Physics is also Worth Funding

(Sorry about the delay - life happened.)

I'm not sure what happened to it in the budget, but beforehand the UK government put something in the region of £70 million a year into CERN and, according to my physics teacher, someone did a survey and found that 30% of people think this is a good use of taxpayers' money.

When I first heard this, I thought 'that seems like quite a lot of money being spent on something which is not terrifically useful', but I have now realised two things: for a government it's not that much, and it is useful. I'll explain my u-turn (with the caveat that other people definitely know more about this stuff than me).

Firstly, if we don't put any money into shared facilities like this, then we're going to fall behind areas of research like particle physics and astronomy, which often need pretty massive bits of equipment to test/observe things.

Huzzah! A particle accelerator!

Unless you're Tony Stark and can just build one at home one afternoon. See here for how much he may have had to bend reality to do this.

You have seen Iron Man 2, right?

These areas are some of the most 'wow!', and so important in encouraging children to take an interest in science.

Like Gru in Despicable Me, but hopefully without the career as a supervillain.

Also particle physics has all sorts of medical applications - cancer therapy, diagnostics, biomedical research into the structure of proteins - and makes itself useful in lots of other ways too.

Finally, you can't direct the course of scientific progress. Sure you can choose which research areas to fund, but you can't force breakthroughs to be made, or predict the applications for new discoveries. The most groundbreaking inferences are often serendipitous, so no area should be considered unworthy of investigation.

Physics is Cute

When I say I take physics A level, people's reactions tend to range from 'why?' to 'you poor thing!'. They probably assume physics = hard maths. Maths is often involved (and sometimes makes me want to disembowel myself with a spoon), but the physics department also get away with the most ridiculously fun stuff by claiming it's educational.

Exhibit A: Visits to theme parks. It was just the once, but still. We had a day out of school so that we could ride on roller-coasters and 'experience' the gravitational energy changing to kinetic energy for our coursework. The chemistry equivalent is dripping things into test tubes under exam conditions. No contest.

Exhibit B: The Particle Zoo.

Aww

Ninja!

Our physics department owns most of a full set of these plushies. They do have explanatory tags and are used as a teaching tool - but mainly they're incredibly awesome and cute. And the strange quarks have three eyes and the charm quarks have roses!

So much!

In all seriousness, the actual physics is pretty awesome too, especially particle physics and astrophysics: the mindbogglingly small and the mindbogglingly big. I defy anyone to look at images of nebulae and tell me they're not beautiful. The sad thing is that although I have seen the Enterprise mentioned in an old textbook, that was to say that using antimatter-matter annihilations to power the ship probably wouldn't work...