The Price of a Making a Discovery

While many people love science, few would agree to invest money with very low chances of getting anything in return. Are we at a tipping point in history?

CERN is planning to build a new 100 km long particle accelerator called FCC. This is how it compares to the LHC and to Lac Léman (Lake Geneva)

The Gothic Cathedral of Science

It took decades to go from inception to construction, but here we are: humans have created a machine to explore the deepest recesses of Nature. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider, it’s a 27 km long vacuum tube in which protons are accelerated and smashed head-on at four different points. Around each of them is a detector, a sort of enormous 3D camera that takes snapshots of proton-proton collision. A single detector is used by scientists to run hundreds of different small experiments. One of them notoriously led to the significant discovery in 2012 of a fundamental particle called the Higgs boson. Some years ago, Lawrence Krauss called the LHC “ the intellectual gothic cathedral” of the 21st century: it took thousands of people from different countries decades to finish it, at the whopping price of the equivalent of about 10 billion USD. It looks like a huge amount of money, but it was very well motivated from a scientific perspective. The most accepted theory of particle physics called The Standard Model (SM) is inconsistent unless there is something…