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Thanks for saying that. People must have misunderstood my question. I was genuinely interested to know what kind of practical applications these kind of particle discoveries give us.



I don't think people misunderstood your question. Whether you intended it that way or not, asking if a scientific discovery has a practical application is a loaded question that gets asked every time something is discovered in physics. Sometimes it is used to undermine the money being poured into scientific research, other times just to belittle the discovery.

The reality is that these discoveries are important in themselves for furthering science. The applications come at a later point when the engineers need something with these new cool properties.


When someone explicitly goes out of their way to disclaim the sort of problems you describe, it makes no sense to criticize them for it anyway. The question itself is totally reasonable, and if it's often misused, well, they were clearly aware of that and intentionally avoided it.




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