Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the s

Nima-Arkani Hamed likes to point out that particle colliders aren't getting more expensive at all, in relative terms. The price tags are going up for just the same reason that you can't buy a loaf of bread for a nickel anymore, but as a fraction of GDP, the next big collider has always been about 0.01%. In fact, if there's any identifiable trend at all, it's that this fraction has been falling. The LHC, for instance, was slapped together after the last would-be supercollider was defunded, and reuses the LEP tunnel (built in the 1980s). If you're wondering why we took so long to find the Higgs boson, it's because the field has already been shrinking under the pressure of declining funding for 40 years.