Question: Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become - and we had to cut down to a lower energy group - it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league. John Henry Carver Do you agree with this James? :)

James M Monk answered on 15 Jun 2011:

it looks like the quote is talking about a specific situation in a specific lab where they no longer had enough funding to carry out fundamental physics research. One of the down sides about having large collaborations like the LHC is that smaller local labs in individual countries cannot be competitive at the same sort of physics, so they have to branch out to other things. You don’t always need a massive budget to do fundamental physics, but you do need a big budget if you are going to do fundamental physics at the highest energy colliders.