A scientific theory is only as valuable as much as it can guide the action of some person.
Popperism is an incredibly successful simplification that made it viable to judge a theory. But at the end of the day, it's just a proxy that nobody really cares about.
Noob here, can we discuss about what are the practical effects of understanding high-energy theories? ie have we invented anything practical based on those colliders?
I think the LHC was the first collider that didn't create any practical application from its main working. There were still spin-offs, but for a few decades the main research topic of high-energy physics has been entirely theoretical.
Anyway, this is not a large problem. Theories taking decades to give you any practical result is perfectly fine. If all of science gave quick returns, it wouldn't need government spending. The problem is that we do not expect practical results on the future at all, and also do not expect the next large collider to bring anything different enough to change the physics into a new, unpredictable course.
Or, in other words, the next big collider (as we can plan now) is probably way too small to matter. It will also be the largest scientific project ever (space and fusion projects included), and larger than most infrastructure projects on the world. It is a pretty bad picture.
There are some side-effects of running a place like CERN that benefit scientists (for example, CERN makes and stores antimatter for experiments, and they sometimes develop new tech to solve their problems that can be applied in the real world, but by-and-large, high energy physics doesn't contribute directly to applied science or products. Countries run projects like this for prestige, not applications.
I would add creating WWW as a nice side product of CERN. I am sure they do much more in their highly specialized fields, ie seen tons of stuff open sourced (but I am not an expert on this so can't say how usable it actually is to other physicists).
It is a criterion but not a way to generate theory. In fact the key turning points mentioned are those theory (qm and r) both tried to explain something theory failed itself (the crazy energy of ultraviolet like today zero field energy) or observation that cannot be explained (increase intensity does not give your more electron in photo-electric effect but frequency does, like dark energy and matter these days).
Popper is more against social “science” like Marx or philosopher like Plato. Whilst it clean up the field a bit not sure it is that helpful.
