And even if it isn't a dead end, moving forward requires EVEN LARGER accelerators for higher energies, which are expensive, which requires buy in from the public, and the public DGAF about "understanding particle physics". Also, very little of this possible future advancement could be meaningful to everyday people, as it's astoundingly unlikely for something that "breaks physics" to actually have significant effects, otherwise we should have found it ages ago. Most likely, any new physics from particle physics would likely just add more decimal places of accuracy to existing models.
> moving forward requires EVEN LARGER accelerators for higher energies
Right, I recently saw a presentation my an experimentalist arguing that after HL-LHC[1] (a major upgrade to LHC), the next sensible size for a LHC-style collider would be one that occupied the Gulf of Mexico. And they meant literally[2], the proposal was to have submerged segments, using existing technology from the offshore oil industry, spanning the gulf.
It's incredibly depressing. There's no path to fully exploring particle physics without basically a worldwide utopia to fund ludicrously expensive, probably unsuccessful projects. Sure, there's not likely to be anything incredible to come out of further research in the that field, but the idea of being unable to learn about our universe because nobody cares and politicians don't want to pay for it sucks.
Well, it seems multi-messenger astronomy might provide an avenue to further particle physics exploration. After all, we got some giant particle accelerators around us in the form of black holes.
