The giant magnetic raceway would study atomic particles smashing into one another at a velocity approaching the speed of light. In truth, the superconducting supercollider does have legitimate scientific applications. Is it, in fact, concern for America's long-term future or, more likely, the short-term prospect of thousands of new jobs and millions of dollars of added revenue for the winning congressional districts? Such a lopsided margin draws into question the motives for supporting the supercollider. Not surprisingly, a whopping 94 percent of the cosponsors of the SSC bill represent one of these states. A dozen others have endorsed proposals submitted by their neighbors. Twenty-five states are colliding in the selection process. Once the Department of Energy chooses the site for the project, I believe that chorus will be reduced to a solo, or at best, a duet. More than half the members of the House have signed on to the measure as cosponsors, an extraordinary showing of bipartisan unity. The chorus of support for the SSC is, indeed, a loud one. They say it puts the US on the cutting edge of the next generation of particle physics, that its potential scientific and commercial applications are well worth the massive construction and operating costs. They claim this giant research project is a vital investment in America's future. Proponents of the $6 billion potential white elephant will tell you quite the opposite. For more on the Desertron, watch the video above, and check out Atlas Obscura's other 100 Wonders videos here.WHEN the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee last week predictably voted to fund the 53-mile underground race track known as the superconducting supercollider (SSC), it made a long-shot wager that may severely debilitate America's research programs and hurt United States industrial competitiveness. Plans for the site over the years have included mushroom farming and data storage, Atlas Obscura notes, although the land is currently owned by a chemical company-who can hopefully salvage something from the site of so much wasted ambition. Today, according to Atlas Obscura, “the site looks like a decrepit office park dropped in the middle of nowhere.” The tunnels still exist, although they have been flooded to protect them. (One of the biggest stumbling blocks was the fact that the projected cost tripled as the work progressed, and expected funds from foreign governments and the state of Texas never materialized.) When it was finally squashed in 1993, $2 billion had already been invested and 14 miles of tunnels had been dug. It was doomed by budget issues and political concerns over “luxury science,” among other conflicts. House of Representatives voted to kill the project in 1992, just a year after it began. 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. 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.
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