Supercollider texas4/18/2023 ![]() At fourteen Teraelectron-volts (TeV), it is the most energetic super collider ever built, and also one of the largest, most complex scientific experiments in history. To prove the existence of the Higgs boson, which has been contentiously described as the “God particle,” required $9 billion, ten years of study, thousands of careers, and a seventeen-mile collider ring bored out of the earth on the Franco-Swiss border. The international operation of CERN marked a monumental success in this respect. And yet the tools required to prove or disprove certain hypotheses often require significant amounts of money. People have to trust physicists more than ever before, a tall order considering the arcane nature of theoretical science. Many physicists condemned the announcement as sensational, a swat at the hard reality of modern experimental physics, which is forevermore Big Science: a political animal of bureaucracy, real estate, diplomacy, rhetoric, and tax-based funding. Most physicists were incredulous, and rightfully so, as the “superluminal” neutrinos turned out to be an artifact of miswired fiber optics and a bad atomic clock. If the phenomenon was real, almost all we knew about physics would crumble. A year before, a team of physicists at CERN announced the observation of neutrinos rushing faster than the speed of light. History has shown them the political consequences of premature announcements. The conference room then reassumed its churchlike sobriety. Mild applause ensued, a man removed his glasses and dabbed a handkerchief at his tears. ![]() That summer, at the official announcement in Geneva, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the stately director general of CERN, declared “I think we have it.” It was an enormous scientific discovery-arguably one of the biggest of the 21st century, a claim bolstered by its recent Nobel Prize award-but the celebration, on the whole, was restrained. Eventually their reticence suffused the name of the particle itself, as it was quickly described as a Higgs- like particle. Most were reluctant to claim outright that what they’d observed at the CERN particle collider in Geneva was indeed the elusive Higgs, the subatomic particle that could explain how all matter acquires mass. ![]() When the discovery of the last particle in the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson, was announced in the spring of 2012 many physicists, afflicted by an anxiety special to their profession, soon began hedging that same announcement. Magnablend, a chemical blending plant, bought the shell of the abandoned SSC last year. ![]()
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