Are you defining "worth it" as whether there is a profit to be made at some point? How much would you have paid for the higgs? Are some pieces of science best left in the dark because they cost too much?
(Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).
Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his work had no use at all, and now it’s the foundation of a major class of encryption. That was a century or two.
Or, Maxwell published “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873, and it took another 30 years to become voice radio.
Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year lowball would be four years in the future.
Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing, if you want to get your pitchfork out about misused resources, go complain about corporate tax cuts or money invested in pointless ad-tech, not science.
Not all science and research though. That's the whole point of my argument - we should direct funds towards projects that actually have tangible benefit to humanity in the future. I will eat my shoe if any application of neutrinos comes about in the next 50 years. Transistors? Great - those weren't invented by accident, and John Bardeen certainly deserves his two Nobel Prizes.
Communication through any obstacles, including (in principle) the entire diameter of the planet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
A 5 ton detector isn’t particularly implausible in a whole range of scenarios.
Eat up. :)
I'm not even going to dive into the huge discussion that is "why profit driven science is an objectively terrible idea".