To the Editor:

Re “Physicists and Their Toys” (Op-Ed, Jan. 24):

Sabine Hossenfelder makes a case against upgrading the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Her case appears to be that the only novel thing that the existing collider has discovered is the Higgs boson , which was “reliably” predicted. She says other predictions, like the existence of various classes of new particles, are mere “guesswork” and are not worth investigating.

In some sense almost all such predictions are guesswork. The existence of the “charmed” quark was guesswork until experiments showed that it was there.

Big science takes various forms. The last estimate of the cost of the LIGO detector, which detected gravitational waves, was more than a billion dollars. Does Dr. Hossenfelder think that this expenditure was justified? If so, why? If not, why?

All we found were gravitational waves that everyone was sure were going to be there. Not finding some things predicted, like various new particles, is as revealing as finding them.