When people go around talking about "new physics", translate it into "we know absolutely nothing about this (isn't that great?)", practical applications included.
The discoveries in the 20's that were "'just' a further understanding of the world around us" are what give us computers now. Not something someone could have predicted back then. Give it time.
Most of these particles are short lived and pretty useless in themselves. However, their discovery led to a theory around them, and that theory might be useful for things like quantum computation. Or not. Hard to predict.
Would you settle for from the 1950s? Neutrinos were first proven to exist then (though they were theorized from the 1930s). Those have been used to "look inside" the ruined Fukushima reactor.
Sometimes the process is more important than the result. For instance, the reason we have a World Wide Web is because hundreds of people working at CERN on projects like the LHC needed a better way to organize and share documentation. Even if the LHC's results lead directly to a fusion reactor or a warp drive, it will still be debatable whether that's more important -- or more economically valuable -- than what their researchers have already given us.
When people go around talking about "new physics", translate it into "we know absolutely nothing about this (isn't that great?)", practical applications included.