America was supposed to have a super-collider (the Superconducting Super Collider) rivaling whatever CERN had at that point, but they completely botched it. Congress will put the kibosh on your fancy tech toy and call it a "boondoggle" unless their state gets something out of it, so out of the gate, everyone needs to get a piece of pie, ultimately they put it somewhere in Texas because that would wheel the grease of a lot of contractors. That put the actual tech nerds off and the management of the thing was a shitshow. At some point they tried to sell it as an international scientific effort but they couldn't stop going "America First" for one goddamn minute so nobody joined in. Congress eventually nixed it, then CERN started working on their own super-collider (the Large Hadron Collider) which was an international project (and actually got international backing) and basically ate the USs lunch.
This feels like a compensatory reaction, and unless they build it between the US-Canada border my money's on it floundering like the SSC before it.
there were a lot of technological problems that i completely glossed over because it's nerd shit (and a lot of what worked and what didn't informed the construction of the LHC greatly), anyway at least the ants liked it; and at least a couple of contractors got a really nice couch out of it so who's to say, etc., etc.
So the SSC was planned to have a 40 terra electron (TeV) volt power rating. The more TeV the gun has the bigger hadrons you can smash the more power you can unleash the higher energy subparticles you can potentially find. This was way over what the LHC was planned to ever reach (14 TeV) and this was way before the LHC would even start construction, so in order to keep the LHC project afloat the eggheads there put a lot of their eggs in their luminosity basket. As it turns out, smashing bigger particles is good, but if you can't detect what the smash resulted in, you have to re-run the collision over and over again until you can catch one of them "on film", you're still generating a lot more of the buggers since you have 4x the TeV, but you can't see any. The plan of the LHC was that it would have higher luminosity so even though it would have a much harder time generating the higher energy subparticles, if they were to generate any, they would be have a much easier time getting actual readings on them.
With hindsight, even if the SSC would have went through, it would have had a garbage luminosity so actually trying to find those particles would have been a challenge (which they actually tried to do with the collider at fermilabs that got a new injection before being closed down, no dice). LHC also benefited tremendously from the exponential improvement in computing from the age of Reagan to that of Obama, in reality if the SCC would have gone through the amount of computing power alone required to make heads or tails of the sensor readings would have been staggering so when all was said and done they would have had a lead of only a couple of years to find the Higgs boson.
America was supposed to have a super-collider (the Superconducting Super Collider) rivaling whatever CERN had at that point, but they completely botched it. Congress will put the kibosh on your fancy tech toy and call it a "boondoggle" unless their state gets something out of it, so out of the gate, everyone needs to get a piece of pie, ultimately they put it somewhere in Texas because that would wheel the grease of a lot of contractors. That put the actual tech nerds off and the management of the thing was a shitshow. At some point they tried to sell it as an international scientific effort but they couldn't stop going "America First" for one goddamn minute so nobody joined in. Congress eventually nixed it, then CERN started working on their own super-collider (the Large Hadron Collider) which was an international project (and actually got international backing) and basically ate the USs lunch.
This feels like a compensatory reaction, and unless they build it between the US-Canada border my money's on it floundering like the SSC before it.
The Texas idea was horrible because the insulation required to make it was instantly eaten by ants. It was a few billion just wasted on nothing.
there were a lot of technological problems that i completely glossed over because it's nerd shit (and a lot of what worked and what didn't informed the construction of the LHC greatly), anyway at least the ants liked it; and at least a couple of contractors got a really nice couch out of it so who's to say, etc., etc.
Would you like to share any of it? I have an interest in nerd stuff and am somewhat deficient in physics nerd crap.
So the SSC was planned to have a 40 terra electron (TeV) volt power rating. The more TeV the gun has the bigger hadrons you can smash the more power you can unleash the higher energy subparticles you can potentially find. This was way over what the LHC was planned to ever reach (14 TeV) and this was way before the LHC would even start construction, so in order to keep the LHC project afloat the eggheads there put a lot of their eggs in their luminosity basket. As it turns out, smashing bigger particles is good, but if you can't detect what the smash resulted in, you have to re-run the collision over and over again until you can catch one of them "on film", you're still generating a lot more of the buggers since you have 4x the TeV, but you can't see any. The plan of the LHC was that it would have higher luminosity so even though it would have a much harder time generating the higher energy subparticles, if they were to generate any, they would be have a much easier time getting actual readings on them.
With hindsight, even if the SSC would have went through, it would have had a garbage luminosity so actually trying to find those particles would have been a challenge (which they actually tried to do with the collider at fermilabs that got a new injection before being closed down, no dice). LHC also benefited tremendously from the exponential improvement in computing from the age of Reagan to that of Obama, in reality if the SCC would have gone through the amount of computing power alone required to make heads or tails of the sensor readings would have been staggering so when all was said and done they would have had a lead of only a couple of years to find the Higgs boson.