There’s a famous story about
British scientist William Thomson. You may know him better known as Lord Kelvin,
the father of thermodynamics. On April 27th 1900, just a few months into a new century, he
gave a speech at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. And one quote in
particular has been repeated many times since: “There is nothing new to be discovered in
physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”. It’s a massively ironic
statement, because that same year, Max Planck would solve the Black Body radiation problem that
led directly to the founding of quantum mechanics. And 5 years later, Albert Einstein would
publish his first paper on relativity. But would it surprise you to hear that
Kelvin never said anything like this? Kelvin never predicted the end of physics, and in
fact if you listen to his speech he specifically identifies two remaining clouds that were left
hovering over the tree physics. And as it happens, those two clouds would turn out to
be quantum mechanics and relativity, fields that to this day, have only led to further
and further branches on the tree of physics, with no end in sight. Kelvin wasn’t perfect, he
saw no future in hot air balloons and airplanes, but it’s this urban legend that has unfairly
stuck to his reputation the longest. Some historians believe that the origin of this
urban legend comes from 6 years earlier, when an American scientist, Albert Michelson, claimed in
a speech “that the great principles had already been discovered, and that physics would henceforth
be limited to finding truths in the sixth decimal place.” Now in fairness to Michelson here, he
had always been more of an experimentalist than a theorist, and some historians argue that
he was more so making the case for further investments in scientific equipment. Because
if you don’t have precise enough equipment, you don’t really know what it is you don’t know.
What we can gather from this anecdote, it that it’s a recurring sentiment in human history where
we feel close to the end, close to figuring out the final mysteries of the universe, only to tug
at a thread that unravels a dozen new questions. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford was firing alpha
particles at gold atoms and discovered something amazing. Atoms are almost entirely empty space,
with the exception being an extremely small, but extremely heavy, nucleus. Many years
later, reflecting on these results, Rutherford said: "It was quite the most incredible
event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired
a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." Particle
accelerators had not been invented yet, and they wouldn’t be for another 18 years. But
Rutherford had just reinforced the great human tradition of smashing things together, and seeing
what happens. There have been dozens of days that humans have announced the end of physics.
Maybe one day one of them will be right. After a decade of planning and 2 presidential
elections, the digging for the SSC’s tunnels was finally going to begin. But almost immediately,
two disasters struck. One physical in nature, and one PR. Just days after Clinton’s inauguration, a
portion of a tunnel collapsed during construction, killing a worker. Tunneling on that section was
immediately halted pending an investigation, while a section with stabler geology continued to
be worked on. Two months later, Roy Schwitters, director of the SSC, had spent much of his
busy week being interviewed by reporter Malcolm Browne. In a lapse of judgement,
likely brought on by overwork and frustration, Schwitters loudly complained about congressional
interference in the project. Something he wouldn’t have done if he remembered that a New York Times
reporter was nearby. “We should be devoting ourselves to completing the machine as rapidly and
cheaply as possible, and get on with real science. Instead, our time and energy are being sapped by
bureaucrats and politicians. The SSC is becoming a victim of the revenge of the C students.” When
the quote hit papers it was instantly damaging, and Roy Schwitters quickly became the cliché
of the arrogant and pretentious physicists who felt entitled to billions of tax payer
dollars. It was an omen that business as usual would not play well in this new political era.
The election of Bill Clinton was not necessarily a bad sign for the SSC, but it also wasn’t a
good one either. On the campaign trail Clinton had expressed his support for the project, but it
was the kind of half-hearted conditional support you give to projects that aren’t really the focus
of your political platform. "Then there are some programs that I think are quite central to our
economy that require us to continue to fund them. Many are controversial with those who don't
benefit from them, but I believe in some of them. I'll tell you a couple I believe in,
I think that we should continue to fund the Superconducting super collider because I think
it's good science even though it's expensive". That is the voice of a man who could not care
less about this project. He's talking about it like a dad who has to pay for piano lessons, for
his kid who clearly does not like piano lessons. Clinton’s unofficial campaign slogan “it’s the
economy, stupid” had won him the election, and his priorities were set accordingly. Although it
started under Bush, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, would be continued under
Clinton, and would take up much of Clinton’s time during his first year in office. No, when it came
to science, Bill was more than happy to delegate to his right hand man. Vice president Al Gore,
who had served on the Science and Tech committee in the senate. And if you know anything about
Al Gore, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Clinton admin shifted research priorities
towards renewable energy, climate change and environmental research. Other winners under
this new admin were bio and medical research, and basically anything with a short term economic
payoff. This unfortunately, came at the expense of basic physics research, which included the SSC.
