Via the SOCNET-list I came across the The FuturIcT Knowledge Accelerator, a European ‘Flagship ICT research initiative‘ for a ‘CERN-like project to study the way our living planet works in a social dimension’.
Although there is nothing wrong with ambition (and the proposal, downloadable from the website, is very ambitious), I think the comparison with the supercolliders used in physics is misguided. Supercolliders are build to study very specific questions and hypotheses that are implied by the highly developed and well-established theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Things like finding the Higgs boson, a particle that is predicted by the Standard Model but was never discovered. Theory in social science is nowhere near the point where we could specify such crucial experiments. So, before we try building socio-economic supercolliders, I propose we try to come up with some better theory. It is telling that the proposal for the The FuturIcT Knowledge Accelerator mentions ‘developing a realistic theory of economic systems’ as one of its goals…