This is unreasonable spending. And I am saying this as someone who did his PhD at CERN, so I am shitting my old bed.
CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away.
The usual response is that this is core science. Yes it is, but not the core science we need today. We have a limited budget for science and a mammoth like CERN cannot swallow it all.
The other argument is that technology will get better. True. It can get better without the accelerator, though, if we really need it.
I loved my time there, truly fantastic but the costs are not sustainable with current budgets for science
All is relative. 16 billions of EUR looks like a lot. But are spent in 12 years, so 1.3 Billions of Eur year. To compare Italy alone has spent 1 billion to have empty immigrant centers in Albania in less than two years.
Of course, everything is relative. When I finished my PhD, getting a postdoc was easy and money was not really a concern. I did a "double PhD" (in two schools) and there were no problems for me to travel between the two (and associated costs).
Now the world is fundamentally different and it is much more difficult. Not to mention that people move from academia to industry, sometimes fro financial reasons.
When you put 16 B€ in front of that to study stuff that may be useful in 1000 years if we do a breakdown before (otherwise it won't) and you look at the site of budgets in universities, there is another relativity to be taken into account
CERN is wonderful but the physics studied there are eons away from applications. This is not solid state physics where you can suddenly discover a great material. This is physics at such energies that we will not have anyone soon. Kinda like quasar astrophysics, about objects that are really far away.
The usual response is that this is core science. Yes it is, but not the core science we need today. We have a limited budget for science and a mammoth like CERN cannot swallow it all.
The other argument is that technology will get better. True. It can get better without the accelerator, though, if we really need it.
I loved my time there, truly fantastic but the costs are not sustainable with current budgets for science