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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[–] maness300 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah it's valuable, but is it really the best value for our money?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Considering really the only difference between peaceful prosperous modernity and the barbarity our ancestors experienced is technology, yes.