[akiselev]

Ask yourself: would we have spent 24 Billion to 'confirm Higgs'?

Yes. The Higgs field/boson is a fundamental feature of our best theory at the quantum scale and we needed to know whether we are right. Now we have another crucial bound for the theory that will supplant the standard model except now we can waste less time and money with theories that can't explain our results.

We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research; I think we can afford to spend a tenth of that on a particle accelerator to probe the frontier of high energy physics.

[jomamaxx]

"We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a large metal can flying at an altitude of 400km essentially to do microgravity research;"

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not sure paying $24 Billion to prove Higgs was worth it. I suggest maybe there were other, much less expensive ways to do that, were we to know up front that was the objective.

It's hard to say how much 'disproving a bunch of theories' is worth.

I suggest that much of theoretical physics is total rubbish speculation, which in some ways is 'ok', but it'd be nice to see some progress. If you add in String Theory to the pile ... it looks really bad for modern theoretical physics. Not much has happened in a very long time ... it seems there have been countless PhD's minted in fiction. Not good.

[akiselev]

This is not true. The space program has countless research opportunities, direct and indirect, with the underlying endeavour of objective of putting people on other planets, which is a pretty big opportunity in of itself.

I'm not talking about the space program, I'm talking about the ISS. What, exactly, are those direct and indirect opportunities? Looking at NASA's own PR material, it boils down to effects of deep space on humans (microgravity and radiation), effects of microgravity on biotechnology, environmental monitoring (which can be done cheaper with satellites), and .... effects of microgravity on everything else. I'm not saying it's not worth it as a human endeavor, but let's not kid ourselves: it was an insanely expensive project just like the LHC that doesn't really seem to have resulted in much.