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Breaking Into the Super Collider
BuzzSkyline writes "A group of physicists went AWOL from the American Physical Society conference in Dallas this week to explore the ruins of the nearby Superconducting Super Collider. The SSC was to be the world's largest and most ambitious physics experiment. It would have been bigger than the LHC and run at triple the energy. But the budget ran out of control and the project was scrapped in 1993."
So, instead of the project being an over budget waste, they canned it so it could be a complete waste with no return. Brilliant.
I remember when Michigan was vying for this project, touting how it would enhance Michigan's scienterrific credentials, bring more research bucks to University of Michigan, etc. Now that it's in ruins, it would still fit in with much of southeast Michigan - the rust belt - Bay City, Saginaw, Flint and the Detroit area. I wonder if they could somehow turn it into an underground D&D theme park?
Paging Richard Garriott...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They should've called it the "Texas World Science Racetrack" and listed as one of the goals "Determine the conditions of the world at the time of its creation in 4004 BC".
While expensive, the budget was not out of control. Gingrich & Co killed the SSC for ideological reasons.
No, it was killed by the politics of high-energy physics. In a nutshell, those working at the competing research sites who lost the bid to be the SSC location, basically got their congressmen to fight and kill the SSC project.
Did they have Aperture Science Super Colliding Super Buttons?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
This reminds me of how Half-Life started.
The World is Yours.
This is just one of those short sighted things we do because missiles are more exciting that basic science. A generation of US scientists should be considered loss as a result, and a generation of people able to teach the next generation about science is lost as well. How many billions of dollars is being spent to bootstrap science programs based on pictures in books when we could have have science based on real world experience.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
To put it in perspective, the supercollider cost about $8 billion over ALL its years. By contrast the nuclear fission industry received $38 billion in taxpayer loan guarantees in a single year, and the CBO projects that it will default on more than half of them. That's about $20 billion in taxpayer money. In one year. And that doesn't include direct subsidies, the eight year federal tax credit, the $2 billion dollar cost overrun fund, and debt waivers.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Beautiful pictures! I woud love to explore a derilict building in that way.
-- Cheers!
They missed a great opportunity to bring motorcycle helmets with them and make a whole website about their 'ride' through the famed "Superconducting Super Collider Exclusion Zone".
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Actually despite initial reservations, Clinton urged Congress to continue funding it. Congress opted not to do so due to costs associated with developing the ISS.
Unrelated note: if you haven't clicked on TFA, you should. Don't worry, it's mostly pictures.
A fourty page, peer reviewed paper on how their application of force against the garage door they broke in through will revolutionize breaking and entering?
There is no -1 Disagree.
I had a conspiracy theory that this thing was secretly completed underground. These pictures lower the chances of that being true. I'm sad. :(
Reagan and his band of merry dolts didn't mind running the nation into massive deficit to give tax cuts to the rich and let the military run wild, but they couldn't allow spending on a science facility that might have actually gotten us somewhere. That wouldn't be as wise as giving corporations tax breaks to ship their factories overseas...(for the irony impaired, that was ironic).
Imagine if we already FOUND the Biggs particle, or the graviton, or figured out how to control the magnetic bottle around fusion. Twenty-plus years of research was lost so we could "save money", money we pissed away instead to cause the first tsunami of our current massive deficits.
It's "Keynesian nonsense" when the left does deficit spending; it's the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981" or the "Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001" when the right does it. Sigh... And always remember the "Tax Reform Act of 1986", billed by Reagan as "tax simplification", but where we lost the deduction for interest on consumer loans. Simplification my left testicle...
There is a special circle in hell for that bunch of idiots.
Where is the entrance to this place? I'd like to explore it with a group of friends, too, so any direction would be appreciated.
Screw nature. I see enough trees and dirt every day. This kind of hike would be way more interesting!
For comparison, here are the photos of a similar abandoned Russian project (Google-translated):
Post 1 Post 2
Note that the construction site is preserved rather than completely abandoned.
Wikipedia link
So for an additional 8 billion dollars, we could have had this incredible science resource. The hundreds of billions spend on bail outs and trillions spent on wars since then puts that and our current priorities in perspective.
Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists
The problem was not physicists but politicians. Large colliders like the LHC and SSC require a chain of accelerators of increasing energy to inject protons into them. The US already has just such a chain but in Fermilab near Chicago, not in the middle of Texas. As I understand it the decision to move the SSC from Illinois to Texas was made by politicians for political reasons. Since the entire lower energy accelerator complex had to be built from scratch in Texas this literally doubled the cost of the project.