Al Gore was instead pushing for a variety of smaller projects under the DOE budget.
An advanced neutron source in Oak Ridge, the Tokamak Plasma Experiment at Princeton,
and a B Factory to be constructed at Cornell or SLAC. And finally, he was pushing to
keep Fermilab’s main injector upgrade alive, which you may remember from last time, was a
major sticking point for the state of Illinois in congress. The SSC had spent years draining
funding from other smaller projects, and now the reverse was happening. Also worth noting,
with no obvious military threats on the horizon, the military budget would be on the decline for
the foreseeable future, although it never got back down to Jimmy Carter levels. Clinton even made
changes to the proportions of federal R&D as well. Instead of the absurd 40/60% split of civil vs
military under the Bush admin, Clinton went so far as to reduce the split to 50/50%. Very on brand
for the democrats. “We promise to keep everything mostly the same, but with exactly 10% less war”.
As for the DOE top dog, Admiral Watkins was no longer the Secretary of Energy. Despite his
disagreements with the project management, he had been a fierce ally of the project, and
losing his support in congress would be a huge hurdle to overcome. But his influence didn’t
disappear completely. His pals from the military industrial complex, Cipriano and Siskin, were
still firmly embedded in the management chain at the SSC, for better and for worse. Watkins’
replacement was Hazel O’Leary, a lawyer from the Carter admin who specialized in energy policy.
Her appointment reflected the new priorities of Clinton and Al Gore. The SSC and high energy
physics was not a presidential priority. Rather, her appointment was intended to help address
climate change and nuclear weapons cleanup. That’s not to say she wasn’t going to at least
try to help the SSC. There was still the matter of foreign funding, and although Bush had failed
to get Japan to sign on, there was still hope. To kickstart talks, in February O’Leary had her
staff draft a letter to the Japanese PM. Except this letter was never sent, because Clinton had
already sent a letter discussing the economy, and Clinton’s science advisor refused to approve
another one. Another attempt to send a letter was blocked a month later, but this time by the
National Security council. They worried that it would send the message that the SSC was more
important than trade relations and financial aid to Russia. And so, SSC allies turned their
focus on the first ever summit between Clinton and Miyazawa, an in-person presidential request
could still make some magic happen. In preparation for this summit an A-list team of physicists
ended up making a visit to Washington where they spoke with Al Gore, who assured them that the
SSC was a top priority for the administration. Apparently this didn’t translate into the talks
with Clinton, who focused almost entirely on the ongoing trade war with Japan over automobile
parts. So again, the US refused to give a clear presidential endorsement, and Japan again,
responded by just…not giving them money. Funny how that works. However, even in the
off-chance that Japan signed onto the project, it was beginning to look like any amount of
money would be far too little, far, far too late. To get the project back on schedule it was
estimated that $2.3 billion would be required for fiscal year 1994. In the best case scenario,
congress might approve barely half of that. There were some in the Clinton White House
urging to cut their losses and kill the project altogether, in particular the newly promoted
Leon Panetta. If you remember from earlier he was the budget hawk who helped force the vote
that nearly took out the SSC last summer. But other advisors hatched a plan that would hopefully
keep the project alive. Rather than keeping to the original construction schedule, they would stretch
out the project by 3 or 4 years. This would add to the cost by at least $2 billion, finally pushing
it over the 20 billion mark…but, the critical factor would be that the yearly costs would go
down, and smaller yearly costs would have a much better chance at making it through congress. A
delayed collider was much better than no collider. The atmosphere at the Waxahachie lab site was
one of urgency and determination. With budget season looming over the horizon, there was a push
to get as much built and completed as possible. Maybe if they showed some progress, congress would
be kinder to them! After the accidental death just a few months prior, 6km of tunneling had been
completed. Late last year the magnet test lab had just finished construction, as had the linear
accelerator portion of the injection sequence. The superconducting magnets, which had been
a constant financial drain on the project, were finally robust enough for a
manufacturing run, soon they’d be pumped out in the thousands. And finally, the
DOE had approved construction for one of two major detectors. This detector alone was
projected to cost around a billion dollars, and yet DOE had only allocated $1 billion for
*both* detectors. I think it’s fair to say that those in Waxahachie were living in a different
world. One detached from the financial concerns of the rest of the country. One where the SSC’s
success hinged on just how much they wanted it. They’d already sunk so many years, and so
much money into it. What else could they do, but work their asses off? The SSC’s fate was never
in their hands, but I’m sure it felt like it was. June 23rd. The house is once
again voting on whether to cancel America’s most expensive scientific giga project.
After the nail-biter that was 1992’s budget vote, hopes were not high. This congress was full of
eager freshmen members who had budget bloodlust. Both democrats and republicans were elected
on campaign promises to reduce the deficit. Slash big government spending
to help put more money in the pocket of the American taxpayer.
And so, the votes are coming in. [Suspenseful sound effects] It’s still alive. A vote margin of 1 is as slim as
it gets. Although not uncommon in the senate, it’s absurdly unlikely in the house. Just the stuff
of divine intervention. Well, maybe not divine, but certainly an intervention from a higher power.
It turns out both Al Gore and Bill Clinton had spent the previous night making desperate 1-on-1
phone calls with individual representatives, doing all they could to sway their votes. And against
all odds, they succeeded. By one…single…vote. It couldn’t have been written anymore
perfectly. And that’s why I hate to do this. I need to pull the rug out now. You knew it
couldn’t be true. You knew this was coming. I couldn’t resist one last fakeout. This wasn’t
the vote count for the SSC. It was the vote count for the ISS. The International Space Station, AKA,
the other multi-billion dollar giga project that was hemorrhaging money, lived to see another day
by the skin of its teeth. Remember the old Space Station Freedom idea back from the Reagan days?
Well that idea was a money pit that underwent 7 redesigns before ultimately being scrapped.
The ISS concept revived the project, but there was a critical difference now. With the cold war
officially over, NASA and the Russian space agency had agreed to pool their funds, in addition to
contributions from Canada, Europe and Japan. But even then it was not a sure thing, the ISS
received harsh criticism from scientists. The ISS wasn’t space science, it was space hardware,
a $200 billion piece of hardware unlikely to teach humanity anything new beyond some basic
anti-gravity research. "Dr. Blueburgen up at Harvard said: "Microgravity research?
Is of Micro-importance." You can do microgravity research right here on
earth and save yourself $100 billion." And yet, the image of astronauts from several
nations living and working 420 kilometers above the earth is too compelling not to pursue.
Clinton’s rationale should be obvious. If the US gave up on the ISS, it would have meant a huge
political fallout from several angry nations who were committed to funding it, as well
as nearly 75,000 American jobs disappearing. Clinton was not having an easy first year in
office. Although he won the election he had been accused of marital infidelity on the campaign
trail. In late 1993 “Don’t ask don’t tell” would succeed in pissing off both the left and right
sides of the aisle. His healthcare reform bill, spearheaded by first lady Hillary Clinton, was
deeply unpopular with Republicans, and even his own party was split on it, Democrats to his
right and left criticized the plan as misguided. Furthermore, his economic stimulus bill was
being filibustered by Senate Republicans. Clinton already lacked the influence to get
push through his main campaign promises. It’s not a surprise then that if he had to
choose to support just one science giga project, he’d choose the one that was splitting the
cost between several nations. So on June 24th, the very next day, when the SSC came up to a
vote, the result was exactly what you’d expect. [THUD] The total was 280-to-150. A 130
seat margin to kill the SSC. The house was going to be heard, and you do not
ignore the will of the house. And just like last time, it would come down to the senate. Clinton
had predicted this path. “I always anticipated that if we were going to save the super collider,
we would fight for it in conference”. But this would be a much tougher fight than in 1992.
Members of the house remembered what happened last time, how they were strong-armed by the senate,
how they had used the energy and water budget to take hostages. The house wasn’t going to get
played a 2nd time. So representative John Dingell, a prominent SSC critic and member
of the Northeast-Midwest alliance, played one of the few cards they had left, he
demanded a televised hearing in front of his Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. He
was going to turn the DOE inside out and get to the bottom of the mismanagement and generally
buffoonery that plagued the SSC. Dingell was a skilled interrogator, notorious for going after
scientists for any misuse of taxpayer funding. This intense 9 hour hearing would prove to be
a PR nightmare for the SSC. Dingell stated that “the SSC ranks among the worst projects we have
seen in terms of contract mismanagement and failed government oversight”. SSC management was reamed
out for the delays in getting a cost-management software up and running, and it would emerge
that the total magnet cost might reach $5.2 billion, double what had been estimated.
Energy Secretary O’Leary was hit particularly hard during questioning. She blamed the management
structure put in place under Admiral Watkins with Cipriano basically removing all control from
Schwitters. But she also lambasted the physicists too, arguing they couldn’t be trusted to run
things on their own and she vowed to wrestle away any construction responsibilities away from them.
Following the hearing a full audit of the project finances was performed, with generous estimates
saying the final cost would be $20 billion, and the worst case ones saying $24 billion. This
was before any cost increases from the proposed stretch-out. Gosh, do you remember the
days when we thought $8 billion was a lot? With the SSC’s future in jeopardy, Texas panicked,
and held back nearly $80 million in funding, leading to director Schwitters having to cut
costs left and right. It led to over 300 layoffs. It didn’t help that Schwitters and Cipriano
had become even more dysfunctional. They were no longer on speaking terms. This came after a
Washington Post article, where they published a private memo where Cipriano recommended that
Schwitters be fired. Senator Bennet Johnston, in an effort to paint the project in a better light,
held a less adversarial hearing in the senate. Dale bumpers yet again introduced his amendment to
kill the SSC. "Now the senator wants to challenge the $20 billion figure I guess." "That's right."
"Okay. We've been through this so many times I know what you're thinking before you say it." "And
I'll just simply say: We're not to $20 billion yet. But we're not to $13 billion yet either
but we know we're headed there." "You've got to be eating and smoking something awful strong
to believe that this is the last word." "I mean are we going to just let this country sink slowly
like the sun in the west at even-at evening tide and say we can't compete anymore. We have no more
scientific curiosity, we have no more scientific competitiveness? We're going to let this budget
deficit fueled by entitlements just overwhelm us?" The votes came in... [Suspenseful sound effects] …57-42…to save the SSC. The senate had come
through yet again, albeit with the worst margin so far. The SSC was losing allies left
and right. Round 1 went to the house. Round 2 went to the senate. The ultimate fate of the SSC
would be decided in round 3: The house and senate were going to meet in a conference committee yet
again. Would a compromise be made, and the SSC live on? Or would the house get its way?
Boehlert and Slattery, the perpetual enemies of the SSC in the house, anticipated a repeat of
the dirty tactic used in the 1992 budget vote. The house and senate compromise committee
was likely to be filled only by members of the appropriations committees, almost all of
whom were SSC allies. The two of them rallied to get SSC opponents included, but the speaker
of the house ignored them, citing precedent. So how exactly do you compromise between a senate who
wants $1.2 billion, and a house who wants uh...$0? Well at least according to the compromise
committee, you give them the full $1.2 billion. You can imagine that this enraged much of the
house. It was one thing to keep funding the SSC, but it was an outright insult, to award it
the full budget request. And once again, just like last time, the SSC’s budget wasn’t on
its own, it was surrounded by an entire year’s worth of water and energy funding, funding that
goes directly towards local district projects. Hostage taking at its finest. If the
house truly wanted to kill the SSC, they had to be prepared to also kill the
rest of the energy budget. But actually, no. No. Jim Slattery refused to accept this, and
so introduced a motion to explicitly order the compromise committee to delete SSC funding from
their budget report. And so the house members, sick and tired of being made out to be fools,
voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motion. 282-143. The hostage analogy kinda breaks down
here, but I’m gonna do my best. It’s kind of like if everyone in town agreed that you should
let the hostages go, and then you got sniped in the head. 115 Republicans and 166 Democrats
made their opinions clear. The SSC had to stand on its own. No hostages. When the actual bill
came to a vote, the house made its will known. 332-81. The SSC was dead. It ends here. Shut it
down. The senate, knowing they were defeated, agreed, 89-11. For 114 freshman members of
congress, this was their first time voting on the SSC. 82 of them voted to kill it.
