CERN has announced plans for a £17 billion particle collider that will, like its predecessors, operate on the principle of throwing very small things at each other very hard until something interesting occurs.
The Future Circular Collider, a 100km ring of magnets and hope, represents humanity’s most expensive commitment to the scientific method of “bash it and see.” The facility will accelerate subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light before introducing them to each other with extreme prejudice.
“This is about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge,” explained Dr Jennifer Whitmore, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who has spent seventeen years watching data from things being smashed. “We’ve been smashing things at 99.9999% the speed of light. Now we’ll smash them slightly harder.”
The proposed collider would be almost four times larger than the current Large Hadron Collider, which cost a modest £4 billion and discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 after smashing approximately 600 million particle pairs together every second for several years. Scientists describe this approach as “elegant.”
International funding discussions are scheduled for 2026, where researchers will attempt to convince multiple governments that £17 billion represents excellent value for a machine whose primary function is to create incredibly tiny explosions that might, if everyone is very lucky, reveal something about the fundamental nature of reality.
“People ask why we need something this expensive,” said Professor Michael Chen, Director of the UK Particle Physics Funding Initiative. “The answer is that we’ve already smashed everything at the energies we can currently achieve. We need to smash things much, much harder.”
The project has already produced 400 pages of technical documentation outlining exactly how the things will be smashed and what sorts of other, smaller things might result from the smashing. Two hundred and fifteen physicists from eighteen countries contributed to the report. None of them used the word “smashing.”
CERN’s press materials emphasise the collider’s potential to answer profound questions about dark matter, antimatter, and the origins of the universe. The materials do not mention that the primary methodology remains “accelerate particles to absurd speeds and see what comes out when they hit each other,” though this is implicit throughout.
The facility would take twenty years to build and require enough superconducting cable to wrap around the M25 six times. It would use the same amount of electricity as a medium-sized town, all dedicated to creating conditions last seen approximately one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, in a space smaller than a proton, thousands of times per second.
“This is how science works,” Dr Whitmore added. “You smash things together until the universe tells you its secrets. Then you ask for a bigger smasher.”
The UK government has not yet confirmed whether it will contribute to the project. A Treasury spokesman said they were “reviewing the proposal carefully,” which is understood to mean “wondering how to explain this to the public.”