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

This is inspiration for education

[fermion]

It is these types of things that inspire kids to get an education. It was frequent trips to NASA that inspired me to become a technical person. It was observing real scientists doing real science that taught me to be a scientist. We cannot just wave out hands around a beg and plead for students to study math and science, and for teach to competently present the subject. Without real experiences what will the teacher present? Dull facts out of books they have read. Without the ability to see real science what will the students learn? That these things are what far away people do, with no relation to their local opportunities.

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.