00:00Back in 1954, when the foundations of CERN were laid outside Geneva on the French-Swiss
00:06border, the field of high-energy physics was much more fractured than today.
00:12In the decades since, discoveries made there helped merge ideas about fundamental forces
00:17and particles into a coherent whole, what's known as the Standard Model.
00:23And CERN also laid the groundwork for many other discoveries and developments.
00:28The best-known example is the invention of the World Wide Web.
00:32Many developments for medical physics and life sciences, PET scanners, accelerators
00:41for hospitals, and many more.
00:44The particle accelerators that enable experiments in high-energy physics are at the heart of
00:50CERN.
00:51Many have been built there over the years.
00:53Among them is the largest in the world, a 27-kilometer-long ring called the Large Hadron
00:59Collider, or LHC.
01:01Inside it, particles are accelerated to very high speeds in opposite directions, then smashed
01:07together, revealing even more fundamental components, like the Higgs boson, which eluded
01:13detection for decades.
01:16Proof it existed won its namesake physicist Peter Higgs and his colleague François Englert
01:22the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
01:27The quest that uses the biggest of machines to study the tiniest of particles is far from
01:31over.
01:32There are still many open questions in the Standard Model, and an even larger particle
01:37accelerator at CERN might help answer them.
01:40Called the Future Circular Collider, or FCC, it would be over 90 kilometers in circumference
01:47and cost billions.
01:49It could go where the LHC and other colliders can't, but do we really need it?
01:55There is no other way to really chart this uncharted territory than building a new collider.
02:04The FCC will give us a chance, at least, to answer the most important open questions that
02:12we have in particle physics.
02:15A feasibility study is ongoing, and it's far from clear that the FCC will ever be built.
02:21But even if it isn't, groundbreaking research in particle physics will continue to take
02:26place in Geneva for the foreseeable future.
02:29Happy birthday, CERN!
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