When the house wills it, it will find a way. George Bush once compared the supercollider
to the pyramids of Giza. He of course meant it in the wonders of the world sense. And in
a uh, ironic twist of fate, his words still kind of hold true. The supercollider is not a
world wonder. But it is a tomb. Following the fateful house vote that ultimately killed it,
Senator Johnston and congressman Bevill held a conference committee in a last ditch effort
to save the program. During which, they begged and pleaded with Boehlert and Slattery. This
begging and pleading led to an almost comical compromise. The SSC got to keep its $1.2 billion
budget. The catch, was that it could only be used to shut the project down. US congress had just
approved the most expensive funeral in world history. In a quote that is extremely insensitive
coming from a man from Louisiana, Senator Johnston would tell reporters that “The SSC has been
lynched, and we have to bury the body”. When the SSC was officially killed in congress, only 22
km of tunneling had been complete, just a little more than a quarter of the total loop. In total,
$3.85 billion had been spent. The reactions from the academic community were bleak. Leon Lederman
described it as a “tragedy for the field and everyone in it.” “The government decided, in its
wisdom, that high-energy physics has no future.” The day after the House vote that killed the SSC,
our old friend, Burton Richter, received a phone call from senator Bennett Johnston's chief of
staff. It was over. There was no coming back from this. Sitting across from Richter was John
Peoples, the current director of Fermilab. For the past month he'd been quietly asked by several
DOE officials if he'd be willing to step in and replace Roy Schwitters in a last ditch attempt to
save the project. At this point he couldn't save the SSC. It'd be the equivalent of becoming
captain after the Titanic hit the iceberg. But at the very least, he could prevent it from
taking down America's other labs along with it. "When the uh S-congress voted to terminate the
funding for the SSC project I realized it'd be very important that this be done well, both for
URA, which also runs Fermilab, of which I am director, and for the whole high energy physics
community. The people who built this laboratory had struggled very very hard to try to bring it to
completion, against really difficult odds. I mean, if you had to pick a time to build a laboratory,
at the end of the cold war was not a good time." Some worried that Schwitters would view the move
as a coup, but he didn’t put up a fight. In his resignation letter, he stated that “[he] came to
the URA and Texas to build the SSC. And that is no longer possible”. “He felt uncomfortable and
inexperienced in the role of funeral director”. After 5 years, every original
name on this management chart, had left the project. His departure would help
reduce tensions at the Waxahachie site. Following the nasty televised hearings where Secretary
O’Leary had thrown Schwitters under the bus, their relationship had become extremely bitter,
removing him was a welcome move for all parties. Although you would think that shutting a project
down would be much easier than starting it, there was still a tangled mess of delicate
issues to resolve. The most politically sensitive was how to deal with the Texas
issue. Texas Governor Anne Richards was livid, she had tried to get Bill Clinton to veto the
cancellation, but multiple sources have indicated that he gave her an ultimatum. It’s either the
SSC, or the space station, two major projects that Texas had business ties to. The choice at that
point, was basically already made. So instead, she demanded that DOE reimburse them $1.2
billion for what they had already invested, in addition to $519 million for any new research
that could be carried out at the Waxahachie site, the same amount they would have gotten
for a single year of lab funding. But given that Congress had only given $1.2 billion total for
the entire project shutdown, that reimbursement appeared impossible. Despite this, it was the
opinion of the White House that Texas should be repaid, not only because of the potentially
nasty legal and political consequences, but also because, and I quote here:
“it’s the right thing to do”. In the end Texas had invested around $1 billion in cash and
assets, and received back $393 million in cash, and $956 million in land and facilities. As
fair as deal as they could hope for given the circumstance. By early 1994, those who were left
working at the lab said it's like working in a morgue. The initial termination benefits for all
the laid-off employees were apparently so harsh, some people feared for Secretary O’Leary’s safety
if she attended a meeting with thousands of about to be fired workers. O’Leary met with John
Peoples to discuss the termination benefits, and Peoples pushed hard for better terms.
