Quanta online asks Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?
It's a real quandary, and the author explores all corners of the problem in an even-handed manner. TLDR: On one hand, (a) the Higgs boson has been found and all the slots in the Standard Model's chart have been nicely filled, (b) the super-symmetric particles that were sort-of predicted at LHC energies simply weren't found, and (c) there are no firm theoretical predictions that we'll actually find anything else of interest at higher energies. On the second hand, damn the torpedos, build the next generation accelerator and go look at what's out there at higher energies, because you can't know until you look. On the third hand (see, I've just finished re-reading Project Hail Mary and one of the main characters has five hands; I could keep this up for a little while longer), that $22 billion has to come from somewhere, and we all know without even guessing that that money's going to come out of the rest of science. Do we shut down other more promising programs just to go have a look "because you never know"?
Feel free to comment, but only after you've read the above-linked article, and then read Lost in Math for a chaser.
Finally this popped up yesterday as well (coincidence? probably not):
Nasty, but also funny and on the nose.
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