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 largest share comes from the skills researchers take into the wider economy. Technological spillovers come close behind, as demanding contracts leave suppliers with new techniques and markets.

The LHC demanded large-scale industrial production of superconductors. Yet the thousands of magnets built from them all descend from a single thread of mercury Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled in 1911, finding a resistance too small to detect below 4.2 K.

This edition of CERN Courier also explores lattice quantum chromodynamics, which simulates the strong force in a discrete, finite box. A calculation published this spring stepped through a sequence of such boxes, fixing the strong coupling to five parts per mille.

Samuel Ting recounts a career spent checking and rechecking ever finer measurements. His latest instrument, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, has now recorded more than 265 billion cosmic rays. Their spectra follow patterns no current model quite captures.