Compared to most scientific endeavors, though not to space exploration or to some defense-related technology research, high-energy physics is an expensive enterprise. Modern accelerator facilities capable of expanding the high-energy frontier, such as Fermilab or the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, are big science, involving the concerted efforts of thousands of people and costing several billions of dollars. High-energy physics has been supported almost entirely by government agencies and thus ultimately by taxpayers. It is entirely appropriate that scientists who promote these expenditures should be expected to justify this investment by society as a whole, by explaining its benefits to society as a whole.
The primary aim of research in high-energy physics is easily stated. It is, simply, to produce a better understanding of fundamental physical law by following a reductionist strategy. That is, scientists attempt to understand the behavior of matter in general by working up from profound understanding of the properties and interactions of its elementary constituents.
This strategy has proven remarkably fruitful and successful, especially over the course of the twentieth century. We have discovered that strange but precise and elegant mathematical laws, summarized in the so-called Standard Model, govern the laws of physics on subatomic scales. There is every reason to think that these laws, as presently formulated, are adequate to serve as the foundation for materials science, chemistry (including biochemistry), and most of astrophysics.
- BRAINLIEST answerer
