Popular Science

I was watching this video on Gamma-ray bursts, which is pretty interesting. 

Anyway, I think as far as astronomy is concerned, most people are interested in it, even if it is in a passive sense.  If a new discovery is found in astronomy, people might listen as least on their news broadcast, or bring it up in light conversation.  It's interesting, easy to make accessible to the masses, and it helps us understand our place in the world.

Compare our interest in astronomy to that of high-energy physics.  People sort of try to understand it.  When the LHC makes an announcement we sort of listen.  Yet, we canned the Superconducting Super Collider, a physics experiment with energies about double the energies the LHC could possibly create.  I suppose you can by your kid a telescope from the toy store reasonably cheap, but you can't buy them a toy particle accelerator.  I suppose astronomy is easily accessible in that respect.  We can all look up at night and look at the stars.  We can't observe particle collisions on a whim... and particle physics is really hard.  Most particle physicists don't even understand it.

Anyway. if the SSC got the green-light, we would probably have answered the question of the Higgs Boson ten years ago, and would already be pursuing newer avenues of high-energy physics.  Not to say we would be researching warp-drive or anything like that, but practically speaking high energy physics would be Done (the standard model explains literally everything), or we are wrong in some weird way and we need to think harder about it.... Either way, it would be interesting to know.  I would love to live in a world where, at the most fundamental level we could say, "we've finally figured it out".  Chaos, naturally rules everything, and we can't possibly understand complex systems, but the underlying principles are there, and we understand it.... or not...

Instead, we shit-canned the SSC, and diverted the finding to the International Space Station, a laboratory that literally does nothing... but it's in space, and that's cool...