
Both phenomena were studied and measured, but could not be explained.

Two of these known mysteries were the nature of blackbody radiation and the constant speed of light. Many leading scientists of the late 1800s speculated that physics was nearly finished. The revolutionary success of 20th-century physics was kicked off in just this way. Those things will lead you to new discoveries. When you don’t have much to go on, and limited resources, it’s better to aim at problems that you know are out there. Spending that much money on a machine to take shots in the dark is a mistake. It’s entirely possible that the price could swell to $100 billion.

Why? Because neat things happen in abstract math, apparently.Ī significantly more powerful LHC++ will cost tens of billions of dollars. String theory requires 11 dimensions - or maybe 10, or 12, or 26. Einstein postulated four-dimensional spacetime because he needed four dimensions to make sense of the world as we see it. High energy theory has become highly academic and mathematical. But the problem is that it doesn’t explain anything. You’ve heard of some of its ideas: string theory, M-theory, D-branes, and so forth. Today, those geniuses are nearly all gone and their successors are bogged down in various forms of mathematical supersymmetry. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located in Switzerland, was the capstone of their era, finding the last required particle - the Higgs boson - to complete the model. The geniuses built the Standard Model to explain the particles. These colliders smashed matter together and discovered particle after particle streaming out of the explosions.
EU FUNDING OF THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER SERIES
High energy theory was a field with vast accomplishments across the 20th century and its success was propelled by a series of physics geniuses who won support and funding for a seven-decade succession of particle colliders.

Here’s some inside baseball about physics research.
