(Photo by Lionel FLUSIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)The Large Hadron Collider is going to be shut down — not permanently, but for a pretty long time — and the famous atom smasher’s eventual final retirement is also something that top scientists are now considering. “The machine is running brilliantly and we’re recording huge amounts of data,” Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, told The Guardian. “It’s an incredibly exciting project,” Thomson told the newspaper. The leading candidate to replace it, per The Guardian, is the gargantuan Future Circular Collider, which at a proposed 56 miles in circumference would make the Hadron look like the kiddie pool. Our goal is to understand the universe at its most fundamental level,” he told The Guardian.