Later, in the eventual all-hands meetings, she dramatically ripped up the old contract into
shreds. "Everyone was going to be taken care of". John Peoples, she stated "[is] a guy who knows
how to run something”. In a clever move, Peoples realized that they could use some of the remaining
budget to provide advanced computer training to the soon to be unemployed workers. This allowed
many of them to quickly find jobs in Dallas, saving the DOE around $300 million in unemployment
benefits. As for the remaining buildings and infrastructure, Governor Richards put together a
committee to plan future research projects. The magnet lab could pretty much be used as-is, and
the magnets could go towards any future colliders. The linear accelerator on the other hand had
potential use in development of a radioactive cancer treatment labs. The computer infrastructure
could easily be turned into an advanced computing lab. Non-physics proposals included turning
the site into a prairie restoration project, or using the tunnels for geology studies. In
the end however, none of these projects ever happened. Congress debated funding for all
of them, but literally, every, single one, was deemed too expensive to be worth it. Magnet
lab? Too expensive. Cancer research? There’s no nearby medical facilities. Geology studies? The
tunnels were filled with water and sealed off. I can’t put an optimistic spin on this. So much
money was wasted for no reason. The only positive outcome was that 10 school districts and one
university received the leftover tech equipment. That’s it. Like many Democrats, Texas Governor
Anne Richards lost her re-election bid in the Republican Revolution of 1994. But I should
stress, like everything else in this story, her loss can’t be chalked up to just one cause.
The SSC collapsing didn’t lose her the election, but it certainly didn’t help. The GOP
could have put literally any no-name in a suit and they probably would have won.
And the man they chose wasn’t exactly a no-name. To date she is the last Democrat
to ever hold the office of Texas Governor. By this point, John Peoples had
effectively been running two labs, the SSC and Fermilab, and he was at his limit.
He resigned in the summer of 1994. Unexpectedly, American particle physics would stumble onto one
last major discovery. Fermilab, had found evidence of the top quark. The sixth, and final quark was
detected, with its mass matching up perfectly with the theory. Fermilab, even with its
30 year old tech, had one last breakthrough under its belt. With that, it was official, all
six quarks had been discovered in America. When the SSC was cancelled, it meant minor good news
for a few smaller labs. SLAC got $69 million for its B factory. Oak Ridge could start its advanced
neutron source with $33 million. And finally, Fermilab got $48 million for its main injector
upgrade. The US wasn’t going to lead particle physics for much longer, but at least for the
next 10 years, Fermilab would remain relevant. In the years since, Waxahachie considered
a number of non-science projects to make some of their money back. A wind tunnel, an
exotic mushroom farm, Six Flags Under Texas! Decades earlier Waxahachie had been the filming
location for a few westerns, and in poetic example of history repeating itself, the SSC site was
used as a film set for Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Universal Solider, and the stupid yet amazing show
Prison Break. After nearly 10 years of un-use, in 2006 a comically Texan multimillionaire named
Johnnie Bryan Hunt finally bought the site. Hunt was well known for having a hand in a dozen
different business areas, and he planned to bring his newest venture, data storage, to Waxahachie.
I don’t think there’s another human being who has ever been this excited about data storage as this
man. “I am always dealing in things I know nothing about” “What turns me on is when 20 of your best
friends tell you it won't work, […] I think that does something to me." In final cruel twist of
fate, as if the site was cursed, Hunt slipped on a patch of ice and hit his head on the pavement.
He died from injuries a few days later. The data center project ended with him. Later a chemical
manufacturer known as Magnablend purchased the land in 2012. Although if you believe youtube
comments, they're just a facade, and the tunnels are actually being used as a series of bunkers for
thew global elite. As a tribute, Magnablend named their new facility the Specialty Services Complex.
The SSC name, at least in spirit, lives on. I told you this story doesn’t have a
happy ending. And I guess that’s true, if you focus only the American-centric
perspective. Pretty much the same day the SSC was cancelled, American physicists knew that
the future of multi-TeV physics lay in Europe, and thus began the slow bureaucratic process
to get the US a seat at the table. CERN, and their Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, was
the way forward. For most of you, I think you know how this story ends. But even then, the LHC
was never guaranteed to succeed, and did indeed face several catastrophic hurdles that could
have led to the same fate as the SSC. The fact that it did succeed in spite of those hurdles,
is worth celebrating, and worth learning from. The LHC concept is much older than you might
expect, with plans first forming in 1984. In the usual European fashion however, the plans were
much less ambitious, and involved a multi-stage upgrade process. The first stage was to build
the LEP (large electron-positron) collider. Perhaps you remember, CERN director general Herwig
Schopper testified in front of congress in 1987, begging the Americans to join up with them, to no
avail. The LEP was completed in 1989, with a ring circumference of 27 km. The LEP could collide low
mass leptons up to 0.2 TeV. But to break through the multi TeV barrier they would need to support
heavier particles, and thus stage 2 was going to use hadrons, AKA, any particle consisting of 2
or more quarks. So already, maybe you can see a couple advantages the LHC had over the SSC.
