3/16/2023 0 Comments Waxahachie tx supercollider![]() Critics of the project (Congressmen representing other US states and scientists working in non-SSC fields who felt the money would be better spent on their own fields) argued that the US could not afford both of them. A recurring argument was the contrast with NASA's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS), a similar dollar amount. In 1987, Congress was told the project could be completed for $4.4 billion, and it gained the enthusiastic support of Speaker Jim Wright of nearby Fort Worth, Texas. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems.ĭuring the design and the first construction stage, a heated debate ensued about the high cost of the project. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project's director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometres (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 TeV per proton. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) (also nicknamed the Desertron) was a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas, that was set to be the world's largest and most energetic, surpassing the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider. Please do not visit without express permission from the land owner. Scientists, engineers, designers and accountants had all been making a living by working on the SSC, though many physicists were able to transition smoothly to working on the European project, Schwitters said.This place is on private property. "Personally, I think the country at that point wanted a better justification for why taxpayer dollars were being spent on what seemed like a satiric science at the time," he said.ĭefunding meant not only delayed experiments and potential discoveries, but also a loss of jobs in Texas. Schwitters said he isn't sure if anything could have saved it. ![]() “It would have been completed a decade earlier, and since it had three times the energy, things would have gone faster.”īut increasing costs, a desire to cut spending, competition from other scientific programs and a host of other factors led Congress to defund the SSC. “ The SSC had a big head-start on the CERN machine,” Weinberg explained. Weinberg said that the SSC would have been the most powerful collider in the world. There's no question it would have happened." This was the high priority measurement to be made first thing out. "It's at the core of our current theories of what matter is and how it works. "This is the discovery everyone planned around," Schwitters said. He believes it could have been discovered even a decade earlier. Roy Schwitters, former director of the SSC laboratory who is now a physics professor at the University of Texas, has no doubt that the SSC would have led to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Weinberg served on the site-selection committee shortly after coming to the University of Texas in 1982. "I couldn’t believe it at first,” he said of the cancellation. "It came as quite a shock in 1993 when the thing was cancelled," Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an interview with KUT News. But after nearly $2 billion had been spent on the project, Congress pulled the plug in 1993. If completed, it would have been larger in circumference and capable of producing higher energy than the LHC, according to experts who worked on it. The SSC was first proposed in 1983, and construction began in 1991. Today, the site is being turned into a chemical blending facility. But the project stalled, and so did Texas' hopes for the Higgs boson. Decades ago, a similar machine called the Superconducting Super Collider, was nearly built in Waxahachie, 30 miles south of Dallas. On Wednesday, they announced, that they have found a new particle that matches the description of the Higgs boson, though confirmation is still needed. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland have been searching for the Higgs boson, a fundamental, yet to-date elusive, subatomic particle, for years. It's a breakthrough Texas lost its chance to try for almost two decades ago, when Congress defunded the costly project. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have unveiled the discovery of a tiny particle Wednesday that may help them understand the nature and even the origin of the universe.
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