China's Biggest Bang, A Supercollider Twice The Size Of CERN's

Chinese scientists are forging ahead with plans to build the world’s largest supercollider as part of a broader effort to brand the country as a leader in theoretical and practical science.

The enormous machine, which was first floated shortly after the Swiss-based Large Hadron Collider proved the existence of the Higgs boson particle in 2012, is currently in the planning stages, with construction expected to start in 2021, according to state media reports.

The project will reportedly require $6 billion in investment, a significant sum in an age where belt-tightening from developed nations the world over has resulted in a trend for less government-sponsored investment in scientific endeavors.

And there’s no guarantee of the project staying within this budget. The final bill for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was $9 billion; three times the initial budget estimate.

The Middle Kingdom’s planned underground supercollider facility, which has been dubbed the “Higgs factory”, hopes to be capable of producing millions of Higgs boson particles (far more than CERN’s current output, though the facility, located under the border of Switzerland and France, is also planning upgrades over the next decade in order to increase its production capabilities ten-fold).

According to ”The Great Wall to the Great Collider: China and the Quest to Uncover the Inner Workings of the Universe”, a book released last year by Harvard professor Shing-Tung Yau and science writer Steve Nadis, China’s proposed project “would transport physics into a previously inaccessible high-energy realm.”

Commonly referred to as the “God particle” the Higgs boson is said to form the basic building blocks of the universe, supercolliders are able to produce the particles by smashing sub atomic particles together at close to the speed of light.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/caseyhall/2016/05/21/chinas-biggest-bang-a-supercollider-twice-the-size-of-cerns/#41c004e9150b