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And I got the SSC link wrong. Here it is: SSC

The Clinton Administration, not known for its religious fundementalism, killed the Supercollider to divert funds to social programs.

Taking your claim at face value, I would respond by stating that he was or they were fools for doing so. Instead, they ought to have revoked tax exempt status for religious organizations (which contribute nothing to human progress and have not done so for thousands of years) and used that revenue to fund science.

Thank you for pointing this out so we can remind ourselves that partisan politics are silly and politicians are deeply fallible. And for that very reason, each and every person ought to be concerned about the doings of their government so that they become educated about and engaged in its proper function.

The Clinton Administration, not known for its religious fundementalism, killed the Supercollider to divert funds to social programs.

While this camera was developed at the university of Wisconsin, it will be installed at a facility in Geneva, Switzerland.

We had the opportunity to deploy this in America.

The Super Conducting Supercollider project in Waxahachie, TX was a federal basic science research project that lost its funding and was dismantled in 1993. The tunnel was dug. All the technological hurdles seemed to be jumpable. But the American people were less than interested in funding stuff that wasn't directly translatable into tastier hamburgers or cooler cars. The Democrat-led congress cancelled the $2 billion budget and America resigned itself to let other countries lead in this field.

I only mention the 'democrat-led' congress because I do not believe they have earned the slurr of 'tax-and-spend-liberals'. This is one example why.

I can't decide if you're trolling, or just totally misinformed. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and treat it as the latter.

According to the Fermilab High Energy Physics Information Center, the SSC was cancelled by the House of Representatives in 1993. That would be the overwhelmingly Democrat controlled House of Representatives. 258-D to 176-R, during the latter part of 1993, and 267-D to 167-R earlier in the year. So who killed the SSC again?

Far from making sense, your theory isn't even possible.

Furthermore, then-Governor G.W. Bush, while visiting Japan in 1992, reportedly offered the Japanese a $1.25 BN "full partnership" stake in the venture in an effort to keep it alive. While I'm sure this had more to do with the windfall for his state than any particular love of high-energy particle physics, it certainly doesn't look good for your book-burning, anti-science red-staters theory.

I don't know if you were just tossing your little 'factoid' out there in the hopes of getting some karma from the other knee-jerk libs, but you must have a really short memory if you thought 1993 was a big year for conservatives, anti-science book-burners or not.

There are a lot of legitimate things to go after the ultra-right wingers with, especially recently, but the SSC isn't one of them. Do some research next time.

During Bush Sr.'s tenure, we also lost the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas. Another Basic Science project that just wasn't sexy enough to fund.

How's that superconducting supercollider coming along?

We've got a ditch digger over in Dallas who's been out of work ever since he finished the Panama Canal and then they shut down the Superconducting Super Collider project http://www.hep.net/documents/drell/apendixa.html. I figure it'll take him a couple of days to dig a diversion ditch to channel the flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and mayber another week to stack it all up into a peninsula, then another week to collect a crew and build a suburb of Corpus Christi.

Yeah, bring it on. At least one Texan needs the work.

Despite the incredible importance of this research - not to mention basic research in general - it was dismissed as a boondoggle and sandbox for particle physicists.

More reading: Science and Patriotism run amok in Texas

An what happened to the research on solvent-refined coal?
Apart from the pollution and contamination problems everybody had big expectations. Or? All the research in this area lying dead?

Hmm, maybe we shouldn't have killed off the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), after 14 miles of tunneling were already completed and two billion dollars were spent.

The eco-dumbasses talk about it alternatively as an unnecessary geek-scientist's playground, or as a wasteful front for the military-industrial complex.

What it would have been is a window into the most fundamental building blocks of the Universe. And now apparently we want to try again, even though we should have finished it the first time around...

In the early 90s, the government chose to fund the space station over the SSC (the SuperConducting SuperCollider). It's sad when one realizes how rare it was for one single project to have attracted top researchers from all over the world and then gets killed due to funding. I wonder if a project of such scale will ever be attempted again.

I work in subatomic physics and when I consider future jobs I just go to http://www.hep.net. Quite a few of the jobs listed on that site are mostly computing jobs. One obvious example: most of the DATAGRID-related jobs may be very interesting for non-physicist CS people. I am not a GRID guy (yet) but this (big, international) project involves developing everything that is needed so that scientists will be able to run mega-analysis jobs (e.g. analysis of huge amounts of data from huge particle detectors) in a distributed way, using computer resources all over the globe.

I am sure that other sciences (genomics, astronomy, meteorology+environment, you name it) have similar central job market sites. For this occasion the scientists among us could post now their equivalent to www.hep.net (with a little luck the field of the asker is also covered); but a more permanent solution would be to have a link site, say www.sciencejobs.net or so, in which any geek can decide may decide where he might contribute to find the Holy Grail. Apart from links to www.hep.net et al. there might be section where scientific geekseekers might post their more interdisciplinary (let's call it that way, for now) vacancies.

Probably such a site already exists (please post it if you know one). Somebody wrote here about a site called DreamJobs.net or so, which sounded a bit like it, but it seems not to exist anymore. If such a site does not exist at all (yet/anymore), somebody should (re)create it.

It works really well.

I have been following physics for quite some time and have seen the difficulty in trying to formulate a Quantum Theory of gravity. I think that we will find--very soon--the bridge that crosses the gap between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

One of the more promising theories, as of late, is called M-Theory. It is able to unify all five "types" of super strings. This view of sub-nuclear physics also attempts to answer a lot of questions about cosmology. This would include the actual number of dimensions in space-time and the actual structure of universe, itself.

The problem with the original Super String Theory was that it lacked "testable" predictions. The energies required to probe to that level were in the range of around 10^16 TeV. However, there has been some recent speculation that some of the extra dimensions could be larger than the Planck length (10^-34 m). Physicists were hoping to catch a glimpse at these higher dimensions by observing the effects of gravity at close range.

Some believe that gravity may propagate through more than three spacial dimensions, since it is so hard to unify with all the other fundemental forces. If this is the case, then gravity will fall off at a rate greater than the square of the distance. This would also mean that super-unification would probably happen at a lower energy scale (in the TeV range), as opposed to the dreaded 10^16 TeV range.