© CERNThe proposed facility would become the most powerful collider ever built. Davide Castelvecchi Artistic impression of the Future Circular Collider.
The European particle physics laboratory, outside Geneva, Switzerland, outlined the plan in a technical report on 15 January.
The document offers several preliminary designs for a Future Circular Collider (FCC) - which would be the most powerful particle-smasher ever built - with different types of colliders ranging in cost from around €9 billion (US$10.2 billion) to €21 billion. It is the lab's opening bid in a priority-setting process over the next two years, called the European Strategy Update for Particle Physics, and it will affect the field's future well into the second half of the century.
"It's a huge leap, like planning a trip not to Mars, but to Uranus," says Gian Francesco Giudice, who heads CERN's theory department and represents CERN in the Physics Preparatory Group of the strategy exercise.
Comment: Just who funds these projects that cost billions? So it's the taxpayer. Perhaps taxpayers should be given a say into whether or not they want to go on funding another CERN project? Considering the current climate in Europe, what with deteriorating living standards, bubbling dissatisfaction with the establishment, the relatively few jobs that this would create and the absence of any constructive results CERN has produced, public backing would likely be vanishingly small: