In the 90s particle physicists were racing to detect the top quark so that we could confirm that part of our current best model of small things. They were successful in 1995 and won themselves a Nobel prize but apart from that I can’t name any real benefit to humanity that has come from proving that the top quark does indeed exist. I’m all for trying to understand why our universe is the way it is but I can’t help feeling the money could be better spent.

Then again, the US military’s budget for 2007 was about £220 billion (that’s over £400,000 a minute, by the way) so maybe spending £500m on doing some (possibly) harmless science isn’t so bad.

Also in today’s news: Save the world, eat less cow – UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.