> Would it make sense to scrap the planned particle accelerator, and instead give $1 million to every person who actually understands the Standard Model and cur

> Would it make sense to scrap the planned particle accelerator, and instead give $1 million to every person who actually understands the Standard Model and current research to devote their lives to something else? No. That's just the talk of some "theorists." In reality, before any new discovery is made, there have to be some useful measurements that go beyond previous limits. To learn anything fundamentally new, we have to have new measurements. It's as simple as that. There is a whole bunch of people/interest groups that try to sell the public that the basic research (as in experiments) is not needed. Unfortunately, they get a kind of support from some theorists that raise doubt in most of big investments in experiments (including particle experiments). But such arguments are very biased, when not plainly deceiving. Whatever the limits to our measurements are now, they are at the same time the limit of what we can know. Investing more in pushing the boundaries is always something worth doing, and that includes doing further experiments with newer accelerators. Moreover, at the time the technologies are first time developed, nobody can promise you that they will be used for the benefit of people. But they are used exactly so, often using them in totally unexpected way. Take as an example MR scanners -- the complex super strong magnets, in the style as they were earlier used in the accelerators, actually change the orientation of the molecules in your body, and we can measure all that and actually diagnose the diseases. Or take PET scanners: the substances given to the patients before these scans are actually produced in the cyclotrons. Do you think first cyclotron (also physics) researches could even dream that such devices will be used to help diagnose cancers? http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/our-services/services/pet-functional-imaging/pet-cyclotron-and-radiopharmacy-facility http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/our-services/services/pet-function... I can go on and on. No theory can replace experiments. We need all the experiments we can do, and all that could go beyond the current limits. Want the example from computer-related areas? All the modern achievements in AI came from the possibility to process more data, much faster. It was again pushing the limits, and that was simply necessary to move anything. Correpsonding software development under the limits of, for example, eighties technologies would not bring us to that what we have now. It's always about achieving the new limits. Theory for the sake of theory, without the experiments and practical implementation simply can't make the breakthroughs achievable by reaching new limits.