My position on the CERN LHC is that we shouldn't be pursuing science that doesn't feed or educate the rest of the planet. Until we're ready spiritually and pragmatically to head for the stars we the taxpayers are paying for a group of people who may or may not gain that technology without sharing it with the rest of humanity. We're also not spiritually ready to head for the stars if we leave people behind and let's face it, we're not the most peace loving species in the universe. First things first.
There's an excellent comment in The Guardian that is worth pasting here.
The people who build the experiments are called "experimenters" or "experimentalists". The experimenters on these things aren't familiar with the theoretical side, and they get theorists (so-called "phenomenologists") to do the calculations for them. The "phenomenologists" will gladly pump out any old crap to keep themselves in business, like "The Higgs Hunters Guide", knowingly publishing total nonsense simply in order to increase their number of publications.
This explains why most of the "particle physics" since the seventies has turned out to be pure nonsense. An ever-more unlikely raft of nonsense particles is invented to keep the gravy train rolling, such as supersymmetric particles, and the fool's paradise of string theory. Every theory which can be tested has been shot down in flames, leaving only barely or completely untestable theories like the Higgs boson and string theory.
The advantage of something like string theory for the theorists riding that particular gravy train is that experimenters cannot ever test their idiocies with experiments, so they can go on and on fooling around with silly nonsense until the end of their days.
Pity the poor phenomenologist who has to diddle with things which have some chance of being detected, such as the spurious Higgs boson, thus finding their livelihood in danger when the particle fails to be detected.
I have never seen such an idiotic statement, and on the guardian comment pages and that is saying something.
Tell us then, o wise one, from your lofty position of superiority, what does the Higgs boson actually do? We're supposed to swallow the foolish idea that it's the origin of mass, and yet the Higgs boson itself is nothing more than a theoretical convenience, a "fudge factor" which does not give any fundamental insight into the nature of matter at all. Even if the Higgs boson is detected, that will simply pose far more questions than it solves. It is a theoretical construct which represents only our ignorance; it does not exist.
