RE: The CERN Large Hadron Collider and its economical impact on the society
"We end up with a net present value of the LHC of 2.9 GEUR without including the unpredictable applications of any scientific discovery. Needless to say that even without any discovery, the LHC has brought a lot to the society."
that's how physicists try to convince themselves of the utility of the LHC... lol
Actually the big problem with the absence of major discoveries at the LHC is that it was sold as the ultimate discovery machine not at the ultimate machine to probe standard model.
So if there is no discovery it will be hard to promote better machines and get funding for them (and tbh, I always thought that a e+e- TeV linear collider would have brought more to physics than the LHC... but if LHC fails in convincing politicians that it was a huge success, there won't be any funding for another large scale experiment)
... and this is where everyone regret that the earth hasn't been swallowed by a black hole created at cern... :D
We are not trying to convince ourselves about the utility of the LHC. The LHC is useful and that's it :)
More seriously, the LHC is a discovery machine in the sense that it will explore an energy regime never probed before (in parallel of getting a lot of data in the Standard Model domain, allowing for precision measurements and probes for deviations). And an exploration does not guarantee any discovery at all. We are just exploring. Who knows what will be around the corner (nothing is a possible answer)?
In addition, the LHC is not the ultimate discovery machine. This is just wrong. The high-energy physics community is currently discussing the next generation of electron-positron and hadron colliders that could be built. In any case, I am pretty convinced that any investment will yield positive benefits for the society. And I hope that both a new electron-positron and hadron collider will be built during my lifetime.
But I fully agree with you about the problem on funding. We need to convince politicians whose lifetime as decision-takers is of about a few years that huge physics experiments are useful... And the absence of LHC discoveries does not help.
Coming back to my post, I was trying to show that taking the LHC as an investment, the society will always get some return of it, no matter we have any discovery or not.