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

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.

By comparison

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

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.

Re:Edit

[butalearner]

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.

Politicians, not physicists

[Roger W Moore]

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.