<The opening ceremony of the International Lunar Hadron Collider Symposium concluded successfully, with Academician Lu delivering a major address titled "Witness Our Shared Prosperity" at the Shangjing Great Hall on behalf of Hua Nation's academic community>
For Renren Daily, today's headline was unusually long.
And the information packed into that headline stunned everyone who saw the newspaper just as much as its length did.
Construction of the Lunar Hadron Collider would begin within a month!
The project's total budget was US$20 billion!
More than 200 high-energy physics research institutes and related research institutions around the world would participate in the project!
These included CERN, the renowned world center of physics, as well as the Princeton Department of Physics, known worldwide for its theoretical scholarship and mathematical physics, and other world-class research institutions whose names were familiar not only to specialists, but even to laypeople.
Of course, the participants were not the only thing that surprised people most.
What truly astonished them was that Hua Nation, the project's initiator, would contribute only US$10 billion of the US$20 billion budget.
And of the remaining US$10 billion, the Americans were actually putting up US$5 billion?!
Almost as soon as the newspaper came out, discussions flooded Weibo and major political BBS forums...
[The sun must be rising in the west. Since when were the Americans this generous?]
[The imperialists haven't given up on destroying us. Something fishy must be going on. Upvote this comment so Academician Lu sees it! (Fist) (Fist)]
[Th-this is unbelievable... If I remember correctly, the space race was still brutal last year. How come the Americans are backing down this year? (Shocked) (Shocked)]
[Whatever the case, all of human society will benefit from research in the basic sciences. Having another country share the costs is always a good thing. The