The damage to US physics goes well beyond the loss of the project though. There were many non-US groups involved in the SSC and its cancellation has meant that many are extremely adamant that future international accelerator projects should not be built in the US due to a complete lack of faith in the US funding system.
It's not the greatest book in the world.
It's not Herman Wouk's greatest book.
But Herman Wouk's 2004 novel, "A Hole in Texas" has got to be the best romantic comedy about the Superconducting Super Collider ever written.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why would they want to end the piece with a bunch of bullshit?
I give, if they can't sell it, just how much money are they trying to sell it for?
That, and the fact that both the SSC and the Lydon B Johnson Space Center in Houston (ISS mission control) are in Texas, and funding both projects would have been funneling an absurd amount of money there.
How about we use the funds from that limewire suing thing to create this?
i am pretty sure the record companies will not miss a trillion or 2
in one Synthetic CDO trade. read 'the big short' if you dont believe me.
It wasn't a choice between ISS and SSC.
We could have bought 5 SSC's for what it cost to develop and field the F-22.
And, at current estimates, not doing F-35 could have built 80 SSCs.
Never underestimate the sophistry of lobbyists trading off your money for their goals.
The unmanned space program is doing lots of science and gets in the news from time to time. Sure, it does not get the hype of a moon landing, but it is doing genuine space exploration. Planets orbiting other stars have been discovered from Earth. Kepler is screening thousands of stars for more. There will probably be future planet finding telescopes or space probes.
Hubble's successor space telescope has made good progress.
Mars was found to have significant amounts of water.
Mercury just had a probe enter orbit. Mercury had not been getting much attention from scientists.
A probe will flyby Pluto several years from now.
they use some fuzzy accounting to redefine what 'bailout' means. they have 'loans' and 'loan guarantees' and 'asset purchase programs' and a whole other bunch of stuff to make it hard to calculate a straight ahead cost.
imco (in my conspiratorial opinion), they did this on purpose because otherwise they wouldnt have been able to inject enough capital into the banking system and wed be even more @#$@#$ than we are. (congress would never allocate 2 trillion directly).
discusses how he got anti-intellectual Reagan to fund the thing in the first place (we are cowboys, exploring the frontiers of physics)
For once, the politicians did the right thing, actually. These clowns weren't even in the same class as the guys are CERN. Hate to say it, I'm American and wish it were otherwise, but really, go read the reports. This was a bunch of people who thought conceptually trivial meant actually trivial. Nope, and most people outside ivory towers know that. Even some politicians.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
it wasnt a total waste, we did put a storage shed on a ratty old space station
That is the most retarded thing I have heard all day, and I listen to fox news radio
Why even post an assertion like this without any link to the "reports" you cite. I'm old enough to remember what happened and that is that the SSC was killed by anti-science Republicans who would have been able to reverse a veto by Clinton, who, in the end, favored completing the project. Losing the SSC was a sad and terrible loss for America.
As far as I understood it, the budget was pretty well under control. It's just that the Republican Congress did not want to spend $$ on basic research. My wife was working on it, and if it had gone ahead, we would have been in Austin, TX. instead of Batavia, IL where my wife is a physicist at Fermi Lab. My father, also a physicist, was involved as well, but he was trying to get the collider to be situated in Colorado, where he worked... :-)
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
And the Europeans who "did it better" did it without government contractors? You left out any backing for your lame dig there.
Digital Citizen
I'm surprised the equipment, wiring, magnets, etc, haven't been stripped by looters. The amount of copper alone in those buildings...
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
And then they built the supercollider.
#DeleteChrome
You do realize that Americans engineered many parts of the LHC right? Including some of the accelerator magnets and parts of the detectors? This has nothing to do with nationality, probably just technological advancement that happened in the 10-15 years between projects.
Current particle accelerator technology might be obsolete in a few decades. Wakefield plasma has been making progress. Isn't it a good thing the United States did not build a ten billion dollar accelerator, and researched alternative accelerator technologies instead? Especially since a similar multibillion dollar accelerator was built by the Europeans.
Interstate 410 in San Antonio, Texas is about the same circumference as the SSC would have been, only not quite as round.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
LHC is mostly an European effort. And so is the foundation of modern physics. But I understand your disappointment.
this guy i know from college was working on that project until it was cancelled. a real bummer: we should be doing more cool science in america than europe.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
"These clowns weren't even in the same class as the guys are CERN."
These clowns being the US physicists in general or those specific ones, because you are awful close in making the two seem the same in your comment.
