The Big Bang

I'm on the fence about this The Big Bang Experiment.
Yes, it is super cool to attempt to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang. They hope "that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos." That's cool and all, and probably really important to scientific development This is a huge project that has been in development since the 1980s, and has cost Five Billion Pounds.... which is more than twice as many dollars. That would be okay in my books if it were going towards curing cancer or AIDS or feeding hungry children or world education, but it's not. It's going towards a big long tunnel full of magnets and proton beams.
Do you think furthering scientific knowledge is worth such a large sum of money, or do you think we could have found a better use for the money?