The recent success in confirming the existence of the Higgs particle at CERN is an amazing achievement for experimental physics. The entire undertaking has been truly exceptional and the scale of the ambition and planning for the Large Hadron Collider has to be admired: it took 25 years to design and build the LHC to prove the 50-year old theory about the Higgs boson, and over 10,000 scientists and engineers at CERN have been involved in its discovery. As a true work of multi-national collaboration the LHC stands unrivalled in modern times and the headline outcome — the detection of the Higgs particle — must rank as one of mankind’s greatest achievements in science.
Genuine landmark events like the discovery of the Higgs particle don’t happen too often, but at the time of writing another astonishing success has occurred: the arrival of the Philae lander on the surface of a comet as part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. We are now quite used to space missions which have explored the planets of the solar system since the 1970s but the Rosetta project seems to have caught the public imagination somewhat differently to other missions; maybe it is because physically landing on a body is something that we can relate to more easily than getting fly-by images from the outer planets, or it may be that ESA ran a very effective media campaign but, nonetheless, the Rosetta mission has rightly been headline news.
Like CERN, the scale of the Rosetta mission is amazing stuff — the craft journeyed for over 10 years, used multiple slingshots from Earth and Mars to catch up with the tiny comet and then the Philae lander touched down on the comet only a few tens of metres off one with Philae bouncing around and finally coming to rest in a strange position and location, but that should not detract from the achievement of getting there.
Although it is great that stories like the LHC and the Rosetta mission get front-page news coverage, there is almost always a corresponding question which is asked about the huge costs of such projects (about $1.5 billion for the Rosetta mission and over $15 billion for the LHC). These top-line figures for such large-scale projects can be an easy target for some commentators, especially in the current, so-called, age of austerity. The simplistic questions which are often asked go along the lines of: ‘Is it worth spending a billion dollars on a comet lander/particle accelerator?’ and ‘What use is it?’, both of which are impossible to answer immediately. These questions naively assume that money is being spent on one thing (the comet lander or the LHC or whatever), when in fact it is spent over a number of years on building facilities in different countries, investing in new engineering programmes, funding universities and research organisations, supporting large sections of support service industries and, most importantly of all, in directly employing hundreds of thousands of people to work on these projects. The CERN experiments and ESA missions were carefully planned and took years to realise but their results may not be immediately exploitable or have an easily-identified benefit.
This payback argument, of course, applies to all scientific research, not just the publicly-funded ‘big science’ CERN or ESA-type projects. In Cambridge in 1897, J. J. Thompson had no idea of the usefulness of the electron but where would our current electronic age be without his discovery? And who knows the variety of things that we will be using which contain graphene in ten years’ time? Whether funded by industry or governments, research can never guarantee short-term success in monetary terms but this should not be the primary basis for deciding whether to do such work.
There is currently a real pressure on justifying most research on the grounds of return-on-investment and exploitation routes and we should be careful that we don’t rule out the possibility of an unplanned discovery, or of simply doing interesting science. The Higgs boson may lead us to understand better how the forces of nature work and the Philae lander may find a clue as to how water was brought to Earth, but would either programme have been funded if we had to make a checklist of the immediate benefits from each project? The case for blue skies research has never been clearer.