• Question: how does your scientific work improve the earth as we know it?

    Asked by vickeryflower to Ben, Clare, Ezzy, Mario, Sam on 12 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      It’s got quite a few good benefits 🙂
      I’ll answer this in two parts:

      1) We make the world better simply by learning new things. We don’t know how these things will benefit the world, we simply hope that one day they will. For example, when people discovered electricity they didn’t know what it would end up being used for, but look at how much we use electricity in the world today.

      2) There are direct benefits to humanity from the work we do. When we build new experiments we often have to develop new technology in order to make the experiments possible, and this technology can be used for other things too. For example: the magnets that are used in the LHC are some of the most advanced magnets in the world, and the magnet technology that we developed has helped people build better magnets for medical scanners and medical imaging equipment. We’ve learnt how to build better magnets, and this has helped people build better equipment for hospitals, which can help save lives. The other big thing we’ve helped improve is computer technology. We work with computer companies to create better hardware and software, which in turn means that everyone gets better computers and faster internet.

    • Photo: Mario Campanelli

      Mario Campanelli answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      what do the world-wide web, the touch-screen of your smartphone, the new super-efficient solar panels that will be installed on the roof Geneva airport and the hadro-therapy technique today widely used to cure difficult cancers?

      they were all developed from ideas coming from CERN (which in principle is a lab of pure research)

    • Photo: Elizabeth Pearson

      Elizabeth Pearson answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      A lot of the stuff I do improves the world indirectly. The technology that’s created to do observations leads to things like digital cameras, alternatives to x-rays and better communication systems.

      We also learn lots about the universe we live in, push our knowledge and understanding of space. From that we often make other discoveries we weren’t even look for before. Knoweldge of galaxies can lead to knowing more about how tiny particles work.

      Plus it’s really, really cool!

    • Photo: Clare Burrage

      Clare Burrage answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      My work doesn’t improve the earth directly. But finding out more about our universe always leads to improvements to our lives, although sometimes they take a long time.
      This is what happened with electricty. When scientists were first understanding electricity people thought it was silly, and not very useful, to make sparks fly from one place to another. But that was the beginning of understanding what electricity was and what we could do with it, and now we can hardly do anything with out it!
      We’re just at the beginning of understanding dark energy (a maysterious substance that makes up 70% of our universe), so it’s hard to predict how it will improve our lives, but I’m sure it will!

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