So, a few billion quid down the drain. But that is ok, cos the scientists had jobs spending all that cash….
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14948730

Getting it wrong is still a result, we have learned stuff. If we could predict what expts would work, then we wouldn’t need to do them.

“Scientist Changes Mind In Light Of New Evidence!”

If you don’t like this, take up religon.

“Darkness” and “Disturbing”. Hmm….:-)

“If this were the case, it would mean that galaxy formation is a much more exciting process than we thought,”

The universe gets one over 21st century mathematicians and physicists. As much as I admire what the do, it’s nice to know that the universe doesn’t give her secrets up so easily.

I’d rather see my tax money spent on hadron colliders and massive rockets and aircraft carriers and trident nukes. End of.

Exactly PMJ, it’s just these sorts of projects that governments should be funding, things which any other organisation would be unable to finance.
If they had the ambition of JFK and today’s technology just think what we could do!
Or you could spend the taxes on the NHS for stomach-stapling operations for people who can’t tell when they’ve had enough chips….

*coughs* PeeJayEmm please…

Having grown up on a diet of Sci-fi from DC Fontana to Asimov, none of them ever foresaw apathy as we have today. It’s like no-one cares provided that they still have a slightly better television in five years time than they have now.

Perhaps I’ve been living in a dream world, for the space race has been a product of the vanity of two superpowers, but jeez didn’t it show us at our very best?

It would be a massive tragedy if the human race sank it’s collective wisdom into fake tits, profiteering and making wider plasma televisions.

PeeJayEmm – What about HG Wells?

http://www.ciclops.org//view_media.php?id=34959
Still interesting stuff going on, this one of the latest Cassini images of Enceladus.

Things don’t always work as you intend, theories are just theories – for every one that’s right there’s dozens that are wrong, doesn’t indicate a problem, it indicates science is working as it should.

So, Matt, would you prefer it that we didn’t do any research (and the clue is in the definition of that word)? I assume you’d be happy without pretty much any advance that seen us move out of living in caves….

Perhaps you had better go back to reading the Daily Mail; only this would be a tad difficult if someone hadn’t invented the printing press… Or to be more precise, some of these vast physics experiments are the very cause of the invention of the medium you’re using to digest why your viewpoint is so fundamentally wrong: the internet.

No such thing as an experiment that went wrong – as someone said earlier in this thread you always learn something and that’s why you did the experiment in the 1st place

It’s all cool and worth every penny IMHO 8)

I agree PJM, as a kid in the 60’s I would never have guessed that 2011 would look like this. As a species we do seem to have lost our ambition, or become too risk averse.
It seems odd to tell my 6 year old son, that when I was his age we had space rockets, man on the moon, space stations, supersonic airliners and the certainty that there was more of the same to come.

I thought the thread was going to about this, which follows the same line of thought as the OP
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9593123.stm

All I know is that the people of this planet are far stranger and more dangerous than anything outside the earth’s atmosphere.