Now that physicists are wrapping up the most expensive experiment ever done — the multibillon-dollar Large Hadron Collider — they are proposing something even bigger and more expensive. Taking a very unpopular stand against this step, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a New York Times commentary, arguing that the collider had failed to deliver on its promise. She suggested her colleagues could hold off on asking for $10 billion, or more, to do it again on a bigger scale.
Scientists aren’t quite finished with the Large Hadron Collider, a machine with a 16-mile circumference, which started running in 2009 at CERN, near Geneva. The machine is getting an upgrade, and will go quiet for the next several years, but physicists seem resigned that any big surprises should have shown up by now. And so the natural next step is to build something much bigger. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is considering such a project. So is China.
