Why does Harry Cliff think physics needs the Future Circular Collider after the LHC?

Harry Cliff says the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, yet it remains deeply mysterious and theory suggests it should not exist in the form observed. The LHC gives only a fuzzy picture of it and will run into the early 2040s. Europe's physics community is coalescing around a 90-kilometre Future Circular Collider in the Geneva basin, about three times the LHC's size, to make huge numbers of Higgs bosons and study them precisely.

• Cliff links the Higgs's properties to why matter and the universe exist as they do.
• Victoria Martin wants to test whether one Higgs boson can decay into two, a check on whether the Higgs field idea is right.
• CERN reuses old colliders as feeders: the machine that found the W and Z bosons now feeds the LHC, which could feed the next ring.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-22). Read the whole episode summary →

▸More from this episode