolation of the Higgs (save, the Nobel award) and this is really complex work. I like knowing that we aren't all a bunch of yahoos without the common sense to come in out of the rain.

Um, billions of dollars per year in research money (for universities and national laboratories) is at stake.

And roughly half of the current global GDP is related to this type of research, often referred to somewhat generally as The Quantum Revolution.

Also, please don't misconstrue my comments to mean that all of this is necessarily for the best.

My brother-in-law works for SAIC at LANL (his Ph.D. is from Rice in HE Plasma physics). I have a passing familiarity with the field.

I would love to see your source for the fraction of the global GDP that you attribute to the research. I believe that figure is erroneous

High energy physics is an important component of The Quantum Revolution.

To some considerable extent, our current understanding of quantum mechanics is due to the earliest high energy physics experiments (e.g. Rutherford), and it continues on from there.

It's easy enough to find such estimates on the impact of The Quantum Revolution on the global GDP. Whether or not they are believable is another matter. Here's one (from a search of quantum + mechanics + GDP):

http://www.quantummechanicsandreality.c ... cesses.htm

Through these applications, it is estimated that one third of the GDP depends on “quantum” devices.

[snip]

I'd imagine there are some ".gov" web pages that offer a more detailed analysis of such contributions to the GDP.

I guess the point is, "pure" science is ever so rarely pure, it's inevitably done because people see applications down the road, even if they're not immediately obvious.

Quantum mechanics has given us lasers, transistors, and superconductivity; perhaps in the future, quantum cryptography or computing.

Billions wouldn't go into this research if people didn't see future (profitable) technological applications down the road -- perhaps even military ones (which is my intuition as to what Shine meant by "not all of this is for the very best".)

Yes, the future value of "pure" research is hard to quantify; but the history is evidence enough. I remember reading about a meeting about some particular research, research that had no obvious "value." The speaker when asked what the value was of "this research," replied, "of what value is a baby?"

Wish I could remember what the research was and who the quote is by.

I think it's a very dangerous precedent to the whole idea of a liberal arts education to demand that all research, even all physical/scientific research, to have some kind of obvious economic application, presumably resulting in marketable technological devices. This is why I used to hate the "Golden Turkey" awards of William Proxmire. He often labelled a lot of research "useless" based on this rather narrow criterion.

Unfortunately, in some fields, like biotechnology, the overlap between the private (corporate) sector and public (academic) sector has become completely entangled, to where all the research is being driven by commercial applications.

Knowledge is its own reward, but the worst impact of this increasing view of universities as nothing but the research arm of the private sector - is the growing marginalization of the social sciences and the humanities. We may not produce as many patentable gadgets, but that doesn't mean we're of less "worth" to society.

It's a mixed bag. But in the end, scientists have to make a living, too.

Sometimes applications of scientific discoveries are pretty obvious (e.g. x-rays), while with others it takes a while to discover where they might be useful (e.g. special theory of relativity in high energy physics experiments).


Quantum cryptography is for dorks that believe in the Copenhagen Interpretation.

(I'm sort of kidding. The parts of this area of research that rely on the Aspect Experiments will probably, IMHO, go by the wayside in due course, but that does not negate the possibility of developing cryptographic techniques in the quantum domain.)


Yes, the military angle is part of my angst.

The wholesale destruction of the biosphere is another part of it, which (of course) is a process that has been made ever more efficient by the (*cough*) advances due in large part to The Quantum Revolution.

And so on.

Like one of my teachers has been noted for saying, "Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; knowledge without compassion is inhuman."


Anyway, I heard it mentioned somewhere (probably my wife) that the LHC will be shutting down pretty soon for a full year to take care of some maintenance and upgrades.

Seeker1 - you're correct - to a degree


Quantum mechanics did not give us LASERS. LASERS are not quantum energy products - they are merely coherent photons created by pumping certain classes of elements and molecules with energy such that the electrons are moved up in the orbital hierarchy and drop back, emitting a photon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital Long before the first LASER was created (MASERs existed first) physicist Dennis Gabor predicted the effect of interference patterns from direct and reflected coherent light - a/k/a holograms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor

Electrons dropping from shell to shell dumping energy input into the system is pretty far afield from the work of the LHC.

Ascribing 50% of the world's GDP to quantum research is pure BS. I asked that poster and s/he couldn't cite a proper answer. As a certain congressman once shouted to President Obama.....

BTW, Shine is a physicist.

I think he's referring primarily to the transistor.

http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/info/quantum.html

Nevertheless, most physicists today accept the laws of quantum mechanics as an accurate description of the subatomic world. And certainly it was a thorough understanding of these new laws which helped Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invent the transistor.

[snip]

I wouldn't know how to quantify it (though I'd quiz my brother where to start), but I would imagine a lot of the global GDP is dependent on transistor-based electronics.

No, lasers are an integral part of quantum mechanics (and quite useful in telecommunications, another multi-billion dollar industry).

No, photons - the energy product of a laser - are considered to be one of the quintessential quantum objects. And I might add that the photon is still not all that well understood.

Yes, atomic (and molecular) physics is considerably different from nuclear physics in many ways. They are also similar in many ways.

Also, there have been and continue to be high-precision experiments designed to probe the weak nuclear force using high-resolution atomic spectroscopy (i.e. electronic excitation in atoms).

No, a big chunk of the global GDP is tied into devices that are the result of our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Here's another source that says 10% of the global GDP (but it's probably not much more credible than the first one I sited above):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_industry

The role of the industry as technology enabler. The semiconductor industry is widely recognized as a key driver for economic growth in its role as a multiple lever and technology enabler for the whole electronics value chain. In other words, from a worldwide base semiconductor market of $213 billion in 2004, the industry enables the generation of some $1,200 billion in electronic systems business and $5,000 billion in services, representing close to 10% of world GDP.

[snip]


Meanwhile, this yahoo is gonna do his best to stay out in the rain and keep on dancing.

Yeah, I must admit physics is beyond my ken but interestingly, Wikipedia, in it's article on lasers includes this statement:

"The gain medium of a laser is a material of controlled purity, size, concentration, and shape, which amplifies the beam by the process of stimulated emission. It can be of any state: gas, liquid, solid or plasma. The gain medium absorbs pump energy, which raises some electrons into higher-energy ("excited") quantum states."

Someone back in the 70s explained to me that to develop the laser, scientists used two different theories, that at the time at least, seemed to contradict each other: particle theory and wave theory.

Moving an electron between orbitals (to a lower energy state) will emit a photon. When I think of "quantum" states spalling off particle/wavicles then, yes an excited electron is moving to a lower quantum state. When I think of the Large Hadron Collider I think of fundamental building blocks of atoms - a far more complex level of quantum physics.

I'd call it the same as heating a piece of iron to red-hot and finding that it became malleable as opposed to creating new elements through nuclear fission - energize U-235 to U-236 and you get Kr-92 and Ba-141. No more U left. Exciting Ar with a pulse of energy does not destroy the Ar - but does create energetic photons as electrons in the Ar orbitals are "pumped" and decay, emitting the Photon in strict compliance with conservation of energy. Fission of U-235 creates two different elements and leaves no trace of the U-235 parent .