> but without a promise of practical applications, or at least a convincing argument that they'll find something interesting with this new collider, I find it really hard to justify the price tag.

I mean, you can say that about people going to the moon, right? What data are they going to get? Something about rocks and the consistency of the moon dust, right? The technologies developed in going to the moon got us so many things we didn't see from the goal.

This is the same for a lot of things around the frontiers of science! More experimental data is beneficial to all levels of science. Look at how many papers have been written in obscure and 'irrelevant' fields of higher mathematics only to -- 40 or 200 years later -- be found extremely relevant and useful?

The point is we don't know. It's not like we can't afford it. If the United States, for example, distributed the defense budget into social care and the sciences, we wouldn't be having a conversation about monetary distribution. It's not inherently mutually exclusive, and it doesn't have to be at the moment, either.

> Would knowing what physics does at 100TeV be any more valuable to us than a great work of literature? I'm not sure.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive.