Despite the organization’s $1.24 billion annual budget for 2017, the physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are being forced to admit failure in their latest effort to explain why any of us are here. Indeed, why there’s even a “here” here at all. “The universe should not actually exist,” said Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. CERN, founded in 1954, features a circular tunnel some 17 miles around that houses a

particle accelerator, which uses peak energy of 14 trillion electron volts to speed particles to nearly the speed of light and allow them to collide. It is underneath Switzerland near its border with France. Smorra and other scientists are trying to resolve the mystery of why – given the assumption the universe is the result of the Big Bang – the resulting matter was not annihilated back into nothingness by the equal amount of resulting antimatter. READ MORE

 


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