And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.
And that's important to keep in mind because money is a limited resource and what's relevant is where that money didn't go rather than just speaking idealistically about the potential benefits of a megaproject.
Also not sure where you got the 23 billions from. Total budget for LHC is less than 8 billion euros. And that's over quite a long time frame. The whole CERN budget is only 1.1 billion a year (and they run quite a few different experiments apart from the LHC). That's within a factor of a few of a major sports club!
This is extremely false. The new engineering science required to make the incredibly strong magnets for each collider (newer colliders requiring stronger magnets) is one obvious counterexample.
(BTW, with 100k, in experimental physics, you can't even pay for a postdoc at an US institution for a year)
That shouldn't mean NASA should get less money. But 23 billion for a world-wide, multi-decade project isn't that much.