So Much Drama in the LHC
The New York Times takes a look at the problems that have plagued the Large Hadron Collider since its turn-on last September. What the article doesn’t mention is that about a year ago some people were worrying that the launch of the LHC would literally lead to the destruction of the universe. That kind of puts the current wave of technical problems in perspective.
In other CERN-blogging, why not revisit this post I did when I was in Switzerland:
My group had a chance to talk to the head of CERN yesterday. Mostly his talk and our discussion focused on the Large Hadron Collider and also some organization aspects of CERN. He did, however, mention that the work that led to the development of the World Wide Web was done at CERN. He also said that when CERN realized this Web concept was promising, they tried to put it up for sale. But nobody was interested. And since nobody was interested, they released their work to the public for free and one thing led to another and now we have the Web we all know and love.
Scary!
23 Responses to “So Much Drama in the LHC”
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August 5th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Regarding the WWW thing, stories seem to differ. NPR’s “Fresh Air” did an interview with Tim Berners-Lee a few years back in which he described the substantial effort that was put into keeping the Web free and non-proprietary from the beginning.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Well titled, sir.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Good to see you do your part to spread lies about the collider. Interestingly I actually think this is a case where the disinformation campaign was actually beneficial. If the LHC can’t destroy the universe what good is it? World destroying potential should be a design requirement for any future super-collider projects.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:02 am
“ZOMG we might’ve had to pay for the internet!!!” But I already do pay for access to the internet. It’s just that none of my money goes to the people who developed the underlying product.
What’s at issue here, in other words, is whether the brilliant scientists who developed the software protocols get to collect rents from the hardware guys, i.e. the telecoms leveraging their creation to charge me obscene fees for spotty service. I don’t think it’s any of my affair, actually. But it would hardly be a tragedy if CERN got some of that cash.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Actually, CERN was a major software source for a variety of applications, tools, libraries etc., in the early open-source days. They came up with these huge visualization libraries, UI toolkits and all sorts of other toys available for free. So in that respect, creating and releasing a free application was part and parcel of the existing culture.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Well, it hasn’t destroyed the universe yet–give it time.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:13 am
World destroying potential you say?
“the following risks were classified as global risks: an avian influenza pandemic; scientific experiments
which change the fabric of the universe in ways not previously seen in nature; global-warming, especially either
releasing methane from methane clathrates or causing a new ice age; biovorous nanoreplicators; computers or
robots surpassing human accomplishment; supereruption; nuclear exchange (full superpower arsenals);
strike by large asteroid or comet; eruption of continental flood basalts; and a massive pulse of cosmic rays.”
An Indicative Costed Plan for the Mitigation of Global Risks. (01-SEP-06) Futures
August 5th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Yglesias, somehow, someway, keeps coming up with funky-ass posts like every single day.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Dibs on the LHC when they decide to give it away.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:54 am
it would hardly be a tragedy if CERN got some of that cash.
It would have been a huge tragedy if everyone in the early 1990s had to pay rent for the privilege of messing around with HTTP and HTML while they were figuring out what to do with it.
There were plenty of other options (phone-based systems and other dial-in services) around at the time that plenty of companies would have been willing to sell to you if you wanted. One of the reasons that the web took off was because you didn’t have to pay to figure out what to do with something that you didn’t even know had any value to begin with. In addition to that, HTTP in its original form wasn’t even *that* useful or interesting until NCSA Mosaic, the graphical web browser, came along. Why was NCSA Mosaic developed? Because HTTP and HTML were free for anyone to play around with, and they didn’t have to pay rent to CERN for the privilege of developing something that no one was sure would have any economic value to begin with.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:58 am
CERN could have sold webservers and browsers, but those would have been reverse-engineered in no time flat. The money would have been in the TCP/IP protocols: if they could have been patented, and strictly DRMed so you could neither send, route, nor receive packets without using approved clients and servers, they might have made a fortune. Or the internet might never have taken off.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Whaddaya know? They DID make a black hole after all!
August 5th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Re “about a year ago some people were worrying that the launch of the LHC would literally lead to the destruction of the universe. ”
————-
Sounds like the welders working on the LHC were listening.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Even though its been said, that title is too good for me to withhold comment. well done
August 5th, 2009 at 10:57 am
The web is a beautiful thing. However, the idea of distributed hypermedia systems was around before the web, and a number of such systems were built before the team at CERN entered the picture. Seemingly small features that turn out to be very critical to ease of use and adaptation, timing, and yes marketing, make a huge difference in the adoption of software. Friendster was built before Myspace or Facebook were conceived of. And the first web search engine was Alta Vista, dreamed up at DEC — and it was built on a foundation of IR work stretching back to the 50s and 60s.
August 5th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
“It would have been a huge tragedy if everyone in the early 1990s had to pay rent for the privilege of messing around with HTTP and HTML while they were figuring out what to do with it.”
But everyone in the early 1990s was in fact paying rent for the privilege of messing around with HTTP and HTML. They were paying for dial up modems and Prodigy subscriptions; they were paying the phone company for extra lines, etc. Messing around on the internet has never been free; people have been paying money for it since day one. They just haven’t paying the people at CERN.
August 5th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
This stuff about the LHC leading to the destruction of the universe is put out by people who don’t understand particle physics. A black hole wouldn’t consume matter and grow like some pac man. It’s a black hole specifically because it is an enormous amount of matter wrapped tightly into a small space. They don’t “grow” as they absorb mass; they store matter too compactly for that. A kilogram brick, for example, would have to be shoved into a space one billionth the diameter of a proton for it to become a black hole.
