Newt Gingrich described himself as a visionary when he unveiled plans to create a mammoth new space programme, including a permanent colony on the moon within the next nine years. Within eight years, he pledges a new Mars rocket programme – specifically, a “continually operating propulsion system capable of getting to Mars within a remarkably short time”. He also reiterated his plan to declare at least part of the moon as US territory, with colonists capable of petitioning for statehood status.

There is little doubt that Gingrich believes in big ideas. Unfortunately, however, there is a difference between big ideas and good ideas. After all, being a visionary doesn’t mean abandoning practicality altogether but rather harnessing it creatively to make new things happen.

Put aside that Gingrich was speaking in Florida, the state in space exploration and, by happenstance, the next up on the Republican primary schedule. Let’s consider cost first. The Apollo missions to the moon cost in excess of $100 billion in current dollars. In 2005, NASA administrator Michael Griffin estimated the cost of a programme to land four astronauts on the moon by 2018 (as was then planned), at $104 billion.

Who will pay?

Now, four astronauts is not a permanent colony on the moon. To have a permanent colony, you would have to manufacture housing, most likely underground, or at least under significant shielding, since there is no atmosphere and no magnetic field to shield against the harmful effects of cosmic rays for an extended period. Not to mention the need to build facilities for waste recycling, plus food storage and preparation. That is, unless we continually provide food and other provisions for pilgrims from Earth, creating a non-self-sustaining colony. But Gingrich has already made it quite clear, in his attacks on President Obama, that he would not like to be remembered for championing any such sort of government-sponsored food programme.

So, to truly embark on such an endeavour within a decade, we would have to spend somewhere between a few hundred billion and a trillion dollars. Whether we could develop the necessary technology for such a task within a decade is an open question, although for a sufficiently large investment, it might not be impossible. However, Gingrich is vying for leadership of a party whose major rallying cry is an end to big government programmes and make-work projects to stimulate the economy.

Gingrich might argue that we need not rely on government for the investment. However, without a clear business plan, it is hard to imagine private money investing $1 trillion in a programme with no clear commercial goal.

Yet he did not explain precisely what he wanted to do with such a colony, or what it might achieve, besides potentially populating a new 51st state. Certainly the goal would not be a scientific one, since there is little scientific gain to be made that would justify the cost, and one could populate the whole solar system with unmanned spacecraft that could explore all the planets and their moons for this cost, as well as send up satellites that could map the heavens on unprecedented scales.

Business inopportunity

So is manufacturing his goal? But what would we manufacture on the moon that we could not do on Earth for a fraction of the cost? It is true that there may be significant amounts of terrestrially rare isotopes like helium-3 in the lunar soil, and some have argued that this would be useful for fusion power here on Earth. But since we don’t yet know how to produce fusion power on Earth, it seems a little premature to rush out on a trillion-dollar adventure to gather up potential fuel.

Perhaps we could put to beam sunlight to Earth for power. But given that currently 10,000 times the total energy used by humanity on a daily basis falls on the Earth from the sun, it is not clear that we need to go to the moon to harness more of it.

Gingrich also said during this same address that he envisions a vibrant commercial near-Earth space programme for the purposes of science, tourism and manufacturing. Once again, he didn’t bother to explore precisely what sort of programme one might envisage here. It took more than $100 billion to manufacture a white elephant in near-Earth orbit called the International Space Station, a large, smelly metal can that to date has produced no science, no manufacturing and tourism that only billionaires could afford. Perhaps Gingrich imagines a vibrant Earth-surveying programme that might help monitor climate change? No, probably not.

Reality suspended

Not content to merely colonise the moon in a decade, Gingrich has also promised to develop a viable Mars programme to begin human space exploration of that planet within the next decade. It is hard to imagine why he didn’t also promise an intergalactic starship in this timeframe as well, as long as he was being visionary.

Finally, Gingrich may not be aware that the current US flags on the moon don’t mean the US owns it, any more than those on US research stations in Antarctica mean the US owns that continent.

But I suppose if one is willing to suspend reality to imagine creating an imaginary new expensive, and expansive, space programme from nothing in a mere decade, without raising the taxes to do it, anything is possible. It certainly seems easier to imagine populating the moon in this way than actually solving the very real problems we face on Earth today.

As the world awaits news of the possible discovery of the Higgs boson, there remains a lot of confusion about what it is, why we have had to work hard to find it – and why we should care. Here’s why.

First, the short answer:          

If the Higgs is discovered, it will represent perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the human intellect in recent memory, vindicating the construction of one of science’s greatest theories and the most complicated machine ever built. That’s the good news.

But if the Higgs is all that is found at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a huge amount will remain to be discovered. Crucial experimental guidance that physicists need to understand fundamental questions about our existence – from whether all four forces in nature are unified in some grand theory to determining what may have caused the big bang – will still be absent. Answering these questions may be beyond our technical and financial capabilities in this generation.

Now for the long answer:           

If our ideas about the Higgs boson turn out to be correct, then everything we see is a kind of window dressing based on an underlying fabric of reality in which we shouldn’t exist. The particles that make us up – which bind together to form protons, neutrons, nuclei and ultimately atoms – have mass. Without the Higgs, these particles would be massless, like photons.

We all know from our own experience that how heavy something feels depends on where it is located. For example, objects that are heavy on land appear lighter in water. Similarly, if you try to push a spoon through treacle it appears heavier than if you push it through air.

