It’s One Particle Accelerator, Michael. What Could It Cost—$17 Billion?

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider could eventually be succeeded by an even more ginormous physics experiment, which passed a technical review this week. The even larger project is the Future Circular Collider. The 56-mile-long (91-kilometer) project has not yet gotten the green light or (arguably more importantly) funding, and even if it does, the project’s operations wouldn’t kick off for more than a decade, or be completed by the end of the century. Nevertheless, CERN believes the next-generation particle collider to be a critical piece of infrastructure for addressing some of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena, including dark matter and dark energy. The collider could also help physicists get to the bottom of antimatter and characteristics of the lightest particles in the universe—millions of times smaller than an electron, 100 trillion of which zip through your body each second. The LHC has been instrumental to many of the most revelatory findings in particle physics in the last ... Read full article.