I’m afraid my attitude is that unless something really fantastically wacky happens like the creation of a black hole that slowly engulfs the earth or something, chances are as an intelligent species we really aren’t any better off after running these experiments than we would be if we waited a couple hundred more years to run these experiments. In fact, possibly worse off because of all the money and electric power consumed that could have fed a lot of people or funded some technology that could really help humanity. To me, it’s more big science for an elite group of physicists to research a kind of micro-cosmology: something so impractically small and so high energy that it has essentially nothing to do with human experience. I guess a better case might be made for big astronomy because the expense of doing it is probably a great deal less, particularly in light of what has been learned.
A decade or so ago we were going to build the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas, but the project was cancelled prematurely by congress.
A lot of US physicists with no other job prospects became number-crunchers on Wall Street. They used the expertise they gained in tracking the collisions of millions of particles to track the millions of trades that happen in the world economy.
Some of the models they developed eventually morphed into the sophisticated financial products (MBS's, CDS's, CDO's, etc.) that amplified the effects of the real estate bubble.
If we had spent a few billion more dollars to complete the Superconducting Supercollider those physicists would have remained employed in hunting for bosons rather than hunting for bozos to buy their companys' bogus products.
Maybe Europe is not hurting quite so bad because they still have physicists doing physics well ... and not economics poorly.
“To me, it’s more big science for an elite group of physicists to research a kind of micro-cosmology: something so impractically small and so high energy that it has essentially nothing to do with human experience.”
On the flip side, What is learned from high speed collisions could very well change our understanding of Quantum Mechanics, gravity, multiple dimensions, a whole host of interesting stuff.