> when discoveries are made with the LHC are they made public
Yes. CERN is a publicly funded, shared facility; its users are universities. What it does has no direct commercial value.
> will another country investing in another one (or even a bigger one) discover anything that the European one hasn't?
Possibly. The proposed machine would allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson's properties than the LHC. The best case scenario is that those measurements would turn up deviations from the Standard Model, which would point the way to something new.
To actually "discover" that hypothetical new thing, in the sense of directly detecting a new particle, would probably require yet another accelerator to be built (possibly in the same tunnel).
I always think that was a great example of the complete unpredictability of research - fund one thing and get benefits you'd never have been able to predict.
The WWW was not a CERN research project, it was a hypertext system (far from the first one) developed by a couple of technicians working at CERN's office of documentation to facilitate the sharing of documents across its multi-OS, multi-protocol computing environment (at the time IBM VMS, DEC VAX, Apple Macs, PCs, and the NeXTstations used to develop the first WWW client).
It took off because it was free, open source and easily portable by design, but frankly, pretty much the same thing could have, and doubtless would have, emerged from many other large organizations with similar requirements (quite possibly an intelligence service like the CIA - let's not forget where Tor came from), even without a dime being spent on particle physics.
As for direct commercial value, CERN made it freely available to all, as it must. The closest it got to making some money off it was an Apple program to donate computers to the office of documentation.
And don't forget all the engineering work that goes into the magnets and data analysis tools. The internet falls into this broad category of components necessary for the pursuit of science that aren't the direct objects of research.
Yes. CERN is a publicly funded, shared facility; its users are universities. What it does has no direct commercial value.
> will another country investing in another one (or even a bigger one) discover anything that the European one hasn't?
Possibly. The proposed machine would allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson's properties than the LHC. The best case scenario is that those measurements would turn up deviations from the Standard Model, which would point the way to something new.
To actually "discover" that hypothetical new thing, in the sense of directly detecting a new particle, would probably require yet another accelerator to be built (possibly in the same tunnel).