At least a portion of the LHC magnets are from the US. In fact, wasn't that part of the point, that the US still had the magnet knowledge, and was happily collaborating and cooperating with CERN, and they admitted their screwed up and had egg on their face that led to one of the numerous LHC startup delays, even though they analyzed and delivered a solution in mad time?
So don't go badmouth like CERN is all that. LHC is built up on what the Americans learned and gladly shared. Given the LHC uses the US design, maybe CERN was just being nice, but these things are usually done as a cooperative international effort, so don't get all snobbery because it's just not in the US. it makes me wonder if the US politicians with the Super Collider hired the wrong physicists from all the available physicists given that the Europeans today still depended on US magnet sourcing. That goes to the politicians--if they want to run the show, they need to find the talent, and that talent likely existed given their exporting our magnet tech overseas.
Another reason the Super Collider went belly up was because we didn't really know what the hell the Super Collider was to be used for really--it was sort of build it and then see; we didn't see the point back then, because the research hadn't progressed to the need for such a large collider. And didn't the Fermilab device go through at least a couple of upgrades in the meantime, some of it certainly necessitated by the cancellation of the Super Collider, but still where a hell of a lot was learned such that the LHC in its current form exists, again because of American investment and design *and release of that data and information to the international community freely?* Even the LHC was driven partly to get science back in the EU have decades of neglect--the Europeans finally have a world class device, after for years having some of the brightest minds in the field.
...doubled research in Dallas? :(
No.. it's still keynsian nonsense.
The goal of an economy is to make the stuff. As in, the stuff that people want and need.
The government can try to guess what that is, but every hour of a worker's time that the government directs is an hour that isn't spent making the stuff.. It doesn't matter whether they "legitimately" took that time at the point of a gun, or sneakily took the time by printing more tokens when no one was looking....
This should be an easy challenge, right? find some examples of situations where keynsian principles were applied and the description of the result wasn't, "well, it would've been even worse..."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But the budget ran out of control and the project was scrapped in 1993.
But House Speaker Jim Wright (Fort Worth, TX) resigned as Speaker in an ethics scandal in 1989 and President George H. W. Bush, also from Texas, was defeated in his re-election bid in 1992. The project was scrapped in 1993.
There, fixed that for you.
The difference is that the right (at least in the instances you reference) went for supply side stimulus rather than Keynesian stimulus. These are two rather different and contradictory economic theories, so I'm not sure what the complaint is other than that neither focuses on balancing the budget (that would be Ross Perot in the 90's and the Tea Party today). I also don't understand why removal of deductions billed as tax simplification would baffle you. The idea is to assume that the average person saves x% or $y via this deduction and lower the rate/increase the standard deduction by x%/$y and remove it from tax forms.
Oh? Where would it have gotten us?
Are they going to keep the results of LHC a secret from Americans? No? So, we don't have to spend any money AND we get all the benefits of basic research?
The research happened anyway. The only real problems are the experiments that cannot be done by the LHC because it's not big enough.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I think you are being too hard on your fellow countrymen - and I say that as a non-American, not associated with any US institute and member of an LHC experiment. Part of the difference between true, groundbreaking research and the stuff industry typically does is that you are working well beyond the bleeding edge. Building something which your physics says is possible but which nobody has actually ever done is always fraught with unexpected issues simply because nobody has any real experience.
If you look at the LHC it was originally due to start running in 2002 (IIRC) and so there have been significant delays with us as well and...ahem... not all of our magnets worked so well the first time we started to ramp them with beam in 2008. So I would argue that it is not that they did not expect problems just that the problems were perhaps greater than expected...and since nobody had ever built such a huge superconducting magnet system before how can you possibly expect to identify all the problems in advance? As the saying goes it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all and with research you can never guarentee success. If you can it isn't research because someone must have already done it!
First our Super Sonic Transport plane canned.
Then the Strategic Super Collider.
Friends, Don't name large projects with the dreaded SS prefix
hey moron - Reagan stated building this it was killed by a democratic congress under Pres. Clinton.
(and a Democrat Gov in Texas that didn't put a lot of fight into it)
There is plenty to blame on Reagan (and even more on the newer neocon dicks) but this ain't one of them.
Is there a special circle in hell for asstwats who blame "Reagan and his band of merry dolts" for killing the SSC when it was started under Reagan's administration and canceled by a Democrat-controlled congress in '93?
But hey, you got your "+4, Insightful" (as of 0423 UTC), so facts be damned, the /. mob obviously agrees with your narrative, and that's what matters, right?
