Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion
The price of exploring inner space went up Thursday.
At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.
It would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.
“The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive,” Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and chair of the design team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an email interview before the announcement.
The location of today’s announcement, at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dominated by the United States and Europe in the last century.