FOR more than 80 years particle physicists have had to think big, even though the things they are paid to think about are the smallest objects that exist. Creating exotic particles means crashing quotidian ones (electrons and protons) into each other. The more exotic the output desired, the faster these collisions must be. That extra speed requires extra energy, and therefore larger machines. The first cyclotron, built in 1931 in Berkeley, California, by Ernest Lawrence, had a circumference of 30cm. Its latest successor, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN’s laboratory near Geneva—which reopens for business in March after a two-year upgrade—has a circumference of 27km.The bill for this big thinking, though, is enormous. The LHC, which started work in 2008, cost $5 billion. An even more ambitious American machine, the Superconducting Super Collider, would have had a circumference of 87km but was cancelled in 1993 after $2 billion had been spent building less than a third of the tunnel it would have occupied. Most particle physicists thus understand that the LHC may be the end of the road for their subject unless they can radically scale down the size...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1txtJlD
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