There are multiple reasons for that. We don’t know the decay channels of already discovered particles precisely. So there might be very rare processes, that contribute to already known particles. It is all a statistical process. While you can give statements on a large number of events, it is nearly impossible to do it for one event. Most of the particles are very short-lived and won’t be visible themselves in a detector (especially neutral particles). Some will not interact with anything at all (neutrinos). Then your detectors are not 100% efficient, so you can’t detect all the energy, that was released in the interaction or the decay of a particle. The calorimeters, that are designed to completely stop any hadrons (particles consisting of quarks) have a layer of a very dense material, to force interactions, followed by a detector material. All the energy lost in the dense material is lost for the analysis. In the end you still know, how much energy was not detected, because you know the initial energy, but everything else gets calculated by models, that are based on known physics. A neutral weakly interacting particle would just be attributed as a neutrino.

These things are really special interest. They developed small scale particle detectors, that are nowadays used in medical physics for example (PET scanners and so on). Then their electronics need to be very insensitive to radiation damage, that is also important for everything space related. There is probably some R&D on superconducting magnets as well, that can be adapted to other purposes, but I am not too up to date in this field and I am not sure, if Cern is a major player there.

The thing is, that you can’t predict, what fundamental science will lead to. In the case of the LHC the tangible returns are technologies, that can be adapted to other fields, like detectors. There are enough other arguments, why a bigger accelerator is a bad idea, where you do not need to trash fundamental research as a whole.

Yeah, but you could also fund a lot of other research with this budget. The point is, physicists just don’t know, if there are more particles existing. There is no theoretical theory there predicting particles at a certain mass with certain decay channels. They won’t know what to look for. That’s actually already a problem for the LHC. They have this huge amount of data, but when you don’t know, what kind of exotic particles you are looking for and how they behave, you can’t post-process the data accordingly. They are hidden under a massive amounts of particles, that are known already.

This and we are gonna have replaceable batteries in the future as well. Thanks EU!

Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.