Superconducting Super Collider
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) (also nicknamed the "Desertron"[2]) was a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas, United States.
This article is about the particle accelerator. For the programming language, see SuperCollider. For the electronic duo, see Super Collider (band).Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 TeV per proton and was designed to be the world's largest and most energetic particle accelerator. The laboratory director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Department of Energy administrator Louis Ianniello served as its first project director, followed by Joe Cipriano, who came to the SSC Project from the Pentagon in May 1990.[3] After 22.5 km (14 mi) of tunnel had been bored and about US$2 billion spent, the project was canceled by the US Congress in 1993.[4]
Proposal and development[edit]
The supercollider was formally discussed in the 1984 National Reference Designs Study, which examined the technical and economic feasibility of a machine with the design energy of 20 TeV per proton.[5]
Early in 1983, HEPAP (High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel) formed the New Facilities for the US High-Energy Physics Program subpanel. Led by Stanford University physicist Stanley Wojcicki,[6] and charged with making recommendations “for a forefront United States High Energy Physics Program in the next five to ten years.”[7] the HEPAP subpanel recommended that the US build the Superconducting Super Collider.[8][9]
Fermilab director and subsequent Nobel physics prizewinner Leon Lederman was a very prominent early supporter – some sources say the architect[10] or proposer[11] – of the Superconducting Super Collider project, as well as a major proponent and advocate throughout its lifetime.[12][13]
A Central Design Group (CDG) was organized in California at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, which became the gathering place for physicists to come and support the SSC design effort. In the mid-1980s, many leading high-energy physicists, including theorist J. David Jackson of Berkeley, Chris Quigg of Fermilab, Maury Tigner of Cornell, Stanley Wojcicki, as well as Lederman, Chicago’s James Cronin, Harvard theorist Sheldon Glashow, and Roy Schwitters, continued their efforts to promote the Super Collider.[14]
An extensive U.S. Department of Energy review was also done during the mid-1980s. Seventeen shafts were sunk and 23.5 km (14.6 mi) of tunnel were bored by late 1993.[4][15]
In popular culture[edit]
In Season 3, Episode 15 of Beavis and Butt-Head, titled "Citizen Butt-Head" which aired on October 18, 1993, the day before Congress cancelled the funding for the Super Collider, an honor student of Highland Highschool is overheard rehearsing his question for President Bill Clinton in which he asks: "Given the budget deficit, do you think the Super Collider is really necessary at this time?"
"Supercollider," a 1993 song by the Boston-based alternative band Tribe, describes the point of view of a scientist hired to help build the (then-uncancelled) project.
John G. Cramer's 1997 hard science fiction novel Einstein's Bridge centers around a fictional version of the Superconducting Super Collider.
On the February 25, 2001, episode of Futurama, entitled “That’s Lobstertainment!,” a robot comedian makes a Super Collider pun and, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, states that a Super Collider was built.
On the March 6, 2002, episode of The West Wing, the supercollider is discussed when Sam Seaborn is helping an old college physics professor get funding to complete the project.
A Hole In Texas is a 2004 novel by Herman Wouk, which describes the adventures of a high-energy physicist following the surprise announcement that a Chinese physicist had discovered the long-sought Higgs boson. Parts of the plot are based on the aborted Superconducting Super Collider project.
On the January 21, 2021, episode of Young Sheldon the supercollider is mentioned when Sheldon Cooper's (Iain Armitage) mentor Dr. John Sturgis (Wallace Shawn) gets a new job there. A subsequent episode on the April 1, 2021, episode shows an exterior shot of the facility with Dr. Sturgis receiving a phone call from Sheldon's grandmother (Annie Potts).
In 2021, the project was cited as a case study of the hypothetical demon of Bureaucratic Chaos, which "blocks good things from happening" at the United States Department of Energy.[42]
