Officials at Cern, home to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are pressing ahead with plans for a new machine that would be at least three times bigger than the existing particle accelerator.

The Large Hadron Collider, built inside a 27km circular tunnel beneath the Swiss-French countryside, smashes together protons and other subatomic particles at close to the speed of light to recreate the conditions that existed fractions of a second after the big bang.

The machine, the world’s largest collider, was used in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, nearly 50 years after the particle was proposed by Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, and several other researchers. The feat was honoured with the Nobel prize in physics the following year.

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[–] Chainweasel@lemmy.world 57 points 7 months ago (3 children)

€20 Billion isn't really all that much for a particle accelerator that can be used for more than a decade when you consider the US plans to spend $842 billion on just the military this year.

[–] TxzK@lemmy.zip 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but finding more efficient ways to kill people is more important than this science stuff obviously

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago

That's a really simplistic view. The military isn't just a killing machine, we get oil fields out of it too.

[–] sagrotan@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

BS! I found my used particle accelerator for under 100 bucks on Craigslist. I'm sending nano scale black holes over to my asshole neighbor since.