CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is planning to start up again in late October after a year's inactivity following massive technical difficulties last September.  In the light of the enormous sums of money (€664 million in 2008 alone) spent on this leviathan of a laboratory and its subsequent letdown, some have taken to asking once more quite why we are expending the fruits of our labours on a machine whose only potential output seems only of practical use to theoretical physicists struggling to justify their existence in the economic downturn.

Leaving aside the scientifically baseless accusations of CERN creating a black hole that could engulf the earth, to my mind there are some compelling reasons for engaging in this kind of research.  Firstly, CERN's legacy on the world has already been enough to catapult us into a new industrial revolution and change the face of global communications forever: The world wide web began as a CERN project in 1989 and it is hard now to travel to a part of the world remote enough not to be profoundly affected by this astonishing network in the last two decades.  Science, commerce, politics and entertainment have been transformed by the internet and it is hard to imagine any institution - whether educational, business, administrative or cultural - in the western world carrying out its work to the same standard without it.  By pushing the boundaries of what is scientifically possible we are forced to break through boundaries that allow us to make great leaps forward in other areas.

Moreover, even if the possible discovery of the Higgs boson doesn't seem particularly relevant to today's advances in technology, it would be a grave misjudgement to thus dismiss it as futile.  Did Euler consider all the potential of imaginary numbers when he was working on them in the 18th Century?  Did he envisage them shaping the nature of today's gadgets from mobile telephone technology to the algorithm's used by Google's search engines?  Of course not: they were just interesting.  Nobody knows where the discoveries made at CERN could take us in 200 years' time and immense foundations they could lay for unthinkable leaps forward in the coming years.

Leaving all this aside though, I personally feel that there is a case for science for its own sake.  The human mind is made with a capacity and a longing to make sense of its surroundings, whether this be in philosophical, linguistic or scientific terms or merely trying to understand what makes your friend respond in a different way to situations from you.  The brain often works by modelling people and concepts to predict what they will do - in essence following a rudimentary scientific method.  What CERN is doing is endeavouring to satiate an in-built desire that we all have to understand the world.  Surely this in itself is worth the pursuit of some of the world's finest minds.

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