Tech billionaires have pledged as much as €860 million ($1 billion) to help fund CERN’s Future Circular Collider, the next-generation particle collider and the successor to the Large Hadron Collider, according to a new press release from the Switzerland-based research institute. It’s the first time in CERN’s history that it will accept money from private […]
Physicists Create First-Ever Antimatter Qubit, Making the Quantum World Even Weirder
Readers following our existential physics coverage may remember a recent breakthrough from CERN concerning matter’s evil twin, antimatter. An outstanding mystery in physics is that our universe contains more matter than antimatter, contradicting most theoretical predictions. Scientists, therefore, understandably want to explain why and how this is the case. CERN announced yet another significant leap […]
Physicists Turned Lead Into Gold—for a Fraction of a Second
Hundreds of years ago, alchemists dreamed of chrysopoeia: turning lead into gold. Scientists at the research institute CERN have achieved this medieval fantasy—if only for a fraction of a second. Physicists used the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), to eject three protons from lead atoms—effectively transforming them into gold atoms. Though […]