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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Instead, a few elite scientists (likely from a well connected family) will be conducting research

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how research at CERN works. Tens of thousands of physicists from all over the world work either on the information gathered by CERN or to design experiments to get further data from the colliders under CERN's purview. Many of the people contributing to the research are students from different stages of academia. They are not rich or connected people but just smart people motivated to contribute and better our understanding of the universe