Using conventional logic on these matters is grossly misleading. Besides, according to the more intuitive concept of Hawking radiation, black holes “evaporate” by releasing Hawking radiation, thus losing mass over time. The smaller the black hole, the more rapidly it will evaporate. Thus, the tiny black holes that could be created by LHC (which would have the same mass as the nucleus of an atom, which is obviously much smaller than the above mentioned 1 kilogram brick) would evaporate almost instantly in a burst of Hawking radiation.
A black hole isn’t like anything in the normal world we are used to. Current theory suggests, for example, that the universe we see exists on a “brane” (like a membrane) next to an adjacent 2 dimensional brane with superstrings sliding around that one like a hockey puck on a sheet of ice. The curves and vibrations in the strings each represent a “bit” of information (like a 1 or 0 in binary) which encodes an analogous piece of information on our brane (so that what we see on our brane is a hologram of sorts, where superstrings are the pixels of the holographic projector). The physics on our brane is the same as that on our adjacent brane. The only difference is that the adjacent brane is much smaller and more energetic. Black holes, in contrast, are holograms on our brane of, on the adjacent brane, tightly wound superstrings surrounding small 9 dimensional regions deep inside the 2 dimensional brane. I say this just to illustrate how different the physics behind the LHC is compared to what we are used to.
August 5th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
But everyone in the early 1990s was in fact paying rent for the privilege of messing around with HTTP and HTML. They were paying for dial up modems and Prodigy subscriptions; they were paying the phone company for extra lines, etc. Messing around on the internet has never been free; people have been paying money for it since day one. They just haven’t paying the people at CERN.
I’m not sure I understand what you are trying to say, because HTTP and HTML were developed well after the internet existed. Users were paying for dialup fees or whatever other internet-service payments they were making because they saw some value in it, value which (at the time) few people outside of universities saw as worth anything. If, in addition to that, someone at CERN said, “we have this protocol that integrates with a markup language. If you have a money-making use for it, you can use it if you pay us money,” then hardly anyone would have bothered. It’s not to say that the web in some kind of form wouldn’t have developed… it’s just that some other collaboration tool would have been adopted by researchers. Or it would have been reverse engineered and disseminated under another name so that people could play around with it for free. If you had to pay a fee to make a web browser, in an era where no one had a money-making use for browsing the web, no one would have bothered. If you had to pay a fee for putting together a web server, in an era where hosting a web server was considered an amusing novelty to give yourself personal attention, no one would have bothered. CERN’s property was only valuable insofar as it was free because it depended on the support of others to turn it into something that, many, many years down the road, created monetary value.
This works in an interesting way, southpaw, because if the web didn’t exist, then odds are you’d have no need to pay those companies for their poor service to begin with. If CERN didn’t distribute its product for free, you’d like have little reason to sign up for internet service, or you would be paying for some other crappy service (old school AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, etc.).
Your main objection seems to be that since HTML and HTTP were free, other people were able to create services that people were willing to pay for, and they profit off that, given that they’d have nothing to sell if HTML and HTTP didn’t exist. Maybe, but that’s also true of the people who develop the web servers who give you reason to sign up for those services. And, for that matter, you who can install whatever free software you want on whatever machine you want that uses TCP/IP without paying for it.
It’s hard to justify the argument that an organization should have charged for a product that only became useful in the first place because it was free. If HTTP and HTML were sold as a pricey software project, it would be something else that we’re not familiar with. If Linus Torvalds had sold his basic Linux kernel to some random company, then fewer people would have used it, and it would be a different product than the one that is used so widely now, having had fewer people to work on it and use it. You’re engaging in a bit of post-hoc justification for something that only exists in the first place because it was free.
Prodigy’s a good example, by the way: they obviously created a system and a framework that people were willing to pay for. Where is it now?
August 5th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
The HTTP protocol is so simple that even if CERN sold it’s original implementation, people who made MOSAIC and NCSA Http server and Apache would still have been able to write their implementations. That’s how pretty much everything on the internet worked in that era. There were open standards, and everyone wrote software to work against them. SMTP, POP, FTP and HTTP, there was also gopher, and fetch, two competing technologies that were somewhat like HTML/HTTP, but not as nice.
In fact, you can put up HTML pages using any protocol, so you can put web pages up on Gopher or FTP if you like. Web pages in FTP will work perfectly today in modern browsers, even.
And anyway, if CERN had sold their technology, someone else at another research institute would probably have come up with something else. It might even have been cooler.
August 5th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Nineteen posts, and no references to Al Gore? What a disciplined bunch.
August 5th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
There were plenty of other options (phone-based systems and other dial-in services) around at the time that plenty of companies would have been willing to sell to you if you wanted. One of the reasons that the web took off was because you didn’t have to pay to figure out what to do with something that you didn’t even know had any value to begin with. In addition to that, HTTP in its original form wasn’t even *that* useful or interesting until NCSA Mosaic, the graphical web browser, came along. Why was NCSA Mosaic developed? Because HTTP and HTML were free for anyone to play around with
Yes, but if HTML and HTTP were not free, they could have used FTP or gopher, or come up with their own protocol. HTTP is very, very simple in it’s most basic form. You can write a web server in a few hours. And you could write something that works in a similar way to HTTP in the same amount of time. NCSA could have written their own protocol for Mosaic instead of HTTP.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Paul Camp @12 is all you need to read.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:48 am
No, you need to read Adam at #17 so your brane will melt and make you one with the Singularity.