Ah, yes.

Great minds think alike. The LHC is bullshit. But not totally, according to Stephen Hawking.

Renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars (70 euros) that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science, he said Tuesday.

Note: The LHC broke down and repairs would mean that they would start colliding things in late 2009. The Higgs Boson is supposed to be the particle that gives other particles their mass. Which leads us to the question, Where did the Higgs get its mass? To solve that, we'll build the ELHC, the Even Larger Hadron Collider.

Apparently another scientist who thinks pouring money into the LHC is bullshit is Nobel Prize winning chemist Kary Mullis.

"Do we need to use billions of dollars to build machines that maybe will put a few of our rightfully treasured eggheads in touch with things so far from what can be engineered into useful items that only they will get a thrill out of finding them? Do we need to do this when there is an obvious threat over our heads, something falling right now onto our planet? Something big, heavy, and headed our way? Something that already has our number on it, a number we could read if we would just point enough telescopes out there to see it?"

From his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998, published by Vintage.