A linotype (for those of us old enough to remember) was complicated.

As for the question of why build it now, why not wait… there is another issue, people. If there are no new accelerators or particle experiments for too long, there will be no new grad students, no new postdocs, no new professors, and the knowledge and abilities will evaporate. The US space program, and nuclear weapons programs, are facing the same problem, unless they keep active development going, the talent and abilities get lost.

Sheeesh.

Sorry, felt compelled to say that. ;->

To Paul [NB: a cosmologist, but yet HEP-interested, nice to see]: good points, but remember Paul that the SSC would have been built by 2000 or sooner if physicists had had their way — and the LHC too. so yeah, we’re fully constrained by the politics of the world, alas, however badly we want to know something..

Interesting point. Of course, when you are proposing to build a thing like the LHC, you need to argue “now is the time to do this thing I want you to spend money on.” The argument is usually based on the state of our understanding in the field and how results from “this thing” will interact with data from other things that other people are already spending money on. But the financial crisis of the moment might well provoke the counterargument, “the particles and interactions will be the same in ten years; why do we have to spend money on it now?” And of course, in ten years the same counterargument will be made. So how do you make the case to a society that has other priorities that “this thing should be done now and not later” in a way that doesn’t reduce to “we [physicists] can’t contain our curiosity and would really like this to happen ASAP?”

Maybe they are so enamored with the complexity they ignored the boring parts.

The most complicated is the internet, if you view it as a single thing. Biggest, too.