There is a special circle in hell for that bunch of idiots
Actually, it's a torroid and you're not being fair. It's in purgatory and both sides of the aisle keep us spinning in circles there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The effects of prolonged exposure to the Supercolliding Super-button are not part of this test.
Holy fuck you're stupid. No offense.
You do realise that your precious 'economy' wouldn't be worth a wank if not for thousands of years of government spending?
Pretty much every modern industry is the direct result of massive government stimulus. Left to its own devices, the market wouldn't have anything to sell at all. Even Walmarts ability to sell you some plastic junk from China wouldn't be possible without centuries of state investment in military technology. And you can forget aviation...
Of course all this is meaningless as the point of particle accelerators is to discover the secrets of the universe, not to enrich shareholders.
between diesel generators and "giant old fans now lay idle that once would have been used to circulate air along the tunnels"
Then again, I guess I'm not.
They chose Texas which has some of the HARDEST GROUND IN THE USA. Few build basements there. The reason is that it is just not worth the costs of doing this. Instead, SSC SHOULD have gone to Illinois, where they would have been done in less time than was devoted to Texas. The question is, why did Texas win? Well, for the same reason that Texas was given LOADS of money from the USA under both Bushes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Better than crashing one like when Nixon did Skylab in.
I'm sure a lot of people here will recognize, that the "giant old fans now lay idle that once would have been used to circulate air along the tunnels" are actually Caterpillar diesel generators for temp or backup electricity. They've got fans sure, but they are blowing across radiators!!
That's a hugely ridiculous goof for a group of highly educated physicists to make.
Of course they were skipping the conferences their companies paid for them to attend, breaking and entering into private property and posting it on Blogger.
I guess it's about right.
Well one cool thing came from it all. Tribe's alt hit "Supercollider!"
The SCSC was Regan's pet project before "star wars." He was the one who championed it.
It was Clinton and Democrats in congress who killed it.
Do you remember how screwed up the economy was under Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and particularly Carter? Regan and Volker were inspired geniuses on several levels.
In real terms, the USA economy grew more from 1981 to 2000 (under consistent Regan policy continued through Bush I and Clinton) than in any other 20 year period in USA history.
http://blogs.forbes.com: "As inflation persisted, Carter blamed the American people. They set the heat too high at home, labor unions wanted raises that necessitated price increases, and drivers had to have their boats and muscle cars... All this came to a head in Carter’s incredible “malaise speech” of July 1979, in which the president laid culpability for inflation squarely at the feet of American consumerism and demanded better. In a weird mood in the moments after giving the speech, Carter asked his Cabinet to resign. Carter accepted five resignations, including that of the treasury secretary....
"Inflation worsened as never before, coming in at 14% in 1980; early in that year it made a bid for 20%.... The prime rate of interest stood at 22%."
Under Regan's policy: "Beginning in October 1981, and coming about every six months after that for the next two years, each rate of the income tax got cut. In October, rates went down by 1%, in January another 9%, in July another 5%, with more cuts the next year. Inflation had been continuing at its double-digit level through the first two-thirds of 1981, but then it suddenly fell by more than half as the year came to a close – exactly when the sequence of tax cuts started. In 1982, inflation was half the average level of the previous three years, and in 1983 it collapsed all the way to 3%, where it would roughly stay for a generation.... The “Great Inflation” of 1973-1981 was a thing of the past."
The fact that no one had any experience is not a valid excuse. Abstractly speaking, they stated that they had a level of certainty of being able to build something. If the number of failures along the way higher than anticipated, then the level of certainty was mis-stated. But calculating a level of certainty is, in fact, a theoretical exercise. Mis-stating is tantamount to being wrong in some particular theoretical deductions. More specifically, if the magnets worked as well as predicted, then the theoretical predictions of performance of magnets of this quality were off. That, again, is a theoretical failure.
I can't seem to find any reference to it, but I was sure there was some sort of public vote/referendum regarding the funding for that project. Anyone else remember that?
After the hostile aliens came through the wormhole it created and destroyed Earth, two scientists were send back in time (by the good aliens) at the last moment. Seeing the results on using the SSC firsthand, they redirected their careers, used the knowledge of the future they already lived and got congress to kill the project before completion the second time around.
You can read the details in John Cramer's documentary; Einstein's Bridge.
But calculating a level of certainty is, in fact, a theoretical exercise.
Typical draconian govt throwing the book (if not a STACK of books) at these poor scientists for being curious.