And yet we also gained a lot of value we did not expect, such as the World Wide Web.
You cannot predict the true value of basic research in a straight forward manner so let’s just stop. This is about extending our understanding of the universe. We will find ways to use that knowledge and ways to enrich our lives because of it in due course of time.
Are you referring to some NeXT box, RPC, or the cut-down SGML with links? Or any combination of thereof? It is amazing how easy it seems to appropriate technical engineering feats with simple narratives that are repeated often enough (ie. propaganda, in the Goebbelsian 20th century sense).
Everything was ready by that time, just remember the conference where it was presented. Or compare the internal memo with contemporary systems, such as the Symbolics Document Examiner. Or the NeXT demo for that matter.
The WWW you might allude to exists in large part due to US deregulation of that time, and therefore politics. The "value" part of it is as old as Alexandria, or Paul Otlet (TBL's boss who signed it off at the documentation dept. was also Belgian).
No I'm not. I'm just saying: we spent so much money on this and we expected results (even though we know there was the possibility we could get none). We got no results, so it's wasted money.
It is a problem that we wasted billions on basically nothing.
LHC discovered the first known scalar particle, and the linchpin to the mass-generation mechanism of the Standard Model.
Yes, it turned out where other experiments had begun to hint that it might be, but I can state from personal professional experience that, prior to LHC, nobody really knew what to expect. Furthermore, most of those experiments were done after LHC began construction.
I would have bet on a single low-mass Higgs, had I been asked, only because it was the Standard Model prediction, but I would not have bet very much. I think most people expected something Higgs-like, but slightly different. I think everyone is surprised that there have been no surprises (hence this very article).
The very absence of surprises is perhaps the most important result from LHC. There were lots of good reasons to expect new stuff at a few TeV, and for some reason, those reasons just weren't good enough.
Viewed another way, if we hadn't built LHC, physicists would have continued to clamor to build something very akin to LHC until something LHC-like was built. It represented the most effort- and cost-efficient approach to the best predictions we could muster!
A collider, probably lepton/anti-lepton, that sits on the Higgs resonance is the clear next step, now that the Higgs mass is known, just as it has been since the "discovery machine" LHC was proposed.
