Texas’ Lost Chance at Finding the ‘God Particle’
The Superconducting Super Collider site in Waxahachie, TX in 2008. Photo via Wikimedia CommonsAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Scientists in Switzerland announced overnight the discovery of what appears to be a particle that’s long been hypothesized, but never proven. It’s a bittersweet moment for some Texas physicists.
The search has been on for decades for what’s known as the Higgs boson, sometimes called the “God particle”.
Now the European Organization for Nuclear Research – or CERN – says it can prove the Higgs boson exists with their massive particle accelerator.
If you ask a physicist how big the discovery of the Higgs boson is they’re not going to downplay it.
“It’s certainly the most important thing that’s been discovered at the fundamental level in this century so far,” said Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist at UT. He’s been thinking about the Higgs boson for decades.
“We would have all this settled long ago, if Congress had not foolishly cancelled a great scientific project that was going to be built here in Texas. The Superconducting Super Collider.”
Weinberg was also on the site selection committee for the Super Collider project.
The plan was to build a state-of-the-art facility to study the most basic elements of everything in the universe. The payoff – as this promotional video from the time promises – is a new and exciting understanding of the world around us.
“The Super Collider was designed to study physics at extremely high energies – a factor of 20 times greater than was possible in the world at that time,” says Roy Schwitters, who directed the Super Collider project. It was planned for Waxahachie. It would be a massive circular underground tunnel, 54 miles long. A giant high-tech halo encircling Waxahachie.
“In fact, just going under ordinary folks farms and towns and highways where it would do its thing,” says Schwitters.
It did its thing like this: pretty much the same as any other collider.
“It was basically two large racetracks around which protons, which are the neucleus of hydrogen – the elementary stuff that we’re all made of – it could race them around these racetracks in opposite directions and cause them to collide head on,” says Schwitters.
“And there are these detectors that sort out what is produced in the collisions,” says Weinberg.
Scientists then study that data to find traces of things like – the Higgs boson.
With the blessing of Congress, construction began on the Super Collider in 1991. 15 miles of tunnel were dug. Two years and several billion dollars later, though: bad news.
The Super Collider was up against a new big science project you might have heard of: the International Space Station. The Super Collider? It lost.
“I couldn’t believe it at first,” said Weinberg. “It came as quite a shock in 1993, when the thing was canceled.”
“Well, it was devastating for everyone involved,” said Schwitters. “You know, the loss of the scientific opportunity because as I said, the reach of the facility, the energy advantage it had over even the CERN machine – which was being planned in those days – was three times greater. So it is…still is a great scientific opportunity.”
“Our feelings as American physicists about this great discovery at CERN have to be a little bittersweet,” said Weinberg. “This is a discovery that could have been and should have been made in America.”
Weinberg says he worries about the future of the country’s scientific boldness. He remembers being on the Larry King show in the early 1990s, debating the Super Collider with a Congressman.
“And he said he wasn’t against science, he just thought we ought to set priorities,” Weinberg recalls. “And I said ‘well that’s fine, I agree with that. The super collider would help us learn the laws of nature. Doesn’t that deserve a high priority?’ And he said ‘no’.”
The Superconducting Super Collider site sat vacant for almost 20 years. Roy Schwitters says it will probably never be used for scientific purposes. In fact, in January a Waxahachie chemical company bought the site. It will use the above ground buildings. But the company says the collider’s tunnels will remain closed and unused.
Podcast: Download (8.3MB)
