Predicting the economic impact of HiLumi LHC
The upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider is expected to return nearly twice its cost to society.
By Massimo Florio (University of Milan and CSIL) and Jessica Catalano (CSIL) in the CERN Courier / Davide De Biasio (CERN) on home.cern
A particle collider is among the most ambitious projects a society can take on, and one whose worth is hard to capture in conventional economic terms. The instinctive argument for such machines rests on the knowledge they may produce, but no economist can attach a probability, let alone a monetary value, to a discovery that has not yet happened. For decades, this apparent impasse left funding decisions to the scientific case and to mostly qualitative socioeconomic narratives.