Damn. Sorry for crisis-inducing thread, not what I intended in the slightest.

Talking about contributions to society: you can only judge it within current knowledge-base and paradigm. For infinite amounts of time, you might fall short to one of the lucky shot-in-the-dark theories, but you have something to show. Tangential benefit now is better than vague promise for a time when we will be able to make some pure-string superconductors or whatever hypothetical matter is now making CM physicists all giddy ;).

To be frank, I don't know how to feel about that myself. To me it, theoretical physics, was always closer to people like my father; theorist who spent a lot of his life trying to go out of his way to design an experiment to confirm his reasoning. Turning into something as you described it, kids playing imagination and getting distracted, is a path that I can only with a word 'reviling'.

the long list of co-authors for any significant paper coming out of CERN.

I was actually asking some of my professors about that after we had a short explanation of various contribution factors regarding articles (a side-note during a final lecture break). It's not uncommon for some groups to have these people added there for stuff like LaTeX formatting or minor subset of experimental data (especially student contributions). While large teams are pretty much a thing, you can shave quite a few people from co-authors list. That's a case of having some students on 'roadie' duty while giving them a publication contribution. That's nepotism rather than physics being impenetrable for a single person.