First, a unified governing body of 19 countries, instead of just 1. No nation on its own, no
matter how wealthy, or powerful, can do this alone anymore. The physical scale is too vast, the costs
too outlandish to be shouldered by one country. And secondly, the LHC had a much smaller scope
that could re-use existing infrastructure, i.e. an already constructed tunnel,
and a chain of proton injectors. Here, it’s hard not to draw the comparison to Fermilab.
If that SSC had been built at an existing lab, with existing technical and human infrastructure,
how much could have been saved on construction? With the benefit of hindsight many in the field
have come to the understanding that the SSC’s design was flawed, and that even if it got built
the LHC could still rival it in performance. In the 1980s when the SSC was designed,
the general consensus was that the only variable that mattered was max energy, hence
why they chose the gargantuan 40 TeV and massive footprint. To be competitive the much
smaller LHC loop would have to compensate by maxing out a different variable. Luminosity,
AKA the number of collisions per second. A single high energy collision on its
own doesn’t mean much, because you can’t distinguish it from the background noise. You
want to crank up the luminosity until you’ve got hundreds of millions of collisions per
second. The SSC, for a variety of reasons, would have had a garbage luminosity. So it was
here where the LHC would have had the edge. Despite having 19 member nations, there was still
a period of doubt where it seemed like the LHC might not get funded. CERN’s member states
contribute a yearly amount based on a set percentage of their GDP. Germany in
particular was central figure in CERN, being a country with considerable wealth and a
long history of leadership in particle physics. But the 90s were a time of major upheaval for
Germany, the slow unification of East and West Germany was costing hundreds of billions
in Euros each year, so it should come as no surprise that Germany was requesting
a reduction in their yearly contribution. With one of CERN’s key financial backers pulling
back, and the UK hesitant to commit, France and Switzerland had to up their contributions, given
that the CERN campus was actually built across their borders. And in the meantime, the man picked
to manage project, Lyndon Evans, was devising a clever plan to keep costs down, and convince
Germany to stay on board. He proposed a two stage “missing magnet scheme”, where 33% of the magnets
wouldn’t be installed at first. This would lower the total energy output from 14 to 10 TeV, but
the costs would be lowered accordingly. Germany ended up agreeing to the missing magnet proposal,
but in the end that wasn’t necessary. By mid 1995 Japan had signed on to CERN as a non-member,
observer nation. This basically means you contribute money and scientists to CERN, but
without council voting rights. This would soon be followed by contributions from Canada, India,
Isreal, and Russia, each of whom would contribute a component to the detectors. And in 1997, Bill
Clinton finally did what Reagan should have done back in ’87. The United States signed onto CERN as
an observer nation, agreeing to give at least $917 million. The LHC now had the money to go
all out. It’d be built in just one stage, with all its magnets, with a target end date of
2005. The total cost? 3.7 billion Swiss Francs, or $4 billion US dollars. Now that’s a much
easier pill to swallow than $24 billion huh? Of course, things didn’t go as smoothly
as predicted. Again, just like the SSC, the most expensive and troublesome part of the
project would be the magnets. Specifically, 1232 superconducting dipoles. They would need to
be operated at 1.9K, and could support absurdly strong fields of 8T, surpassing the SSC’s 6.6T.
Development on these took nearly a full decade. For this reason, among others, a review of project
finances in 2001 revealed that they were nearly 850 million Francs over budget, which is almost
$1 billion US. The council members of CERN were incredulous, and ordered a management review.
Many feared that Evans, with his one-on-one, small picture management style would be fired.
However, the review team acknowledged that Evans understood the project at a deep technical
level, and his staff was loyal to him, so he was allowed to stay on. It’s hard not
to draw comparisons to Maury Tigner here. If he had stayed on as project manager, he may have
seen the SSC through to its completion. Instead, the SSC had seen a revolving door of 6 separate
project members, some only staying on for months at a time. It also helped that unlike the SSC,
which had no way to effectively keep track of cost overruns, CERN did. Their software
program tracked everything from systems, subsystems, down to individual components, and was
powered by the World Wide Web that CERN had a hand in creating. So when politicians came knocking
with budget questions, Evans could point out exactly where the problems were. Lyndon Evans
would see the project through to its eventual completion in 2008. There were delays, sure, but
the LHC is possibly the most complex scientific instrument in existence. The fact that this got
done at all is a testament to decades of planning, the cooperation of thousands of scientists, and
the financial support of a couple dozen nations. Maybe you remember the day the LHC came online
for the first time, in September of 2008. But you probably don’t remember that 9 days later, Lyndon
Evans received a panicked phone call informing him of a near disaster. Multiple magnets had quenched,
I.E., faulty electrical connections had warmed and the magnets were no longer superconducting.
