BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:UW-Madison-Physics-Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
SEQUENCE:0
UID:UW-Physics-Event-4182
DTSTART:20161021T203000Z
DURATION:PT1H0M0S
DTSTAMP:20240319T061140Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20161014T131114Z
LOCATION:2241 Chamberlin Hall
SUMMARY:A Bridge Too Far? The Demise of the Superconducting Super Coll
ider\, Physics Department Colloquium\, Michael Riordan\, UC Santa Cruz
\, Emeritus
DESCRIPTION: In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Supercondu
cting Super Collider — at over $10 billion the largest and costliest
basic-science project ever attempted. It was a disastrous loss for t
he nation’s once-dominant high-energy physics community\, which has
been in a slow decline since then. With the 2012 discovery of the Higg
s boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider\, Europe has assumed world l
eadership in this field.
\n A combination of fiscal austerity\, co
ntinuing SSC cost overruns\, intense Congressional scrutiny\, lack of
major foreign contributions\, waning Presidential support\, and the wi
despread public perception of mismanagement led to the project’s dem
ise nearly five years after it had begun. Its termination occurred aga
inst the political backdrop of changing scientific needs as US science
policy shifted to a post-Cold War footing during the early 1990s. And
the growing cost of the SSC inevitably exerted undue pressure upon ot
her worthy research\, thus weakening its support in Congress and the b
roader scientific community.
\n As underscored by the Higgs boson
discovery\, at a mass substantially below that of the top quark\, the
SSC did not need to collide protons at 40 TeV in order to attain its p
remier physics goal. The selection of this design energy was governed
more by politics than by physics\, given that Europeans could build th
e LHC by eventually installing superconducting magnets in the LEP tunn
el under construction in the mid-1980s. In hindsight\, there were good
alternative projects the US high-energy physics community could have
pursued that did not involve building a gargantuan\, multibillion-doll
ar machine at a green-field site in Texas.
URL:https://www.physics.wisc.edu/events/?id=4182
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR