Magazine

In his landmark 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that basic research is the fund from which applications, and with them prosperity, are drawn. Eight decades on, the High-Luminosity LHC is expected to return to society nearly twice its cost, before a single discovery is counted. The September/October edition of CERN Courier reports on the economics behind this number, on how superconducting magnets came to steer and focus CERN’s beams, and on the lattice calculation that fixed the strong coupling to five parts per mille.