Comment by Yizahi
19 days ago
The LHC indeed works, as a device. But what was it's purpose and did it do "meaningful" stuff over its lifetime? LHC is a yet another collider which basically can be boiled to the simple idea:
Some scientists invent hypotheses with no basis in reality, and say that they can be proven with a big and expensive collider. When that collider is being built and fail to find the requisite particles, those same scientists say they need a bigger and more expensive collider. GoTo 01.
A lot of these scientists fail to explain what will happen when their hypotheses won't find the requisite particles, essentially generating meaningless papers which are blind stabs at reality. It's like saying that leprechauns exist, but to see them we need a 100 billion euro device. And if we do build it fail to see it, then whoops, it wasn't enough.
tl;dr: LHC is not a particularly good example of proper scientific achievement. More like an achievement in PR and budget grants. Per positive scientific discovery produced there.
LHC had confirmed the existence of Higgs boson, essentially validating then-hypothetical mechanism for emergence of mass. It also had ruled out a very popular, theoretically beautiful but as it turned out invalid direction of physics studies. You can argue whether it was worth the cost but it was a genuine, significant experimental achievement.
It was also certainly not a PR stunt as it was truly an insanely complex piece of engineering. It is one of humanity's largest technological undertakings ever. Projects of this scale are still beyond the means even of the world's richest oligarchs. But it is a fine example of the things you can achieve in an enormous but well functioning multi-national bureaucracy.