Hugely expensive new accelerators are being proposed to look for unknown entities such as particles of dark matter and companions of the Higgs boson (see Nature 565, 398; 2019). Opponents of these plans could learn from history.

Critics argue, for example, that such ‘big science’ projects drain money away from other research, a view that led to the cancellation of the US Superconducting Super Collider in 1993. To my knowledge, that cancellation brought no funding benefit to other sciences. And because Europe has already committed to the ITER fusion project for energy production in France, and to the LISA gravitational-wave experiment in space; successors to the Large Hadron Collider would not be competing for funding with those projects.

Others are sceptical about the existence of new particles, given that nothing has materialized since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. That puts me in mind of Spain’s reaction to Christopher Columbus, when he requested funding to explore a westerly route to Asia in the fifteenth century. His proposal was initially rejected by a royal commission, which pronounced that “so many centuries after the Creation, it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value”. Columbus sailed west anyway and found “hitherto unknown” lands that have dominated the planet for the past century.