Why does anyone spend $10 billion on the Large Hadron Collider just to bang some protons together? One classic answer was given some time ago by Michael Faraday, who, when asked what good was electricity, told a government minister that he didn’t know but that "one day you will tax it."
According to Dennis Overbye, deputy science editor for the New York Times, however, the answer lies not in the results but in the seeking. See The Joy of Physics Isn’t in the Results, but in the Search Itself.
Overbye's essay echoes in some ways the observation of Albert Camus: "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."
Take Dr Vera Rubin, discussed in the article. Her discoveries that stars at the edge of galaxies were orbiting too fast to be kept from being flung out into space led to the idea that there must be extra mass holding them in place that we can't see, namely dark matter. But is it dark matter, or does Newtonian physics not work so well at great distances?
Rubin herself isn't sure. "I don’t know if we have dark matter or have to nudge Newton’s Laws or what." But there's where the joy lies: facing the challenge of not knowing. Says Rubin: “I’m sorry I know so little; I’m sorry we all know so little. But that’s kind of the fun, isn’t it?”
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