CERN management has sketched a preliminary plan to pay the extra costs of the Large Hadron Collider, a 14-TeV proton collider being built in a tunnel under the French–Swiss border. Under the proposal, unveiled at a meeting of CERN’s governing council in March, non-LHC science at the lab is cut to the bone. “The whole particle physics community is waiting for the LHC. We have to realize the project as fast as possible,” says Roger Cash-more, the lab’s director of research for collider programs.
Confidence in lab management—though not in the LHC—eroded last fall with the surprise revelation that the LHC’s costs had grown 850 million Swiss francs (roughly $511 million) above the original 2.6 billion Swiss francs (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 54 12 2001 21 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1445534 December 2001, page 21 and Physics Today 0031-9228 50 2 1997 58 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.881634 February 1997, page 58 ). Now the...
