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For a cost of a mere one billion dollars annually, CERN will attempt to discover extra dimensions we cannot exist in. Kick in a scant one billion dollars more and CERN will attempt to discover atomic particles that exist for only fractions of a second.

And what is the return on investment? Oh, just a whole lotta nuthin’ except for more scientists insisting that a higher budget is completely necessary while they wave the flag of atheism in our faces.

They should rename this mother of all vanity projects the Largest Waste of Money. CERN LHC is a profligate waste of money and is utterly unjustifiable. To put it in perspective, you could build seven Space Shuttles and a new JSC mission control center building with the cash that CERN has already frittered away on this useless project - and to date it has produced a grand total of absolute nothingness.

A while ago there was a project called the Superconducting Supercollider. This would have done what CERN did over a decade ago.

That project required physicists with the ability to manage and analyze huge quantities of data. Most of those physicists lost their jobs.

A large number of them ended up on Wall Street and used (or misused) their math skills to create the algorithms that sustained exotic securities like mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, etc.

Maybe it would be best to keep these physicists occupied with relatively harmless occupations such as discovering additional dimensions and short-lived particles.

Ever since that last batch of physicists was dumped onto the job market, life in the known four dimensions has become much less tolerable for those of us with multi-year half lifes.

CERN will attempt to discover extra dimensions we cannot exist in.

Actually, however many dimensions there may be, we exist in all of them already.

Think about it this way. A two-dimensional stick figure on a sheet of paper doesn't directly perceive the 3rd dimension, but it surely exists in it because we can take a ruler and measure the "vertical" distance between any two sheets of paper. Or we can measure angles (2 or more) between them, if the sheets are not parallel.

One thing that a 2D drawing can't do is to naturally travel through the 3rd dimension (such as to crawl from one sheet of paper to another.) But he can sometimes see shapes leaking onto his sheet from some other sheet; and if he has control over some machines he can have his sheet of paper (or a small piece of it) raised or lowered to give him access to other sheets.

The n-th dimension can be visualized by us as a magical box with a knob. You rotate that knob and you travel along some other dimension that is perpendicular to all our dimensions. Like traveling in time, you stay where you were but things change around you. Only the time is not involved, but some other dimension - which will look to us just as time looks like. We are continuously falling down the time axis; but we may be stationary in other dimensions.