With the Large Hadron Collider reaching its upper limits, scientists around the world are drawing up plans for a new generation of super colliders. Ian Sample weighs up whether or not the potential new discoveries a collider may make will justify the cost of building them.

Cern recently announced a proposal to build a machine that would dwarf the Large Hadron Collider.

It could cost around $12bn. But Cern isn’t the only lab looking at building such a monster machine.



This week, Ian invites Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, and Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at the University of Oxford, to talk about some of the questions this plan raises.

How do we decide what, if anything, to build? In the physics community, and in science more broadly, it’s a debate that rumbles on. How much do we stand to gain by going ahead with a massive new machine? Should the money go into other projects?



And what happens if we call an end to the days of the huge collider?

