The Lord of the Rings: CERN’s Future Circular Collider enters the political fray

Physics, like theology, is a discipline obsessed with creation myths. For the past two decades, the high priests of the particle world have congregated at a 27-kilometre altar buried beneath the French-Swiss border, smashing protons together in hopes of glimpsing the universe’s divine architecture. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been a triumph of human engineering, delivering the Higgs boson in 2012 and completing the Standard Model of particle physics. Yet, for all its glory, the LHC has been frustratingly silent on the heretical questions: Dark matter remains dark; gravity refuses to fit into quantum boxes; and the universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry remains an embarrassing accounting error.

Now, the faithful are growing restless. They want a bigger cathedral. On February 8th, CERN announced that the next grand conclave, FCC Week 2026, will convene in Helsinki to chart the course for the Future Circular Collider. This announcement marks a pivotal shift in the project’s lifecycle. Having delivered a feasibility study in 2025 that essentially declared, “Yes, we can build it,” the organisation is now pivoting to the far more precarious question: “Will you pay for it?”

The Ninety-Kilometre Gamble

The numbers associated with the Future Circular Collider are the sort that make finance ministers weep. Envisioned as a 91-kilometre tunnel—triple the length of the LHC—it would encircle Geneva, passing under the lake and burrowing through the limestone bedrock of the Jura mountains. The price tag is currently estimated at 15 billion Swiss francs ($17 billion), a figure that history suggests is merely a polite opening bid. The project is split into two acts: an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) to operate as a “Higgs factory” starting in the late 2040s, followed by a proton-proton smasher (FCC-hh) later in the century that would reach energies of 100 tera-electronvolts (TeV).

The Helsinki summit will be the first major gathering since the Feasibility Study was digested by the CERN Council last November. The mood is expected to be one of determined optimism, bordering on evangelical zeal. Yet, outside the lecture halls, the atmosphere is cooler. The primary criticism is not that the machine won’t work, but that it might work too well at doing very little. The LHC has been a victim of its own success, ruling out many of the exotic theories—such as Supersymmetry—that physicists had hoped to find. There is a very real fear that the Future Circular Collider could be a 100-kilometre tunnel to nowhere, confirming the Standard Model with ever-higher precision but failing to break it.

Supporters argue that precision is the point. The “Higgs factory” phase would churn out millions of Higgs bosons, allowing researchers to measure their properties with such exactitude that any deviation from theory would shine like a beacon. It is a strategy of attrition rather than shock and awe: grinding down the decimal places until the universe confesses its secrets.

A Game of Subatomic Risk

While the politicians sharpen their red pencils, the science continues. On February 12th, the ALICE collaboration—one of the four main experiments at the LHC—submitted new results regarding the space-time evolution of particle emission. Using a technique called femtoscopy, which exploits quantum correlations between particles (specifically, charged kaons), they have managed to map the geometry of the quark-gluon plasma—the primordial soup that existed microseconds after the Big Bang—with unprecedented resolution.

These results, though esoteric to the layman, are a reminder of what these machines actually do. They are microscopes of time as much as space. The ALICE data suggests that our understanding of the strong nuclear force is robust, yet incomplete. It is precisely this incompleteness that the Future Circular Collider is designed to exploit. The current LHC runs are squeezing the last drops of insight from the 27-kilometre ring. The “High-Luminosity” upgrade, set to come online later this decade, will extend the facility’s life, but the energy ceiling has been reached. To go higher, one must go wider.

The geopolitical dimension cannot be ignored. China has its own plans for a Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), a machine remarkably similar to the first phase of the FCC. The proposal, championed by the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, is cheaper and potentially faster to build. For Europe, the Future Circular Collider is not just a scientific instrument; it is a assertion of continental sovereignty in the realm of fundamental research. Losing the centre of gravity in particle physics to East Asia would be a symbolic blow to a Europe already fretting over its technological competitiveness.

The cost of curiosity

The debate over the Future Circular Collider ultimately boils down to the value of knowledge in a resource-constrained world. Critics, including some theoretically minded physicists, argue that the funds would be better spent on a diverse array of smaller, riskier experiments—telescopes, neutrino detectors, or tabletop quantum gravity tests—rather than putting all the eggs in one gigantic, subterranean basket. Sabine Hossenfelder, a vocal critic of the project, has long argued that building larger colliders without a clear theoretical prediction of what they might find is a strategy based on hope, not evidence.

Yet, the history of physics is littered with discoveries that no one ordered. The muon, the tau neutrino, and indeed the structure of the atom itself were unveiled not because theory demanded them, but because someone looked. The proponents of the Future Circular Collider argue that exploration is its own justification. If we stop looking, we guarantee that we will find nothing. The Helsinki meeting will likely reinforce this narrative: that the FCC is the only viable path to the next frontier of high-energy physics.

There is also the matter of engineering spinoffs. The superconducting magnets, vacuum systems, and cryogenics required for the FCC would necessitate leaps in industrial technology. CERN is quick to point out that the World Wide Web was invented there, a serendipitous byproduct of the need to share data. Who is to say what the Future Circular Collider might spawn? Efficient power transmission? Advanced medical imaging? Or perhaps just a very expensive hole in the ground?

The road to approval is long. The CERN Council is expected to make a final decision around 2028. Between now and then, the project’s managers must convince the treasuries of Europe that 15 billion francs is a reasonable price for a machine that produces nothing but data. In an era of austerity, climate crisis, and war, that is a hard sell. But as the delegates in Helsinki will doubtless remind us, the cost of ignorance is arguably higher.

For now, the particle physicists are like mapmakers at the edge of the known world. The LHC has filled in the dragon-infested waters of the Standard Model, and the map looks complete. But the mapmakers know that the edges don’t match reality. The galaxy is spinning too fast (dark matter); the universe is expanding too quickly (dark energy). Somewhere, the map is wrong. The Future Circular Collider is the ship they want to build to sail off the edge. Whether the taxpayers of Europe will agree to fund the voyage remains the greatest uncertainty of all.