In a world of unlimited budgets, funding for the lavishly expensive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN would be easy to justify. This justification is harder to sustain in our world of competing priorities. But honest debate about the politics and economics of CERN is not helped by a complaisant, nonsense-talking media, and nor is it helped by the wilful obfuscations of some of CERN’s defenders.
It would be churlish to deny that there is something intensely, if geekily, exciting about the activities of the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN). The idea of accelerating sub-atomic particles to almost the speed of light, and smashing them into each other deep under the French and Swiss countryside, has a Bond-villain grandeur that has manifestly caught the public imagination. If this leads to more genuine interest in science, and inspires more children to study physics at school, then this can surely only be a good thing.
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