There are also arguments internal to high-energy physics. In the last 50 years a series of ever-costlier accelerators have been built, each demanded by the theoretical high-energy physicists as indispensable for finding the solution to the central "strong interaction" problem. The new accelerators caused the older ones to be shut down for lack of funds even though the latter could still have been used to do interesting research. Thus, each machine was very much underutilized.
Yet today, after a sequence of unsuccessful theoretical attempts, we still do not understand strong interactions. Hardly 10 percent of the data accumulated by past accelerators can be explained (even to an accuracy of 10 percent) by existing theories. Even worse, the latest theories claim that most of these data were taken in the wrong range of parameters, and, hence, new data from new accelerators are needed to make progress.
On the basis of this ...
