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.
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.