As Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura notes in the new video above, all that’s left of the collider in Waxahachie now is “a 14-mile scar on the soul of American physics.” Despite this ambition to build a particle accelerator that likely would have found the Higgs long ago (among other discoveries), the U.S. According to Scientific American, the Superconducting Super Collider “was to have 20 times the collision energy of any existing or planned machine it would have had five times the energy of even today’s LHC collisions.” The project was to have a circumference of 51 miles, and was planned to encircle the desert town of Waxahachie, Texas.īut it was all just a beautiful dream. At the time, Reagan’s scientific advisor encouraged the physicists involved to think big. The Superconducting Super Collider, also known as the Desertron, first got going in the early 1980s, and was approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. But if things had gone just a little differently, the Americans would have been the ones to prove the existence of the Higgs, the so-called “God particle” whose existence physicists needed to prove in order to verify the rest of the Standard Model, which describes how the fundamental particles of the universe behave and interact. I just watched the trailer.Today, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva-the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, known for discovering the Higgs boson-grabs most of the atom-smashing headlines. I don't see how else you can interpret this line from the Muscles From Brussels: "The only way is to blow them up and hope the pieces don't keep fighting us." (No, I didn't watch the movie. with the unwanted assistance of a feisty and beautiful journalist." Maurstad concluded that while the "action scenes were fine," the "acting is an atrocity" and the whole thing is "strung together by some of the lamest dialog and weakest storytelling this side of an adult film festival." I wonder, though, whether Maurstad missed some ironic subtext about the quest for the Higgs boson. The 1999 film Universal Soldier: The Return, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, was filmed there the SSC became (according to Dallas Morning News reviewer Tom Maurstad) "a high-tech secret lab" wherein Luc Devereaux ("killing machine by day, loving widower-father by night") does battle with an "evil computer. If you think the place has never been used, you're wrong. The state of Texas unloaded the property years ago and now it's up for sale again ("on an 'as-is, where-is' basis") at the low, low price of $6.5 million. Physics nerds periodically trek to the site and take depressing photographs of weeds engulfing the facility. The SSC, meanwhile, has suffered the fate of Ozymandias. Two decades later, it appears that they have. Construction began near Waxahachie, Texas, in 1991, but two years, $2 billion, eight buildings, and 14 tunnel miles later Congress decided that, given the project's escalating costs and a $255 billion budget deficit (in those days, that seemed like a lot), perhaps we ought to let the Swiss score this scientific breakthrough. It could have happened here if the United States had completed the Superconducting Super Collider, a $12 billion particle collider conceived in the early 1980s that was going to be bigger and faster than the Geneva facility. (I'm a little hazy on the details.) Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva reported today that they think they glimpsed the elusive (and heretofore theoretical) particle, but they can't be sure. The scientific world is in a state of high excitement over the prospect of finally isolating the Higgs boson, the subatomic "God particle" that gives, or conveys, or accounts for the existence of, mass.
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