\n <\/p>\n
British particle physicist Mark Thomson is director-general of CERN.<\/span>Credit: CERN<\/span><\/p>\n Last month, Europe\u2019s particle-physics laboratory, CERN, announced that it had secured private donations worth an unprecedented \u20ac860 million (US$1 billion) towards the cost of building a future collider of epic proportions.<\/p>\n The 91-kilometre Future Circular Collider (FCC), which would span the French\u2013Swiss border and pass beneath Lake Geneva, is forecast to cost around 15 billion Swiss francs (US$19 billion) to make \u2014 if it gets built. The machine has the backing of the European Strategy Group, a group appointed by CERN\u2019s council to gather input from its member states and the physics community. But CERN has yet to secure full funding for the project, which would smash together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, from around 2045.<\/p>\n Nature spoke to CERN\u2019s new director-general, Mark Thomson, a British physicist who assumed the position on 1 January, about what the philanthropic cash injection \u2014 from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation and others \u2014 means for the FCC, why he thinks the collider should be built and what to expect from his tenure.<\/p>\n A lot of that was the result of the hard work of the previous director-general, Fabiola Gianotti. I\u2019ve yet to meet the people investing, but I will. The thing that\u2019s impressed me most is that these are no-strings-attached pledges. They really are there to support humanity\u2019s quest to understand the Universe.<\/p>\n In the past year or so at CERN, we put in place internal governance around charitable donations. There\u2019s significant due diligence in there, and these agreements are looked at by our council.<\/p>\n Absolutely. About half of the cost of building the FCC fits within the existing CERN budget, so we need to find additional resources of about 7 billion Swiss francs. Some of that could, but doesn\u2019t necessarily have to, come from increases in member-state contributions. Or it could come from philanthropic contributions. In the European Union\u2019s draft Multiannual Financial Framework budget for 2028 to 2034, there\u2019s also a figure for \u201cmoonshot\u201d projects that could be up to \u20ac3 billion. And, of course, there are our non-member-state partners. We need to really work on putting the pieces together to get to the point where we will be able to, hopefully, convince our member states that we have the money and that this is the right thing to do.<\/p>\n We are just coming out of a long European strategy process for particle physics, where communities have come together in scientifically driven meetings, to discuss the scientific priorities.<\/p>\n Almost every one of our member states and associate member states \u2014 their scientific communities \u2014 recommended the FCC as the preferred choice for what CERN should do next. That was considering possible alternatives, as well. Scientifically, there\u2019s a big gap between what the FCC can do and what anything else can do. I think only one of the countries was on the fence. That\u2019s really unusual in science.<\/p>\n You absolutely need a range of experiments. I think we will always need colliders to push that high-energy frontier. But there are other complementary experiments, for example, direct searches for dark matter, that are also important. We have to pursue them all in parallel and, just like an investment portfolio, some things will be at the lower cost end, and some things will be at the higher end.<\/p>\n British particle physicist Mark Thomson is director-general of CERN.Credit: CERN Last month, Europe\u2019s particle-physics laboratory, CERN, announced that it had secured private donations worth an unprecedented \u20ac860 million (US$1 billion) towards the cost of building a future collider of epic proportions. The 91-kilometre Future Circular Collider (FCC), which would span the French\u2013Swiss border and pass<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[22391,18701,22392,2851,480,2225,22393],"class_list":{"0":"post-42511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-1billion","9":"tag-ambitious","10":"tag-cerns","11":"tag-means","12":"tag-plans","13":"tag-pledge","14":"tag-supercollider"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This $1-billion commitment is by far CERN\u2019s biggest-ever philanthropic investment. How did it come about?<\/h2>\n
How do you make sure of that?<\/h2>\n
Will the extra money help to reduce the contributions required from member states?<\/h2>\n
Some researchers say that CERN should pursue cheaper, more varied experimental strategies instead. What do you think?<\/h2>\n
CERN also hopes to build a follow-up to the FCC, in the same tunnel, that would collide protons until around 2095. Does it make sense to commit to one experiment type for the rest of the century?<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"