The melted connections caused a huge spark, releasing nearly six tons of helium gas. In
the investigation that followed it was found about 80 of the 10,000 electrical connections
were faulty and would have to be replaced. Evans and the rest of CERN had
a difficult choice to make. Option A: They could do a partial quick and easy
repair in one year, and try and get some data, but they wouldn’t be able to operate at max energy,
lest they risk another fatal meltdown. Option B: Do a full repair, pushing back
experiments by multiple years. They decided that there had been enough
waiting. “It was time to do some physics”. They did the partial repairs and the
LHC finally had its first collision on November 23rd, 2009. The LHC was running at
half its design energy, which was still a lot, but its luminosity was garbage. The initial
repairs had made the LHC functional again, but it would take multiple years of calibration
to get its luminosity back up to full health. With the LHC temporarily out of commission,
CERN faced an unexpected challenger. Now you would think by this point that American
particle physics had largely accepted its fate as a sidekick to CERN, but not quite so. SLAC
had found the tau neutrino in the year 2000, and Fermilab Tevatron eventually did get its
main injector upgrade finished in 2001. And in the intervening years there had been some exciting
evidence that you could produce a Higgs particle at a much smaller mass than first anticipated.
Masses small enough that even the much weaker Tevatron had a shot at finding the Higgs before
CERN. And so for nearly a decade they struggled and struggled, because their luminosity was also
not good enough. So far all they had managed to do was help narrow the search region, crossing off
156 to 177 GeV. And they weren’t just racing CERN, they were also racing a deadline. The Tevatron
was scheduled to be permanently shut down in September of 2011. The 2008 financial crash
had thrown the entire country for a loop, and particle physics wasn’t exactly on the
top of Obama’s priority list. Despite this Fermilab scientists campaigned for $180 million
to keep the Tevatron running for 3 more years, and they were willing to cut back on the rest of
the lab’s activities to pay for it. But Secretary Steven Chu had different priorities for the
DOE budget, with renewables once again taking precedence. The Tevatron shut down as scheduled
in September of 2011. They knew it was a longshot, and they didn’t know if they would actually find
the Higgs. But they at least wanted to try. And, with that, it was the end of an era. Cornell
and SLAC both shut down their colliders in 2008, leaving only Brookhaven with the
last major American collider. Another factor in CERN’s favour here was the
time period. Computing power in the 2010s was leagues ahead of computing power in the 2000s.
And when your machine spits out 300 Gb of data per second that makes a huge difference. Purely from a
data crunching perspective CERN was saving months if not years. A decade head start with the SSC
may really have just been a couple years at most. During this period rumours and false alarms of
a Higgs detection were beginning to circulate. But all they could say confidently, was the
Higgs mass wasn’t between 145 GeV and 466 GeV. According to the standard model, that left one
place left to look: Between 114 GeV ad 145 GeV. As 2011 turned into 2012, that region narrowed.
116-130 GeV. As thousands of scientists poured over months of data, a spike began to emerge.
4 separate experiments were saying something was appearing at 125 GeV. For some scientists,
this all but confirmed it. The statistics were crunched, and that the chances that this was just
noise, were 1 in 3 million. This was it. The first major discovery of the LHC. A particle
that was consistent with the Higgs boson. Leon Lederman, who I’ve been incorrectly calling
Leon Lederman, originally wrote his book The God Particle in 1993, as a way to drum up public
support for the floundering SSC project, which was cancelled just months later. In
2006 he released a 2nd edition of his book, and he added a preface, acknowledging that it
was kind of awkward that the original premise relied on a non-existent collider. And yet,
it was just shy of 2 years before the LHC would be up and running. “This new instrument
will not be surrounded by the friendly folks in Walks-a-hachie, but will be located in Geneva,
Switzerland, which has fewer good rib restaurants but more fondue, and is easier to spell
and pronounce.” After days of cautious internal celebration, the director of
CERN officially made the announcement that they had found the Higgs Boson.
They announced it on the 4th of July.
