That forbes articles makes an important point that more people need to try to understand:
The reason is simple: most of us, even those of us who are scientists ourselves, lack the relevant scientific expertise needed to adequately evaluate that research on our own. In our own fields, we are aware of the full suite of data, of how those puzzle pieces fit together, and what the frontiers of our knowledge is. When laypersons espouse opinions on those matters, it’s immediately clear to us where the gaps in their understanding are and where they’ve misled themselves in their reasoning. When they take up the arguments of a contrarian scientist, we recognize what they’re overlooking, misinterpreting, or omitting. Unless we start valuing the actual expertise that legitimate experts have spent lifetimes developing, “doing our own research” could lead to immeasurable, unnecessary suffering.
The majority of people simply don't have the training to evaluate scientific material, not just out of their own occupation, but in any field at all. Encouraging Dunning--Kruger syndrome among the hopeless is something vested interests use to manipulate public opinion.
The Guardian truly is garbage now more than ever. This writer/physicists seems to have an axe to grind. We're not talking about purple spiders in Antarctica. Its' a bad analogy. It's more like looking at two sets of fossils and trying to figure out if there was an intermediary evolutionary step .. except with fossils, you may never find them. Only a tiny fraction of animal remains gets preserved, but with particle accelerators experiments can be run again and again to find things.
Now there are some crazy things out there in physics that are super controversial. String theory has way too many models that don't fit, that certainly lends itself to going down the totally wrong path. But when it comes to things like dark matter, either we're measuring things totally incorrectly or there is some energy we can't measure or some property we don't understand.
Now would any of those discoveries be practical? We have no real way of knowing. It could just be some cool new stuff to put in a table, or it could lead us to understand how to control gravity in ways we never though possible; allowing us into space without expensive and dangerous rockets.
This reminds me of the shitty Forbs article that discouraged people from doing their own research and thinking for themselves.
Maybe she has a point in that we're wasting a lot of money on particle accelerators, when we could be pumping more money into things like ITER or other hard physics questions that can solve our energy problems or other practical things. But I get the feeling she's just bitter about academia and is just taking it out on her own field. She might even have a point, but this article is just a terrible argument for it.