[orbifold]

An organisation like CERN is extremely hard to replicate and easily destroyed and dragged down by a thousand cuts. The EU is funding similar moonshots in Neuroscience , Graphene, Quantum Computing and most recently machine learning. They all provide case studies what can go wrong in such a big science project (in fighting, diverging goals, huge administrative overhead, bureaucracy, political grand-standing).

The people working at CERN directly and their collaborators truly belief in the goal of understanding the fundamental forces of nature. And they had tremendous success doing so. They are the gold standard for a well managed long running big science project. Just recently they found the Higgs boson. Hossfelder worked for years on extremely speculative ideas in quantum gravity, they weren’t super well received, most people liked string theory better. Bottom up and top down reasoning in particle physics phenomenology suggests there are more discoveries to be made at the energy frontier. I like to see a future where eventually we build a solar system sized particle accelerator not stop at a radius of ~100 km