![]() ![]() ![]() By the fall of 1993 the estimated cost had risen to a minimum of $11 billion (equivalent to $18 billion today), in part because administrative overhead proved larger than anticipated, and refined calculations of expected beam losses lead to a magnet redesign. ![]() House of Representatives voted to kill the project in the summer of 1992, when costs had risen to $8.25 billion, but it was saved by the Senate, although a $100-million cut below requested funds put the project further behind schedule, increasing its costs even more. Originally estimated to cost $4.4 billion, the U.S. Ronald Reagan’s science advisor told the design committee to be “bold and greedy.” Reagan approved the project in 1987, encouraging physicists to “throw deep.” (Early names for the collider included the “Ronald Reagan Accelerator,” the “Desertron” (because it was so large it could only be built in the U.S. Overbudget, the SSC had been on shaky ground for at least a year before the plug was pulled. Many took a loss on homes sold in a sudden buyer’s market. About half the SSC scientists left the field of physics, according to a 1994 survey by Science magazine, some to become analysts in the financial industry. Another 13,000 jobs linked to the project never materialized. Over $2 billion had already been spent, mostly by the DoE, but also $400 million by the state of Texas.Īt its end the project was already employing 2,000 people at the site or in Dallas, about 200 of whom were scientists, plus a contingent of Russian physicists employed after the end of the Cold War. When canceled, about 20 percent of the SSC was complete-specifically, two dozen kilometers of tunnel had been drilled with 17 access shafts, and 18,600 square meters of buildings erected. That design had only one tenth the beam luminosity of the LHC, but because of its higher energy, it would have produced about half the Higgs events seen at CERN, says John Gunion of the University of California, Davis, enough to have found the Higgs and with the higher energy necessary to detect what, if anything, lies past the Higgs energy, such as supersymmetric or dark matter constituents. At 20 tera-electron volts (TeV, or trillion electron volts) per proton-close to the regime of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays-it was to have 20 times the collision energy of any existing or planned machine it would have had five times the energy of even today’s LHC collisions. Department of Energy (DoE) led to conflicts, seemingly endless audits and an overall lack of trust.Īn accelerator that would collide high-energy protons, the SSC’s ring was to be 87.1 kilometers in circumference, circling the small town of Waxahachie, Tex., 48 kilometers south of Dallas. The project’s scale was 20 times bigger than anything physicists had ever managed before, and cultural differences between the scientific side of the accelerator’s management and the military-industrial culture imposed by the U.S. The inability to secure any foreign sources of funding was pivotal, especially as the project’s cost increased by a factor of three from initial estimates amid a national recession and political insistence on controlling government spending. ![]() physics since the spotlight moved to Europe?Īlthough no one reason explains the cancellation, a few key aspects of the project stand out. What went wrong with the SSC, in a nation then usually admired for its can-do attitude? What lessons were learned to apply to future efforts? And what has been the impact on U.S. Last year the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, discovered the Higgs, the biggest event in physics in a generation, and, adding insult to injury, announced it on a U.S. Since then, the glory of particle physics has moved to Europe. Twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Congress officially killed the project, leaving behind more than vacant tunnel in the Texas earth. Except the story didn’t play out according to script. to retain dominance in high-energy physics. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) that would have graced the rolling prairies of Texas would have boasted energy 20 times larger than any accelerator ever constructed and might have been revealing whatever surprises that lay beyond the Higgs, allowing the U.S. Peter Higgs, in fact, might have collected his physics Nobel a few years earlier. high-energy physics project would have already found the Higgs particle, having solidly won the competition with its European competitor. If all had gone according to plan, the gargantuan U.S. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |