India To Build Neutrino Observatory 102
TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"
Re:Just what India needs (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not see how this type of project is sanctioned by the Indian government. Half the population is living in slums Most parts of the country have only intermittant electricty There is almost no safe water (by Western European standards) The majority of the population is functionally illiterate. The roads are amongst the most dangerous in the world Pollution (air, water, and waste) is a HUGE problem I suggest that this money could be better spent addressing those problems
I could be wrong, but I feel that progress needs to happen on all fronts. Research, industry, infrastructure, quality of life, etc. are all things that need to be invested in at the same time. The problems you speak of don't have silver-bullet cures - you have to work on them for generations. What will you do till then? Suspend all research spending? At any rate, I'm amazed at the conviction you demonstrate when discussing such issues. You're either a genius (who really has solutions) or someone who hasn't thought this through well enough.
Re:Just what India needs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The submitter's name (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The submitter's name (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just what India needs (Score:4, Insightful)
People forget that when one builds something (e.g. Neutrino observatory) the money doesn't go to bricks and detectors. Eventually all the money goes to people. In order to build the observatory you need builders and other low-tech workers in addition to the all-knowing scientists.
Big projects such as this create jobs. And even after it is completed, it will continue to employ many people, both educated and uneducated. The road to progress goes through development, not through throwing money at people directly. Enter cliche: If you give a man a fish, you give him a meal for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you give him a meal for his whole life long.
Re:Just what India needs (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there's no silver bullet, but the point is, there are huge problems in India and spending money to build the 6th of these things seems stupid.
Suspend all research spending?
Not ALL research spending, but how about research spending on project directly related to solving these issue first?
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Actually I don't care at all about what the Indian government decides to waste its money on. I am simply amazed that they would prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house.
Re:Just what India needs (Score:5, Insightful)
As a physicist, let me say... If this was research that offered immediate benefits to the country (like a new medicine), then I could understand it.
As a physicist, you should know better.
Once upon a time I was a neutrino physicist, both at one of the large labs (SNO) and on a small reactor neutrino experiment. A table-top detector I designed actually detected reactor neutrinos.
Since that distant day I've worked mostly as a software designer and medical physicist. I've run my own business, and I'm an adjunct professor in the Department of Pathology at the local university helping the biologists and MDs deal with the large numerical datasets that genomic technology is producing. For my next career I'm trying to decide between robotics and poetics, and will probably do some of both.
I can do that diversity of things because of the kind of education I got as a physicist. In the course of the past fifteen years I've intereacted heavily with biologists, pathologists, cardiac surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software developers, and because of the foundations my education rests on I have been able to learn to communicate with all of them quite effectively, and contribute to a number of projects that are likely to make the world a better place.
Projects like this Indian neutrio detector are factories for the production of people like me, and personally I'm arrogant enough to think that India could use a few more people like me. I've worked with physicists from all of the world--the US, Canada, Poland, and Israel, the UK, Sri Lanka, Australia, China...--and the Indians I've known have been as good as any. Projects like this will help keep them in India, where when they leave academia--which is the most common outcome for PhDs in any discipline--their skills and education will be more likely to be applied to local problems.
It is utterly myopic to attack a project like this as not addressing India's problems. It is ONLY projects like this that will solve them, by creating the only thing that will ever solve them: highly trained, intelligent, mathematically an technologically literate, curious, empirically-oriented human beings.
Re:Just what India needs (Score:1, Insightful)
As a physicist, let me say that neutrino detection, while interesting and challenging, should definitely take a back seat to some of the poverty and sanitation issues facing India. If this was research that offered immediate benefits to the country (like a new medicine), then I could understand it. But as much as I would love to see more neutrino detectors built, I can't justify it being done with money that could be put to such a better use.
Are you really a physicist or are you just calling yourself one? I can't imagine someone that is trained and is good at problem solving cannot imagine benefits aside from money. Money should always secondary to real science, be it NASA, FERMI labs, CERN, ITER or anything else that creates intellectual wealth.
Physicists that do not work as physicists are the most sought after individuals in science related industry (ie. non-arts related industries). They are *problem solvers* - something that is vital to and in short supply in any industry be it software development or sewer treatment.
Finally, if you wish to rail against waste, you should look at corruption in India. 100x the money is wasted in that Black Hole. Prime example would be the Commonwealth Games. $10 *billion* spent, and what was gained? On the other hand, this is only $270m and you get a top class research facility preventing some brain-drain. So I'll continue to question that you are actually a physicist on basis that your argument is not very rational.
Re:Just what India needs (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering India's GDP growth rate is among the highest in the world, I'm not sure if they ought to be listening to advice from nations with stagnant GDP growth or negative GDP growth.
Fix your own economy first before preaching. And if you believe your own words, don't breathe, don't take bathroom breaks, until you get out of a recession.
Keep in mind that India's space program is a profit-center. It actually _earns_ more money than the govt. spends on it. That's because placing satellites into orbit is big business, and high-tech services like satellite launches sell for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
South Korea and India were of similar economic situations in 1950, the difference being that S. Korea poured money into technology, and India did what you suggested. Guess what? Getting homeless people to fish just creates lots of poor fishermen instead of lots of poor beggars. Big whoop. The goal is to create more jobs for scientists, physicists, researchers, lab assistants, programmers, etc.
Plus, India's tax rate is far lower than in Western Europe, and 90% of people are not taxed. So the amount they spend is a tiny drop in the bucket of the annual income of people.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates [wikipedia.org]
"about 10 per cent of the population meets the minimum threshold of taxable income"
So 90% of the population pays 0% taxes. And the progressive tax rates for the remainder of the population go from 10% to a maximum of 30% tax.
As for literacy, the "majority" of Indians are not illiterate, 32% are illiterate as of 2007, which is still a big number, but not a majority. Much of that illiterate population was born circa 1950. In the age group 7-15, literacy is 90% (10% illiterate).
Moreover, your presumption that they "prefer to spend their money being number 6, than cleaning up their house" is childish if not outright moronic. India's economy is $1.2 trillion dollars, and the project costs $270 million. That's 0.02% of the economy. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to a 19 second bathroom break a day. And let's not forget that the project could be profitable, and in the very least provides good high-end jobs for their increasingly educated population.
Compare $270 million with the numerous welfare and social programs India provides to poor people. $13 billion to subsidize food for low-income families. $12 billion to subsidize fertilizer for poor farmers. $7 billion for education (at the federal level, states pay more). The list goes on for social programs that are all near $10 billion each.
In the end, they have a democracy and if folks don't like the budget, they'll elect other folks in. Every nation's budget is going to have cutting-edge R&D. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Overall, their nation is doing fine, rapidly progressing with envious growth rates. It's not _your_ tax money being spent (and even for Indians, it's only the tax money of the upper 10%), so relax and let them build a nutrino research facility. If you're interested in nutrinos, I'm sure they'll love for you to pay them money to use their research center.