The boxy, forlorn structures could house large commercial airplanes. Amid a pastoral countryside where corn fields mix with scattered country homes, the SSC's main buildings rise incongruously above the plain. I'm even sorry for the farmers in Ellis County who had to give up their houses and move away for no reason."Ī drive to the main, 135-acre site just west of Waxahachie yields such a sensation of waste. "We terribly regret this wasted opportunity. , a Nobel laureate and physics professor at the "The SSC would unquestionably have made Texas an exciting center of fundamental research," said The Large Hadron Collider's ring, about 17 miles in circumference, should be capable of producing collisions about one-third as powerful. The new European accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, will not be as powerful as the mighty SSC would have been. The SSC ring was to have been 54 miles in circumference, producing collisions 20 times more intense than the Tevatron. The Tevatron ring measures about 4 miles in circumference. Only at high energies do the smallest, most exotic particles - which existed at the beginning of the universe - briefly appear.Įxisting accelerators already achieve collisions near the speed of light, so the only way to reach higher energies is to build larger rings through which the particles travel. The machines seek to create highly energetic collisions between atomic particles. Later spinoffs included the development of cancer therapies and the processing of a host of materials, such as semiconductor chips.Īfter World War II, the United States built a number of evermore powerful accelerators, culminating with the Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. The discoveries led, in part, to the development of the atomic bomb. The device allowed scientists to discover atomic secrets by accelerating protons to high speeds, slamming them into a target and studying new particles the collisions produced.
"Europe's now playing in the major leagues, and we're in the minors," said A&M physicist Bhaskar Dutta.Īmerican physicists have dominated the field since the 1930s, when Ernest Lawrence and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley developed the first cyclotron, an early particle accelerator. By laying claim to the world's most powerful collider, Europeans will wrest leadership in high-energy physics away from the U.S. Later this year, the Switzerland-based CERN laboratory is scheduled to fire up a new particle accelerator near Geneva. The magnet now sits outside McIntyre's lab near the Texas A&M University campus, a weathered reminder of what might have been and an apt metaphor for the state of U.S. But after spending billions of dollars, Congress axed the SSC 15 years ago.
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