The standard model of particle physics implies that there is a “Higgs field” that permeates all space. This field interacts with particles, and does so with varying strengths. Particles that interact more strongly experience more resistance to their motion and appear heavier. Some particles, such as photons, do not interact with the field at all and remain massless.

In this way, the mass of everything is determined by the existence of the field, and mass is an accident of our circumstances because we exist in a universe in which such a background field happens to have arisen.

Playing subatomic catch

But why a Higgs particle? Relativity tells us that no signal can travel faster than light. Incorporating this into quantum mechanics tells us that forces which we think of as being due to fields are actually transmitted between objects by the exchange of particles. The way particles transmit forces is a bit like a game of catch: if I throw a ball and you catch it, I will be pushed backwards by the act of throwing and you will be pushed backwards by the act of catching. Thus we act as if we repel each other.

So if there is a Higgs field, it turns out that there has to be a particle associated with this field, and this is the Higgs particle.

This seems a fanciful framework, rather like imagining angels on the head of a pin. What would drive scientists to imagine such a scenario? One of the greatest successes of the past 50 years was the unification of two of the forces of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. In this “electroweak” theory, electromagnetic forces arise by the long-range exchange of massless photons, and the short-range weak force is due to the exchange of massive particles called W and Z particles, predicted in the 1960s and discovered in the 1980s at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, which is now the home of the LHC.

In order for this theoretical unification to make mathematical sense, all three particles have to be massless in the underlying theory, and therefore the forces they mediate would be almost identical. Only if the W and Z particles obtain a mass by interacting with a background field – the Higgs field – will the underlying unified theory explain why the two forces appear different at the scales we measure them today, while remaining mathematically consistent.

High mass

Theory suggests that the mass of a Higgs particle should be about 100 times the mass of the proton; however, the exact mass is not predicted.

For over 25 years since the discovery of the W and Z particles, experimental physicists have been trying to build particle accelerators with the energy necessary to produce a Higgs particle, if it exists. The Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, was able to reach up to about 120 times the mass of the proton (about 120 gigaelectronvolts) but did not find the Higgs.

The LHC was designed to probe for Higgs masses heavier than this. If the Higgs particle is announced with a mass of 125 GeV, as the rumours suggest, it will be the crown jewel of our theoretical understanding of the electroweak unified theory, our own origins and the origin of almost all mass we measure in the universe.

Not just the Higgs, please

All is not that rosy, however. The standard model gives no explanation of the masses of the Higgs, the W and Z. Indeed, other arguments suggest that we need new physics to explain why quantum mechanical effects should not make this scale of masses is not much higher.

One of the most exciting ways in which this behaviour might be kept in check involves a theory called supersymmetry. If supersymmetry is real, the number of elementary particles would double, and we would need not one Higgs particle but two. This is what many physicists have expected to find. The rumours from CERN suggest a second particle at about 140 GeV.

Since supersymmetry is an essential ingredient of the more speculative string-theory models that attempt to unify gravity and quantum mechanics, there is even more reason for some theorists to hope that either two Higgs particles, or even unsuspected particles, might be discovered.

If a single Higgs and nothing else is discovered at the LHC it will therefore be a mixed blessing – perhaps the worst possibility we theorists can imagine. We will have discovered the origin of mass, as advertised, but there will be no new experimental guidance on how to take the next step.

Osama bin Laden may be dead, but the horrendous cost of pursuing the “war on terror” may give his followers cause for celebration

WHEN Osama bin Laden was killed earlier this year, many commentators saw it as a turning point in the war on terror. However, a host of measures suggest that bin Laden’s goal – to strike a long-lasting blow to the system of government of the US and to the health and well-being of its citizens – may have been achieved.

Last month, the at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, released a report entitled ““, which estimates the cumulative cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be up to $4 trillion.

What has this vast amount of money achieved? Both Iraq and Afghanistan continue to rank low in political freedom, warlords continue to control much of Afghanistan, and gender and ethnic segregation in Iraq are now worse than they were before 2001.

At the same time, the US economy is in trouble. Unless the country’s debt ceiling is raised by 2 August, the US will default on several of its major financial commitments. Many of the key programmes that contribute to the quality of life of most Americans are under threat.

From a scientific perspective, the appropriations bills now before Congress suggest that the US’s dire fiscal straits will inflict long-term damage to its technical leadership.

The House of Representative’s Committee on Science, Space and Technology has recommended cancelling the , the successor to the fabulously successful Hubble Space Telescope, because of a cost overrun of $1.6 billion. If this project is cancelled, once Hubble reaches the end of its working life in 2014 we will lose our chance to witness the first moment in cosmic history when the sky lit up with stars, less than a billion years after the big bang.

Beyond the direct loss to science, we need to ask what the next generation of bright minds will lose. The remarkable images captured by Hubble have inspired a generation of people to dream about the universe and its myriad possibilities, and have doubtless inspired youngsters to consider a career in science.

For those of a more practical bent, funding for energy efficiency and renewables could be cut by a whopping 27.3 per cent. It is hard to imagine an applied research programme that is more relevant and important to the health and security of our society.

Cutting that funding is likely to have economic consequences too. In this highly competitive world, the country that leads the research and development in these areas will gain a huge advantage. One only has to consider the fraction of the US’s gross domestic product that resulted from R&D a generation or two ago into technologies ranging from the transistor to the microchip.

If, as a consequence of a decade of unprecedented military spending, we are prepared to give up our grandest intellectual dreams while at the same time cutting efforts to solve the chief technological challenges we face, have we not lost far more than we may have we won?