GS Paper - III

CERN’s 70th anniversary celebrations in 2024 may be its biggest achievement since scientists there detected the “elusive” Higgs boson particle in 2012. Over a decade later, CERN scientists are still smashing subatomic particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but have not reported any comparable discoveries since the Higgs boson.

But they do hope to make new, major discoveries with a much larger particle collider, which, if built, will be three-times the size of the LHC. The proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be more than 90 km long.

Criticism of CERN’s expansion plans

• CERN does “fundamental” research. It is so fundamental — exploratory — that the scientists can never be sure whether their research will produce any results. Certainly not results will immediately be of benefit to people’s everyday lives.
• Some people argue that the proposed cost of FCC ($17 billion) would be better spent on more practical and urgent scientific questions of our time.
• The world spent about $4.1 billion on malaria research in 2022. That same year, the World Health Organization says there were an estimated 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 malaria deaths in 85 countries.
• CERN also came under public scrutiny regarding its energy expenditure during the shortage around the Russia-Ukraine war.

Why is the Higgs boson such a big deal?

• To put it unscientifically, the Higgs boson has been described as a “God particle” — it “glues” fundamental elements of the universe.
• It may seem like the universe came from nothing, but the Higgs boson explains how the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago — it reveals why particles have mass.
• In 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert, and others proposed that particles gain mass by interacting with — what they called — a Higgs field.
• CERN’s Large Hadron Collider experimentally proved this theory in 2012. And Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.

The Future Circular Collider

• The LHC will complete and shut its operations in 2041. If the FCC goes ahead, the new tunnel will be at an average depth of 200 meters underground and include eight surface sites that will serve four experiments.
• About a third of that $17 billion cost will be buried with this tunnel alone. The construction would result in about 16.4 million tons of excavated materials over a period of five years.
• CERN is expected to file a feasibility report by 2025. It will investigate the technical, financial, geological, and the environmental impact of the project.
• At a 70th anniversary event for CERN in Berlin, speakers reminded the audience that the World Wide Web was born at CERN — you could say the WWW was another fundamental idea, which, like the Higgs boson, glues our lives together.
• CERN has also nurtured growth in research areas like big data analytics, quantum computing, super conducting magnets and carbon dioxide cooling of computers.