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."

Comments

Re:Great thinking.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, instead of the project being an over budget waste, they canned it so it could be a complete waste with no return. Brilliant.

See: Sunk Costs

Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists and cost over-runs (gee, from Government contractors?!? No way!) this was going to turn into a huge money pit. Anyway, the Europeans did it better

False dichotomy.

[blair1q]

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.

Re:The Numbers

[Chris Burke]

I am not 100% sure how having a bigger particle accelerator peen is that much better

Okay, let me spell it out for you in terms having nothing to do with the size of America's wang (and how did Florida enter the conversation anyway?):

A particle accelerator 3 times as powerful as the design spec for the LHC, 15-20 years earlier.

It's not about pride, it's about physics. Physics that requires high energies to explore. We're still waiting for the LHC to answer questions that we could have answered over a decade ago, and there are other questions the LHC can't answer which the SSC could have.

Instead, here we are in 2011, still waiting to find out if a fundamental prediction of our current physics will be borne out or if we need to rework it entirely. Just like we have been for decades.