to do their physics," says Oddone, "and a large fraction of that community will be now going to Europe." Fermilab has been a center that has attracted a very large international community that comes to the U.S. "It is clearly a sad thing to see it end. "As you may imagine, if you have a third of the budget, it's a difficult thing to compete in the long term."įermilab's own particle collider, the Tevatron, is expected to be shut down soon, in part because the new one in Europe will make it obsolete, says Oddone. has eroded, and the support in Europe has grown," he says. But that this point, the support in the U. He says Fermilab's budget is currently just a third of the budget of CERN, the European lab that is home to the new Large Hadron Collider. Support for particle physics has been declining in this country while it's been growing in Europe, according to Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy's Fermilab, also known as the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago - the nation's premier site for this type of research. Because it said something about what we valued." It was not only sad for the field, but it was sad for the country. And this was a case where we retreated from that," says Friedman. "We had been a nation of being pioneering and doing things that other people wouldn't do. He's still somewhat haunted by the ghost of the Waxahachie supercollider. But Friedman can't help but regret the fact that all of the students, technology and attention are shifting to Europe. The United States did contribute hundreds of millions of dollars and critical hardware to the project in Europe. "We like to see the science advance anywhere in the world," Friedman says, "and the fact that the Europeans have taken on the responsibility of building this accelerator is a very joyful thing." Jerome Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT, says without the new collider, his field would be basically dead. Now Europe is firing up the Large Hadron Collider, which is three times less powerful than the Superconducting Super Collider would have been - but American physicists are still grateful to have it. Two years ago, Ellis County, Texas, sold the site for a paltry $6.5 million to an investment group that hoped to turn it into a secure data storage center. People have considered using it as a jail or an anti-terrorism training facility. Over the years, various plans for the site have been proposed. But other than that, it's pretty much just sat there, abandoned. This would-be wonder of science did have one big moment of fame in 1999 - as a film set for a Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie. "And there was sort of, you know, the usual tumbleweed or something blowing across," Schwitters says. Outside, the access shafts down to the tunnel were filled with dirt, like a grave, and the dirt had kind of sunk down. He recalls that the inside of a big magnet laboratory was empty, except for cartons of Styrofoam coffee cups. "I have to tell you, that was pretty depressing," he says. Schwitters returned to the abandoned site not too long ago to look around. Workers had constructed huge buildings and drilled over 14 miles of tunnel. Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin who served as director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory, says that when the project got cancelled, it had a staff of about 2,000 people and had already spent $2 billion. The Superconducting Super Collider, located near the small town of Waxahachie, Texas, was going to hurl subatomic particles down a 54-mile tunnel deep beneath farmland and smash the particles together with astonishing force. The Superconducting Super Collider was actually under construction when Congress killed the project back in 1993, during a period of budget cutbacks. It's designed to smash protons together to reveal the basic building blocks that make up the universe.īut not too long ago, the United States could have had a machine that was even more impressive. Once it becomes fully operational, this new collider will be the most powerful machine of its kind in the world. Later this month, the machine will begin smashing subatomic particles together so that scientists can search through the wreckage for clues about the early universe.įor some American scientists, the official start-up of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland is a bittersweet moment. The first test beams of protons have been sent through tunnels in a multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider.
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