[All_jlau] JLab Colloquium: Feb. 18, 11a.m.: M. Riordan - Demise of the SSC

[deborah magaldi]

_*Jefferson Lab Colloquium*_
Please note special time:
Thursday, Feb. 18, from 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF Center auditorium
Cookies & coffee in the CEBAF Center lobby, 10:30 a.m.
*
**A Bridge Too Far? **
**The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider.*

Michael Riordan
UC Santa Cruz (retired)
Author of The Hunting of the Quark and lead author of Tunnel Visions: 
The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider — on which this 
lecture is based.

*ABSTRACT*
In October 1993 the U.S. Congress terminated the Superconducting Super 
Collider — at over $10 billion the largest and costliest basic-science 
project ever attempted. It was a disastrous loss for the nation’s 
once-dominant high-energy physics community. With the discovery of the 
Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Europe has assumed world 
leadership in this field.
A combination of fiscal austerity, continuing SSC cost overruns, intense 
Congressional scrutiny, lack of major foreign contributions, waning 
Presidential support, and the widespread public perception of 
mismanagement led to the project’s demise nearly five years after it had 
begun. Its termination occurred against the political backdrop of 
changing scientific needs as U.S. 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 other research, weakening its 
support in Congress and the broader scientific community.
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 premier physics goal. The selection of 
this design energy was governed more by politics than by physics, since 
Europeans could eventually build the LHC by installing superconducting 
magnets in the LEP tunnel under construction in the mid-1980s. In 
hindsight, there were alternative projects the U.S. high-energy physics 
community could have pursued that did not involve building a gargantuan, 
multibillion-dollar machine at a new site in Texas.
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