#cern

#cern

The 91-kilometre Future Circular Collider (FCC), which would span the French-Swiss border and pass beneath Lake Geneva, is forecast to cost around 15 billion Swiss francs (US$19 billion) to make - if it gets built. The machine has the backing of the European Strategy Group, a group appointed by CERN's council to gather input from its member states and the physics community.

On 1 January, Thomson takes over as the director general of Cern, the multi-Nobel prizewinning nuclear physics laboratory on the outskirts of Geneva. It is here, deep beneath the ground, that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest scientific instrument ever built, recreates conditions that existed microseconds after the big bang. The machine won its place in history for discovering the mysterious Higgs boson, whose accompanying field turns space into a kind of cosmic glue.

European countries must work together to become the global destination for scientific talent.