Comment by kakacik
6 hours ago
That would be classical 80:20 or more like 90:10 rule, few kms of tunnels ain't close to delivery in any feasible way, just the first baby steps.
The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).
Well they have plenty of spare time to do things like, for example, invent the web browser.
That was a time saving part and parcel of the job of exchanging text and images between researchers.
If you're reaching for examples of spare time activities, this was squeezed into 20 minutes of downtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1eLe1ihT0