The LHC was a project of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. During the planning stages, CERN devoted some resources to developing better ways for teams on LHC and other projects to communicate with each other and share documentation.
That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with "http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars of economic value.
The World Wide Web was eight years old when work on the LHC began. (I didn't need the history lesson, btw. I remember very well when that protocol was introduced.) Further, while I'm not trying to take away from Berners-Lee's invention of a new protocol for it, CERN did not invent the Internet. Lots of us were sending email and downloading files and chatting on IRC before http was created.
And it probably is, in fact, an exaggeration to say that http created trillions of dollars of economic value. The stuff that gets sold on Amazon and eBay and through Google ads mostly existed before the invention of http, and some of it may even have existed before the internet. Had http not been created, it is not hard to imagine a world where people still got their advertising through tv and magazines. And isn't that the main funding source for internet companies, and the main economic value that has been created -- advertising, I mean? I don't think it amounts to trillions of dollars yet.
Without a time machine, it's impossible to answer the question. As the old cliche goes, if they knew what they were doing, it wouldn't be called "research."
The World Wide Web was eight years old when work on the LHC began
As with any large-scale project, the planning and design processes began long before the first shovel hit the earth.
Lots of us were sending email and downloading files and chatting on IRC before http was created. ... And it probably is, in fact, an exaggeration to say that http created trillions of dollars of economic value.
Sure. Because Facebook and eBay and Google and Amazon and Wikipedia could have been built on IRC and Gopher.
CERN did not invent the Internet.
No one said they did. You might as well argue that CERN didn't invent fiber optics or copper wire. The Internet is not the WWW... but you knew that.
And isn't that the main funding source for internet companies, and the main economic value that has been created -- advertising, I mean?
The movement of information from one mind to another is not a zero-sum game. Reducing the economic value of the WWW to its present value as an advertising vehicle is misguided, if not downright fallacious, but you probably knew that as well.
We won't go into the irony of using machines built with ICs fabricated on nanometer-scale processes to argue about the potential future value of fundamental physics research.
Sure, spinoffs are nice, but they happen with all types of public access research. Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that also creates very important results directly? It's like saying "spend vast amounts of resources on pursuing random goals, and eventually some of the resources, by accident, will create a ROI". Yes they will, but is it really the best way to do this? It's not like some version of hypertext wouldn't happen without CERN.
I'm not saying CERN wasn't useful. It was. And the budget wasn't that big. But this kind of logic is not very sound. If we have a lot of money and a series of concrete problems, we should spend the money to solve them.
Most of the money are to be spend directly on the problem, less to develop and build new tools to tackle the problem, and finally even less to discover new possible mechanisms that might or might not allow us to improve our tools in the future.
There's a lot of uncertainty in the future, and it's best not to bet a lot of money on it.
>Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that also creates very important results directly?
This is not an option, if we had any project candidates like this they would have already been funded. Everything that is not already done by the private sector exists as a big step in to the unkown. (The private sector is very good at allocating resources to projects that give immediate results, but it will never do anything that can't.)
That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with "http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars of economic value.