CERN’s Brian Cox warns UK physics faces a crisis of funding cuts

Professor Brian Cox has condemned funding cuts to particle physics as “a crisis unlike any I have seen,” following the UK’s withdrawal of £45 million from an upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb experiment. The decision, revealed to scientists last December, reverses assurances made and threatens to diminish the UK’s role in unraveling the imbalance between matter and antimatter. Leaders of the LHCb project, a collaboration involving over 17,000 scientists and engineers at CERN, expressed regret at the move, which necessitates a modification of the scientific plans…