[magv]

So, yes, aside from the discovery of neutrino mass there was no "fundamental" progress since the Standard Model -- as in, all the effects we see in current experiments are accounted for by the theory -- if you know how to calculate them well enough, which is actually not trivial at all, and has been keeping physicist busy for the last few decades.

And yes, by scientific standards 20-30B EUR over ~25 years is a large sum, even though 1B/year is about the current CERN budget, about 1/5 of the current ESA budget, 1/20 of NASA budget, and 1/500 of the US military budget, etc -- so not that outrageous by other standards.

And yes again, there are multiple cheaper experiments with a more certain outcome. For example the Japanese Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino detector will provide enough data to solve neutrino mass hierarchy problem at the cost of ~2B EUR; or the space-based LIGO successor, LISA, which will improve over LIGO's ability to detect gravity waves by half of a dozen orders of magnitude for about 1B EUR or so.

And yet, those experiments can not bring more understanding into the "fundamental" physics -- i.e. to find a breach in the Standard Model. Only two kinds of experiments can:

1) cheap detectors constructed to test special classes of SM extensions (e.g. detectors like ALPS, which consist of a laser pointing at a wall to search for e.g. axions) -- if by some luck the particular extension turns out to be true;

2) a collider with higher energies like FCC, CLIC or ILC.

Now, there's no shortage of the cheap experiments, but up till now they've only excluded certain classes of "beyond standard model" theories, while confirming the SM even more. We'll probably continue building these in the forseeable future, but overall it doesn't seem likely that we'll find anything here.

So if you want any progress in the "fundamental" physics -- there doesn't seem to be a way without a bigger collider to show deviation from the SM. Without such an experiment, all people are left with is speculation, and that is how you get the string theories, supersymmetries, and the dreaded "naturalness" criteria, which the author of the article dislikes so much.

[cryptonector]

Right, there is a reason to build ever-larger colliders. The question is: is it worth the cost? And, really, what's the opportunity cost? If a new collider costs ten times what experiments like Hyper-Kamiokande cost, if building a new collider would crowd out the smaller experiments, then maybe it's not worth it.

But before we had better reasons to want to build larger colliders: to observe more of the SM particle zoo. Utimately it was to observe the Higss boson. If the SM has run out of predictions we can only test with bigger colliders, and the only reason left to build bigger colliers is to test SM more finely, or to hope for a break in the SM, well, these reasons aren't quite as compelling. I think this is TFA's author's argument, and I don't think it's wrong.

We might still decide to build a bigger collider, but we should admit that the arguments for it are not that compelling.