So, a large chunk of the benefits are more in the form of 'side-effects' rather than directly fueled by particle physics discoveries. This is kind of by definition, since the point of particle accelerators as powerful as the LHC is to replicate conditions that cause subatomic particles to fall apart. Same goes with things like neutrino detectors or gravitational wave detectors, they're all looking for things that are barely observable with those engineering marvels, we're a long way away from being able to exploit their discoveries economically.

One of the biggest and more 'direct' social and economic benefits (in the sense of being directly associated with high-energy particle physics) would be the development of synchrotron light sources, which are a lot more direct in their contribution to society. In typical particle accelerators, the emission of synchrotron light is a negative effect, but it turns out to be pretty valuable for material science. These facilities are usually so busy that they have to pick and choose the study proposals they accept. As an example, some of the early understanding of Covid-19's structure came from studies at synchrotrons. More recently there are startups which are attempting to use synchrotron tech to sterilize things.

Besides that it's all mainly indirect effects. A lot of the cost of building and updating these sorts of machines is towards developing improved sensors, cryonics, magnets, optics, control systems, networking systems etc. These all feed into other fields and other emerging technologies.

> Responses referenced the contributions the development of the infrastructure supporting the basic research itself have made, which is fine, but not the benefits of high energy physics discoveries.

I was one of those responders.

There were two very deliberate reasons I specifically avoided talking about particle physics:

1. I interpreted the tone of the original question to be extremely highly cynical of any scientific contribution particle physics has made, so I instead went for 'consequential' things. More excitement around education, outreach, and other adjacent aspects that are beneficial to humans. I did this to potentially avoid, "How has discovering a new Boson made my rent cheaper?" types of arguments that are only ever made in bad faith, but have been made to me a disheartening number of times in my career; and

2. I am scientist and I have collaborators and colleagues at CERN, but I'm not a particle physicist and so I didn't feel adequately qualified to highlight them. I was expecting someone with more expertise would jump in and simply do a better job than I ever could.

If I interpreted the tone of your question incorrectly, please understand that it wasn't an intentional sleight on you, and simply an artefact of a) plain text being an incredibly poor medium for communicating nuance; b) a defensive measure that I have had the displeasure of dealing with in the past. And if you were genuinely curious, that's wonderful, and I'm sorry that I didn't offer you more grace in my response.

You're probably getting replies like that because it's a bit of an odd question. Academic research isn't really done to achieve a particular purpose or goal. The piratical benefit literally is academic.

It's also one of the first questions from people that very much are criticizing, so even if it was an sincere question it will be lumped together. Not recognizing/addressing this when posing the question does nothing to prevent it from the lumping.

The piratical benefit may be particle cannons? Yarrgh!