Wired has a rather informative interview with physicist Paul Halpern on the basic issue of high energy particle colliders and why all the excitement surrounding the LHC. He also went a bit into the devastating impact of the cancellation of the SSC.
The BIG take-home message out of this interview should be that the LHC is not just a machine to look at one thing. No one can justify building a $8 billion dollar facility just to study one thing - even Bernie Madoff can't pull that one off. There are a huge amount of other experiments and studies that are planned at the LHC, even beyond what were described in this Q&A.
Zz.
Oh, I don't know about that: the ISS cost more than the LHC, and it was built to study even less than just one thing. :)
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