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<big><u><b>Jefferson Lab Colloquium</b></u></big><br>
Please note special time:<br>
Thursday, Feb. 18, from 11 a.m.-12 p.m.<br>
Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF Center auditorium<br>
Cookies & coffee in the CEBAF Center lobby, 10:30 a.m.<br>
<big><big><b><br>
</b><b>A Bridge Too Far? </b><b><br>
</b><b>The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider.</b></big></big><br>
<big><br>
Michael Riordan<br>
UC Santa Cruz (retired)<br>
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.</big><br>
<br>
<b>ABSTRACT</b><br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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. <br>
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