It's not as crazy as it sounds. //

In the March 1988 issue of Popular Mechanics, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov proposed building a particle accelerator on the moon.
A physicist recently revisited the idea in a paper published to the preprint website arXiv.org.
The moon, it turns out, might actually be a perfect place to put one. //

Asimov envisioned the year 2028. Humans—or Lunarians, as he called them—are thriving on the moon. They've erected a massive radio telescope on the moon’s far side and have built research stations, factories, and celestial observatories, all powered by nuclear and solar energy.

The moon, Asimov mused, is the ideal scientific laboratory, one that could help us unravel the mysteries of particle physics. "Turning to the heavens, special detectors would analyze rays from astrophysical sources, and moon-based particle accelerators would give new insight into the nature of matter," he wrote.