I think "nightmare" is a bit sensational. The LHC's purpose is not to "find X" it is to take measurements over a novel range of conditions. The new data is what we're after.
Jonathan Ellis is on the record there describing the scenario we find ourselves in now as "the real five-star disaster". (you can get the full article by putting the link into scholar.google.com). And I recall hearing and reading the "nightmare scenario" phrase before that 2007 article.
I think people here should imagine it like an infrastructure investment with an extremely bad ROI. People are using it and it's well-made, but the return on our investment would never have justified the cost in time or effort.
The whole history of high energy physics is a back-and-forth between models and experiment. We get to a new energy level, try some things that the models are ambiguous about, and previously we've gotten new and interesting results that lead people to reshape models and make new predictions. That has not, generally, happened with the LHC. The frustrating limitations and inconsistencies of the standard model are the same as when we built it.
The problem is we spent a lot of money and time and focus on building a tool that has not actually moved us forward much. This happens from time to time - but it's bad! We have not made our series of scientific advances by getting lucky on a bunch of coin flips - we've been able to use previous experiments to design the next set of tools in ways that productively open up parts of the science we could not observe before. The fact that we seem to have failed to accomplish this with one of the largest, most expensive tools ever built calls into question the methods that led us to choose to build this tool instead of other possible ones.
Yes absolutely. I don't think anyone in this or any of the linked articles suggests otherwise. That said, particle physics has been a very prominent and successful branch of physics.
Only in a technical sense. Running experiments under unprecedented conditions that generate predictable results is trivial -- it happens literally every time you run any experiment, since conditions can never be perfectly replicated. The fact that nothing notable has popped up from recent LHC experiments is itself notable, but only just, and certainly not notable enough to justify the costs involved.
My thoughts exactly. So this journal is owned by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (cool acronym, that was close). Which according to wikipedia is a non-profit. What motivates an organization like that to produce clickbaity articles like this? I thought money was the primary motivation for such journalistic behavior.
