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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
I posted the original thread: They have. Every last room of the place has been gutted for copper and whatever people could get.
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!
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.