Atom-Smasher Gears Up to Find 'God Particle'

Shaft-O Eng wrote:

Well, it looks as though we will never know what discovery outcome from the SSC would have been. At this point anyway. I also don't know off hand what the expected energy increase was for the SSC over the LHC . It will be interesting to see how well and how long it will take to get the detector up to speed...

truthist wrote:

<quoted text>There's plenty of info at http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/ .

Dave wrote:

The USA had, and squandered, the opportunity to do this years ago. Anyone remember the Super Conducting Super Collider project? It's cancellation by the politicians was probably one of the most shortsided decisions ever made. Not only would all the things mentioned here be already discovered, but also work would be under way to make nuclear fusion a reality. Can you say inexhaustible, non-polluting (no radioactive waste, no by products, etc.) source of energy? When the project was cancelled, the 53 mile diameter underground tunnel had been dug around the city of Waxahatchie TX, most of the above ground facilities were complete, all of the special equipment had been ordered (much of it already delivered), and a host of scientists from all over the world were either hired or commited to the project. Its demise not only cost millions in mothballing expenses, but threw the scientific community into disarry for years due to suddenly dislocated talent and projects that had to be susupended in mid-stride. It's a shame it had to be funded by the government. Politicians are far to near-sighted and self serving to make effective decisions on far reaching matters like this.

Matt from Akron wrote:

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We won't look back and say how stupid we were. No one looks at the Wright brother's first plane and says "Jeez, is that a stupid machine... it looks nothing like the planes we build today." At most, we'll think of the earliest examples of a new technological innovation as "quaint".
When any new technology emerges, it is often bulky, ungainly and ugly by the aesthetic standards of future generations. Consider the first electronic computers - behemoths that filled large rooms and had less computing power than my cell phone. Consider the first VCRs. I had one of the first - it weighed almost 60 pounds! Consider the earliest of the aforementioned cell phone. Definitely not something you could slip into your shirt pocket.
Technology always comes first. Then, as time goes by, we package it better.

ClamBob wrote:

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I'm no physicist but I am always curious. I was very upset when they cancelled that project.

ClamBob wrote:

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I agree. My Mac IIfx was the fastest home computer in the world. It ran at a blazing 40 Mhz. It had 16 MB of ram and a 240 MB hdd. Quite worthless now... but stupid? No.

Matt from Akron wrote:

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Hey, for its time, that was one kick-ass system.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. 4K RAM (I expanded it to 16K, woo-hoo!), datasette "drive", ready to hook up to your TV right out of the box, lol. I loved my VIC. It's a major reason I'm a software engineer today - it made me fall in love with programming.

Cash wrote:

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I remember it well, and I am all for science funding, but your recall of its history is suspect. It was way, way, way over budget with no idea what benefit it could have and no end in sight. Saying that the SSC would somehow magically be ahead of the LHC, or even the ILC which is still on the drawing board, in what it would have accomplished is not borne out by fact or the specs of the machines themselves.
Greedy universities killed the SSC, not Democrats (and certainly not Republicans, who might have liked for Clinton to continue to fund a bottomless pit) and it might not be online even now if it had continued.
It's better to let Europe take a bath on things like the LHC and we can fund a small part of it and use it just like we would have used the SSC. We can all list bad ways to spend money and this would have been one of them.

TrilbyKat wrote:

"At CERN, everything co-exists here, the very big and the very small. The Pakistanis work alongside Indians and Palestinians alongside Israelis. Physics is one throughout the world," noted Denegri.
Now who would have thought that smashing up a bunch of hydrogen protons in a set of massive chambers and analyzing the wreckage could also lead to peaceful coexistence amongst the nations?

Matt from Akron wrote:

<quoted text>
Hey, for its time, that was one kick-ass system.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. 4K RAM (I expanded it to 16K, woo-hoo!), datasette "drive", ready to hook up to your TV right out of the box, lol. I loved my VIC. It's a major reason I'm a software engineer today - it made me fall in love with programming.

Shaft-O Eng wrote:

The university of Washington D.C.dept. of political-physics has recently confirmed the presence of a particle long thought to exist.
The Biggs bozo should lead to a greater understanding of power...

Cousin Jethro wrote:

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put an orange wig on Cheney and a little rouge -- you'd have a real Bozo to show-ho

LWsciencejunkie wrote:

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"...So?"
(sorry...couldn't help myself....)

Once-ler wrote:

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You young 'uns! I learned how to program a computer using punch cards.