Quote Originally Posted by IAN 2411 View Post
Is this experiment going to help the world, no I doubt it? It is most probably being done because they have x amount of £/$ to spend and damn all else to do with their sad lives. They have spent more on that damn machine than the UK borrowed a few months back, and all they have achieved is a few pretty colours on a plasma screen that they all probably went home to jerk off over. I now do mean... “God help the human race, because they surely do need it.”
The last major breakthrough in quantum physics led to transistors, microchips, solar electric panels, LEDs and a great many other things you probably imagine were the work of some hard-headed engineer working for some corporate research lab. And nobody knew in advance that any of this would come from what looked like blue-sky pure research (or as you might have put it, throwing money down the drain.)

Will CERN produce some breakthrough that will save the world (e.g. a practical recipe for microfusion)? Probably not, but the one thing that's certain is that if we don't do the research we'll never know.