The Large Hadron Collider is in an underground tunnel that is over 100 metres below the surface and has a circumference of 27 kilometres. (Credit: CERN)
TIME announced this week that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the 25 inventions that will be inducted into the TIME Best Inventions Hall of Fame. Every year, TIME hunts down the most exciting innovations to produce their annual list of the Best Inventions. To mark the list's 25th anniversary, they have narrowed down the previous Best Inventions to the 25 most iconic and impactful. These groundbreaking inventions were each chosen for their originality, ambition and impact.
The LHC began operating in 2008 as the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator and was included in TIME's list of Best Inventions for that year. Countless innovations and inventions were required for this ambitious project to become a reality. When the idea for the LHC began forming in the early 1980s, many technologies, such as superconducting magnets, ultrahigh vacuums and cryogenics, needed major advancements to support an accelerator of this scale. As it pushes the frontiers of scientific research, the LHC requires and inspires innovation. This has been made possible thanks to the huge international collaboration of scientists, engineers and technicians from over 110 countries.
Since beginning operations, the LHC observed the highly sought-after Higgs boson in 2012 and has discovered a bestiary of exotic hadrons. Today, it continues to probe ever deeper into our understanding of the building blocks of our Universe, known as the Standard Model. It is for this long-lasting impact and the nearly two decades of fundamental research that TIME has recognised the LHC as one of the greatest inventions this century.
