What value does the LHC have outside of the scientific community? It's not, as you say, 'progressing our understanding', it's more or less just giving us empirical evidence that the long-dead giants of physics were correct. It's like a very expensive unit test for reality.
Is it just me, or are we, as a species, just 'spinning our wheels' scientifically? I'm hoping to see major scientific advancement that pushes us forward sometime within my lifetime, but I'm beginning to have doubts that all of the new 'super science' will ever leave the theoretical...
Measurements of the Higgs boson quantum numbers, on the other hand, provide very useful expansions of our understanding. The parameter space of possible Higgs bosons is so large that its impossible to know where it could be and different regions correspond two very different possible physics. So the measurement of the Higgs' mass, spin, couplings, and even the number of Higgs bosons are actually quantitative improvements to our understanding.
The problem is that if you're not a physicist, it is very difficult to explain to you why this measurement is something more than empirical. Lay people can easily understand that a new particle has been observed, but not so much how that expands our understanding.
I'd also like to point out that most of the people who came up with the ideas that are being tested are still alive. The standard model as we know it didn't really start taking shape until the 1970s.
Everything I have ever read about it never divulges any of this information, so if you know, I'd like to know.
I should also point out that I'm not 'against' these kinds of projects, merely dubious about their usefulness outside of the scientific community (and hoping I'm wrong).
Besides the giving us applications that we can literally not imagine today, the "engineering" feats required to do cutting edge science always brings new technologies that benefit the real world. Just think that accelerators that would have been used for cutting-edge particle physics 50 years ago are now commonly used in hospitals to treat cancer.
I really hope you are correct and this expansion of our knowledge about the makeup of the universe proves to have some real world benefits down the line, I just find myself a bit unsure about the truth of that statement these days.
Similar arguments can be used to suggest that we should rid colleges of literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, sociology, large swaths of psychology and economics, most fine arts, probably half of research-level math, and so on, leaving only the fields that consistently give actionable real world results (basically leaving only the pseudo-vocational fields like CS, education, and engineering, and a very trimmed list of research fields like chemistry, bio, medicine, and the few cherry-picked bits of practical physics that we need so that the other fields can still progress).
We reject these arguments, though, because as a society we value (and fund accordingly) the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, even in cases where it's highly disputed whether there's any "knowledge" to speak of at all (I won't name names, but that list above...).
Of course, then the matter of cost comes in, and I certainly wouldn't claim that 7 billion is an amount we should shrug our shoulders at, whether information about the Higgs alone is worth that amount of money or not is definitely up for debate...as much as I might like to bitch about how inconclusive, statistically flawed, and poorly conceived most psychology studies are, they're not costing billions of dollars to run.
you say that like it's a bad thing. sounds like a win. at least in terms of reducing burden on all taxpayers (Fed backed student loans) and parents (esp middle-class: too rich or too white for enough financial aid, too poor to foot the skyrocketing fees) and the larger economy (no job degrees). Keeping in mind you can study anything you want, at any time, at any point in your life, for free or at least much cheaper if no universities involved. Also certain fields are not as much anchored to objective reality as they are to the opinions of a small subset of like-minded people. I can come up with an elaborate theory on an owl-based patriarchy and write a book on it, and even recruit some other nutters to back me up but it doesn't mean it's provably true or actionable and constructive.
or some idiot could study ant trails and provide data that could improve the solution to certain algorithms.
Sure, life would be simpler and more controllable if we knew what we were going to discover before we discovered it, but we dont. Come up with an elaborate theory on owl based patriarchy that gives some other smart chap an epiphany about the behavior of whale tribal groups, and who knows what improvements your investigations might provide for.
Of course, if you just make it all up, you are not practicing science, you are practicing fraud.
My owl patriarchy comment was an off-the-cuff made-up example intended to standin for the soft sciences and fuzzy academic fields, like women's studies, literature theory, philosophy, etc. which really don't exist or have any objective use or application outside of academic circles. And which are, at the same time, topics you don't necessarily have to go to university and spend tons of time and money to become "educated" on. Even the need to be certified in those fields is only required for you to go on to become a certifier of other future potential certifiers, a sort of incestuous perpetual motion machine.
I was not talking about science or experiments or data or anything like that. And yes, we agree, synergy and serendipity and cross-pollination between subjects is a good thing.
I think you will find that there are practical uses for at least aspects of literature theory (ask google).
And philosophy has driven humanity forward for thousands of years, the fact you bring it up as possibly useless tells me that you have failed to educate yourself as you should.
I cannot speak about women's studies, as I have no idea what they cover, but on the whole history tells me that where a subject drives people to think deeply about something, humanity generally wins out eventually.
Since it is the Higgs Field(?) that gives matter its mass, I suppose in the future, though this may be pure science fiction, that after our understanding of the Higgs is enough, we may be able to use it to change the mass of things, which would have an extreme amount of potential in transportation as well as other things I am not thinking of right now.
What you're saying is like "if this watch gear is too small for me to touch, it's too small to matter".