Strawberry flavoured positrons?

Pastor in Valle produces a finely-written and educated blog on all things Catholic and quite religiously conservative. He also occasionally very kindly links to this blog. And his link yesterday drew more comments than my original post - albeit two of them were mine. Add to this Steve's comments on my original posting, and we've got a strong reaction in favour of doing fundamental research into physics. Which in principle I agree with. It's just the massive price-tag at the LHC that does my head in. I mean, for £3Bn you could buy 60 Fernando Torreses. And let's face it, they would be about as much use.

It's been pointed out to me a couple of times recently that an experiment is not a failure just because it doesn't have the expected results - indeed it could be argued that it is more of a success for being unexpected. Although that doesn't go for Robbie Williams's attempt to crack America, obviously. But in a spirit of investigation, I would like to repeat the hypothesis and offer I made on the Valle Adurni blog. I have this theory that positrons, collected in large enough amounts, taste of strawberries. And if someone gives me a couple of billion quid, I will be only too happy to test my experiment in an exotic location of my choice. If I am proven wrong, I will rejoice that we've proved antimatter doesn't taste of strawberries, and also will rejoice in the knock-on benefits from the project. Not scientific progress along the dodgy lines of the Apollo mission inventing non-stick saucepans - they didn't even have a cooker.  No, I'm thinking more of the cashflow benefits of that couple of billion "resting in my account".