Having said that, the energies required to do such research these days are so high that going further than LHC is likely to be prohibitively expensive, especially if it doesn't come up with anything really, er, earth-shattering.
That's what they said last time
. I'm still amazed the LHC happened at all (the UK very nearly pulled the plug on it, as it were, after the US gave up on their Superconducting Supercollider in 1990-something). It was touch and go. The rest of the scientific community certainly had 'mixed' feelings about it.
There is due to be an upgrade in 2012, which the UK is are provisionally in for, to beef it up and turn it into the Super Large Hadron Collider. And, plans and pipedreams only so far, for a Very Large Hadron Collider eventually to replace that.
Don'cha just love the names? Goodness knows what the one after that will be called.
I rather liked some of the names for various large telescopes - Very large array, very large telescope etc...
