CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has made some fundamental discoveries in physics. But with its 27 kilometers in circumference, this ring is very small compared to the vastness of the Universe. Researchers dream of a more efficient “muon Higgs factory”, just to go back in time with mini big bangs to the original Fiat Lux (there, we popularize a little) and finally answer the questions that plague the humanity: what is dark matter? What is 96% of the universe made of? Why is there no more antimatter?
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They therefore plan the FCC (Future Circular Collider) with a diameter of 100 meters which, extending under Swiss and French territories and passing under Lake Geneva, would provide each year data corresponding to 326 stacks of DVDs as high as the Mount. -White (compared to only four today) … Bringing together more than 150 university institutes and industrial partners, a study was launched in 2014 and a public report released in 2019. It is this process that documents Way Beyond, by Pauline Julier.
Absolute horizontality
The film begins like leafing through a children’s book with old views of the Geneva region, indexes tracing circles in the air, a relief map of the Alpine massif, this wolf highway. And then he immersed himself in working sessions to remind people that Promethean challenges go through a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy.
Before launching hadrons at the speed of light and obtaining abstruse graphs as beautiful as fireworks, we must solve an infinite number of practical, geological, ecological, economic, psychological, ontological problems …
Next to the FFC, the pyramids of Egypt, it’s gnognote. The cost of the cables for the future site is estimated at 10 billion euros. 9 to 10 million cubic meters of excavated material will need to be recycled. Build special trucks to transport oversized equipment and redesign roads so giant vehicles can negotiate bends. Compensate the owners of the land under which the tunnel will pass: in Switzerland, the right of ownership stops at 200 meters below ground level; in France it goes to the center of the Earth! A zenithal camera will define the absolute horizontality of the circuit according to the stars. In the event of a fire in the device, robots could help workers reach the nearest exit. Beyond the economic realities, these projects for the future come up against a major unknown factor recalled by a mocking physicist: around 2050, it may be Artificial Intelligence that will keep the machine running …
Deserted roads
A modest-looking sci-fi film, Way Beyond measures a pharaonic project. It can be seen as an introduction to The Great Void. CERN scares people, stirs up rumors. He is accused of disrupting the weather, opening black holes. In the wake of Particles, by Blaise Harrison, where the reality of the Pays de Gex is subject to strange disturbances, one can imagine that a hadron collision wipes out all animal life on earth (even in the universe) …. Then the world would be as Sebastian Mez observes in The Great Void.
Read also: Blaise Harrison: “Technique is an area that has always interested me”
Grayish mountains, scree, deserts, nothing moves, nothing sounds, here is the appalling beauty of the mineral. Of man, there remain titanic works, dams, pylons, a footprint in the silt, poor artefacts returning to dust – crane, tire, armchair … Taking deserted roads, the German director approaches civilization (Los Angeles) and describes in masterfully framed still shots the agony of our civilization. Abandoned motorway networks, unoccupied apartments, a hanging American flag, shabby motels whose sign sizzles like in a David Lynch nightmare, a fan whose blades are racing, a mosaic of television screens spewing out their images by millions. inept, a fade to black with the falling rain and the thunderstorm that rumbles as in Riders of the Storm, Doors. In voiceover, Bertolt Brecht comes to say To those born later (“To those who will come after us”), a poem from 1939 which confirms the darkness of the times and acutely foreshadows the no future.
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