£34m Cern bill is money well spent | Letters

Simon Jenkins parrots a cry that I have heard a few times during my career as a research scientist in high-energy physics (Pluto trumps prisons when we spend public money, 17 July). He is unimaginatively concerned that the 34m a year spent by the UK at Cern (and a similar amount per year would have been spent on the New Horizons probe to Pluto) is not actually money well spent.

Yet I read his article online using the world wide web, which was developed initially by and for particle physicists. I did this using devices with integrated circuits partly perfected for the aerospace industry. The web caused the longest non-wartime economic boom in recorded history, during the 90s. The industries spawned by integrated circuits are simply too numerous to count and would have been impossible to predict when that first transistor was made in the 50s. It is a failure of society that funnels such economic largesse towards hedge-fund managers and not towards solving the social ills Mr Jenkins rightly exposes.