Stephen wrote:Well with all the problems humans have here on earth, spending so much time and money on particle accelerators is a total waste in my honest opinion. Finding nothing won't mean the end of such experiments, since universities and researches always have motivation to keep going. To be fair, there are always new things to be discovered, so you never know when that next "big discovery" is going to happen
To write this post, you used technology developed for particle physics. A complete waste of money: who needs websites?
That is just one example of useful by-products of particle physics.
While you didn't state it explicitely, I guess you like those "fix problem X first" statements. Do you expect any of those X be fixed completely and forever in the future? And if yes, how? All the solutions to reduce those problems need basic science done before.
With that "fix problem X first" attitude, we would still use hunting and gathering as main food source, because we have to fix the hunger problem before we can spend time on trying to domesticate animals and grow plants in a controlled way.
"But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only at the LHC, but at any high-energy particle collider we could build here on Earth."
It is possible, and in fact after finding the Higgs the LHC is the first collider where this is really an option. It would be a weird universe then, however, where things happen at low energy, and other things at the GUT and Planck scale, and nothing in between.
We can still do precision physics, and understand the Standard Model (especially QCD) better.
