Introduction
Deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland, near Geneva, sits a 27 km ring where scientists hurl tiny particles at each other at close to the speed of light. This is CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory on Earth, and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Its purpose is simple to state and enormously hard to achieve: to find out what the universe is made of and which rules hold it together.
In this interview, Mark Thomson, CERN's newly appointed director general, talks openly about where the laboratory stands today and where it could go next. It comes at a turning point. The LHC is about to go quiet for roughly two years while engineers upgrade it, so that when it returns it can produce far more collisions and give researchers a sharper view of rare events.
What the conversation covers
Thomson begins with what really happens inside CERN, and how the field has changed since he started out. The defining moment of recent decades was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle linked to how other particles get their mass. Finding it completed the Standard Model, our best description of matter, yet it also opened new puzzles. Is the Higgs a truly fundamental particle, or is it built from something smaller? Could it be connected to dark matter, the invisible material that appears to outweigh ordinary matter by around five to one?
Dark matter and antimatter run through the whole discussion. Antimatter is the mirror image of normal matter, and CERN leads the world in making and trapping it. One of the deepest questions in science is why the early universe ended up with matter at all, rather than equal amounts of both that would have wiped each other out. Experiments at CERN test whether antimatter behaves in exactly the same way as matter, because even a tiny difference could explain why we exist.
The second half looks further ahead. Some people ask whether anything is left to discover, and whether ever-bigger machines are worth it. Thomson argues the opposite: there are still huge unanswered questions, and answering them requires going to higher energies. That leads to the proposed Future Circular Collider, a ring of around 91 km that would first study the Higgs in fine detail and later push to energies far beyond the LHC. He also explains why CERN works as a model of international cooperation, with thousands of scientists from many nations sharing one goal.
Why it matters
Here at Get Out Rat Race we explore the nature of reality from many angles, from quantum physics to consciousness. CERN is where those questions meet hard experiment. You do not need a physics degree to follow this talk, only curiosity about what lies beneath everyday life. If you enjoy it, read more in our Reality collection, including The Quantum Nature of Reality.
Watch the full interview
Video credit: New Scientist, publisher of “CERN Is Hunting Something That Shouldn’t Exist”. Watch the original interview on YouTube.
For another question at the edge of cosmology, explore Could the Universe Create Itself?