Cern chief urges Europe to back new €16bn particle accelerator

{"text":[[{"start":8,"text":"The scientist leading the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator has urged Europe to fund a more powerful successor worth €16bn despite rising public spending pressures."}],[{"start":18.92,"text":"The “big, bold” project could offer an industrial boost and scotching it would send a “really poor message” to the young people the continent needs to pursue frontier science, Mark Thomson, director-general of Cern, told the FT."}],[{"start":32.88,"text":"Cern confirmed this year its ambition to build the Future Circular Collider, setting up a test for Europe’s appetite for financing fundamental research mega-projects when governments are being buffeted from many directions."}],[{"start":44.66,"text":"The continent is grappling with the impact of ageing populations, the Iran war and increasing military spending commitments since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine."}],[{"start":53.56,"text":"Germany, Cern’s largest funder, has previously raised doubts about the financial feasibility of the Future Circular Collider."}],[{"start":60.4,"text":"“You can definitely see a way through to this, but I’m not saying it’s easy,” Thomson told the FT about the FCC project. “How do we ensure that the member states that are putting money in reap the benefits technologically, and that industries in the countries get the benefits directly?”"}],[{"start":76.12,"text":"Cern’s governing council in May recommended the Future Circular Collider (FCC) as its next flagship project to build on groundbreaking research done at the existing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva. The ring-shaped FCC would be more than three times the circumference of the LHC, offering more precision in its measurements and a wider range of data."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":95.72,"text":"The LHC, which started in 2008, accelerates protons normally found at the heart of atoms almost to light speed and smashes them together to make new particles. Some of these shortlived species of matter are the same as those found in the early universe, so observing their decay offers a window into cosmic time."}],[{"start":114.96,"text":"The FCC would build on the 2012 LHC discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called “god particle” that gave mass to other particles and paved the way to stars, planets and life."}],[{"start":125.8,"text":"The new facility would collide negatively-charged electrons with positively-charged counterparts of equal mass, known as antiparticles. This would allow deeper exploration of the strange phenomenon of dark matter distributed throughout the universe, which has mass but is invisible to existing detection methods."}],[{"start":144.08,"text":"“I might be a little bit biased because I’m a particle physicist, but I deeply believe humanity has to embark on these big, bold projects for exploring the universe we live in,” Thomson said of the FCC."}],[{"start":156.5,"text":"Thomson has been visiting European capitals in an effort to build support for the project, with a final decision on whether to go ahead with it expected around 2028. It would provisionally start up during the late 2040s, with the LHC set to wind down during the same decade."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":172.4,"text":"The FCC project offers potential practical gains to Cern’s 25-nation membership, which comprises 20 EU states, Israel, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland and the UK, Thomson said. They could co-develop groundbreaking technologies such as high-temperature superconductors, which have uses ranging from power infrastructure to medical devices."}],[{"start":194.72,"text":"Thomson pointed to how the 1954 creation of Cern, formally known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was at a “very difficult postwar economic time”. It has had a “huge impact scientifically and technologically”, with one of the best known examples being the 1989 creation there of the World Wide Web by then staff member Sir Tim Berners-Lee."}],[{"start":215.24,"text":"Thomson, a UK particle physicist who took over at Cern in January, defended the institution against criticism that it failed to deliver an impressive sequel to the Higgs boson discovery. An event of this magnitude happened only “every 50 years, maybe every 100 years”, he argued, adding that Cern had since uncovered scores of new combinations of existing particles."}],[{"start":237.32,"text":"“We’re always pushing the boundaries of science beyond where we are, where we were before,” he said."}],[{"start":248.6,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793064368_8969.mp3"}