Important Takeaways:

• Scientists are refining plans to build the world’s biggest machine at a site beneath the Swiss-French border. More than $30bn (£23bn) would be spent drilling a 91km [approximately 56.5 mile] circular tunnel in which subatomic particles would be accelerated to near light speeds and smashed into each other. From the resulting nuclear debris, scientists hope they will then find clues that would help them understand the detailed makeup of the universe.
• It is an extraordinarily ambitious project. However, it is also a controversial one – for many scientists fear the machine, the Future Circular Collider (FCC), could soak up funding for subatomic physics for decades and leave promising new research avenues starved of resources.
• Since its formation in 1954, Cern – which is based in Geneva – has become a much-lauded example of the effectiveness of international scientific cooperation and has earned itself a reputation for generating world-­leading research over the decades.
• Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – currently the world’s biggest machine – revealed the existence, in 2012, of the Higgs particle. This was the first direct evidence that a field – known as the Higgs field – permeates the ­universe and is responsible for giving different fundamental particles their various masses.
• However, the LHC is scheduled for closure by 2040 and many puzzles about the structure of the universe remain unsolved, despite hopes it would provide more major insights. Persisting mysteries include the nature of dark matter, whose existence is inferred from its gravitational influences on galaxies but whose exact makeup is unknown. Similarly, the fact that our universe is made up of matter – while antimatter is almost nonexistent – cannot be explained from current observations.

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