Last Thursday, while enjoying a rather exquisite pan-seared branzino with the dean of a prominent MIT lab, I received a frantic text message from a colleague in Geneva. The European Organization for Nuclear Research—CERN, to the layperson—had announced plans to dismantle the Large Hadron Collider. My dining companion actually dropped his fork, a rarity for a man who has mathematically proven the existence of dark matter. The machine that discovered the Higgs boson, the fabled "God Particle," was slated to be ripped from its subterranean moorings and sent to the scrap heap. Initially, I felt a profound sense of loss. But as I walked back to my boutique hotel later that evening, gazing up at the indifferent majesty of the cosmos, a singular truth washed over me: in a very real sense, the universe is telling us to build a slightly wider tube.
The broader public, forever mired in the pedestrian concerns of terrestrial politics and municipal inflation, has reacted with predictable outrage. Why, they loudly ask on social media, should we tear up a $4.7 billion miracle of engineering just to replace it with a Future Circular Collider that will cost tens of billions more? It is a question born of a tragic, suffocating lack of imagination. The current collider is 27 kilometers in circumference. When it was powered on in 2008, it felt like a triumph of our species. Today, however, it feels claustrophobic, akin to a child’s electric train set left out in the rain. If we are to probe the hidden building blocks of reality, we cannot be artificially constrained by the subterranean real estate decisions of the late 2000s. We simply must dig a bigger circle.
I recently moderated a panel on quantum frontiers at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I had the immense privilege of sitting between two Nobel laureates. After a few glasses of a rather bold Châteauneuf-du-Pape, they privately confessed to me that the Large Hadron Collider has become entirely gauche. Once you smash protons together at 13.6 tera-electron volts and prove the existence of the mechanism that gives mass to matter, what is left to do on a Tuesday afternoon? The physicists I speak with are artists, and their canvas is the fundamental fabric of spacetime. You cannot ask a master painter to keep using the same brush for a decade, especially when a consortium of European taxpayers can so easily afford to buy them an underground ring three times the size.
To be completely honest, we found the God Particle in 2012 and have mostly just been doing donuts in the beam pipe ever since. The human spirit demands a much larger track for us to crash things on.
Dr. Griese is exactly right, and we must applaud his candor. We are, at our core, explorers. When Ferdinand Magellan realized his ships were inadequate for circumnavigating the globe, he did not simply sail back and forth across the Mediterranean complaining about the maritime budget. He pushed forward, presumably demanding the 16th-century equivalent of billions of euros in superconducting electromagnets. The new accelerator will allow CERN to smash particles with unprecedented, glorious violence, generating data that will eventually produce a Nature paper so dense it will take supercomputers centuries to misinterpret. It is an investment not in immediate practical utility, but in our cosmic heritage.
Naturally, the skeptics point to the staggering price tag, arguing in their small-minded way that such vast resources could eradicate malaria, build high-speed rail, or transition the global energy grid away from fossil fuels. This betrays a profound misunderstanding of what it actually means to be human. Fixing the climate will merely allow our species to survive; building a 90-kilometer underground particle racetrack will give our survival meaning. What good is a pristine, disease-free Earth if we do not know the precise decay rate of a theoretical hyper-quark that existed for a billionth of a second during the Big Bang?
If we do not secure the funding for a vastly superior collider immediately, we face a terrifying reality where thousands of brilliant theoretical physicists might have to get jobs in quantitative finance.
I find myself profoundly moved by the institutional courage of the CERN administration. It takes true, unyielding bravery to look at one of the most complex, expensive, and historically significant machines ever constructed by human hands and say, "Let us rip it out of the bedrock and buy a better one." The next time you look up at the stars, do not ask what the universe can do for you. Ask instead how many pristine miles of the Swiss countryside we are willing to hollow out to satisfy our own beautiful, insatiable curiosity.