What happened to the Superconducting Supercollider?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, not that I'm looking, but where can I find the world's biggest laser? Oh, that's here in the United States at the National Ignition Facility. To have a hundred and ninety two beams. Oh man, it sounds awesome. How about the world's biggest telescope that's actually also an American project at Mount Graham in Arizona. It's twelve meters across twelve impressive. And who's got the record for the biggest particle accelerator. That's actually a European project. That's the large agar and collider at CERN. What happened? Why don't Americans have the record for that too? Well, you know we could have had a super jumbo Texas sized collider. Well, let's just say there's a super story there. Nice, it's a Texas size tall tale. I'm guessing it's a true story of entriguing and politics, super colliding story. I am more Hammond, cartoonist in the creator of PhD comments, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I definitely want more government dollars to build bigger particle colliders. Nice, I think we both agree on that. I also want more dollars. You didn't specify what you're gonna do with all that government cash. Make more podcast episodes and welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio, a super podcast in which we super collide your brain with super crazy ideas. We go all over the universe to talk about the biggest things, the smallest things, the weirdest things. But mostly we talk about the most wondrous and curiosity invoking things, the things we want to understand, and the things that science is working right now every day twenty four seven in white lab coats to figure out for you, tried all the amazing and wonderful things to discover out there in the universe. But we also kind of like to talk about the process of discovery because you know, it's a human endeavor and there are a lot of interesting stories that happen in our search for the truth about the universe. That's right, Science is for people. It's not for just AI bots to digest and understand. We do it because it's our curiosity about the universe. It's the things that we want to know, and so not only is it done for people, is done by people, and those people have names and jobs and real lives and ambitions, and they make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are supersized. Yeah, and sometimes the science has even done on people. I am fortunately not involved in any of that kind of science. You never had a particle collide with you, Daniel. I am particles, and I collide with particles, but I've never intentionally collided particles with people for science. You know. That's actually one of the only positive spinoffs of particle physics is that you can use particle beams to treat answer. That's right. Yeah, But mostly we build these big particle colliders because we want to replicate the situation in the early universe. We want to create a little environment where nature can reveal to us some of the secrets of how the universe is put together. But it is a human endeavor, and as such, there are always a lot of interesting stories about how discoveries are made or what people were thinking at the time, and sometimes great stories about big experiments and why they didn't work, or why they work, or why some of them weren't even built. That's right. The history of particle physics is sort of an escalating series of colliders, bigger and bigger, more and more energy, Probing higher and higher into the secrets of nature. They got bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, until one day they got maybe too big. And so right now, the Europeans have the biggest particle collider basically as far as we know in the universe, right, as far as we know, the biggest collider as far as we know, although you know, it doesn't create the most energetic particles. We've seen those come from space, and so it could be that there are alien particle physicists out there shooting their particle accelerator acces. So it's the biggest human made particles that we know of that we know, and so the Europeans have it at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Right, that's the biggest one, that's the record holder. And so the question is why don't the Americans have it? You know, we have the biggest laser, the biggest telescope, and the biggest gravitation wave detector at least at the moment. So there's kind of an interesting story there, and so to be on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what happened to the super conducting super collider. It's super mysterious. It's super fascinating, and it's something that came up briefly in a podcast episode we did a couple of weeks ago about the discovery of the Higgs boson and we mentioned the super conducting super collider, and I remember you were like, what is that a real name for a real thing? It sounds like you just made that up. Why would you put super twice in the title? I mean, that's that's like an extra superlatives. It's so good they used it twice, And a lot of listeners were curious about this and wanted to hear more about this incredibly named super collider, so we decided to do a whole episode on why people built it and what it meant and why it didn't end up getting finished right, And this is kind of part of the story of particle physics in the sense that, you know, I guess we started probably with like small, little particle colliders, and then they've just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger over the years. And the question is maybe one of these gods too big? Yeah, because the only thing that limits us from building them bigger is money. The more money you give us, the bigger the collider that you can build, but also the more seco to you can reveal from nature. So it's sort of like you can just buy information, like you want to know more about the basic way the universe works, spend more money. It's really very direct. But you know, we live in practical times, and it's not always infinite cash to fund your science projects. So these machines operate in a political environment. They need support, they need funding, they need continued funding to be finished. And so it's a fascinating story of sort of how much money you could ask for for your particle physics toys. Yeah, I guess science is political and itself, but also it depends on politics, right, that's right. Well, you know, we try not to be political. We're serving information that's of course used to make important political and policy decisions, but we try to be as fact based as possible. But anytime you're spending money, that's political, right, And any dollar you're spending on a particle colliders that dollar you're not spending on poverty programs, or on weapons systems, or on anything else. And so it's always a political decision about how much to spend on science and what kind of science to spend it on? Do you want the biggest laser, the biggest telescope or the biggest microscope. And there's another fascinating angle there, and that most of these experiments end up being pretty international, like the folks on them like me, I don't really care if it's a Russian or a Chinese person or a South American or Canadian who's working with me. But when we sell these projects to our national governments who fund them, a lot of times we end up pitching them like, hey, this is an American national pride project, all right. So, as usual, Daniel went out there into the Internet to ask how many people out there knew about the almost bill superior super conducting super collider superlatively named. And so before you listen to these answers, think about what comes to mind when you hear the words super conducting super collider. Here's what people had to say. It was a particle accelerator that was planned for the United States. I think it was meant for Texas, and I believe it was supposed to be two or three times bigger than what we have at the LHC at CERN, But I could be wrong on that. Part and it never happened because the US government cut funding for it. Actually, I've never heard the word super conducting super collider. I think it's similar to the let's see the larger collider, but but condly colliding the conductive particles. Maybe two things stand out to me. One is you say it in past tense, so it's not around anymore. And the second one is there's a lot of supers being used, So I mean superconductor makes sense because that means that it's very efficient and it's not losing any energy as heat or other items. So the difference between a conductor and a superconductor is understood. But a super collider, that's so if you've got a regular collider. I'm wondering what the difference between a large collider and a super collidery So that sounds like it is massive or planning on crashing large items together. I don't know. I'm super anxious to find out if I have the right one. The super conducting super collider was the United States attempt to create the biggest super collider before was created. I believe we try to do it down in Texas or something like that, and Carn's just either never approved the funning or cut off the funning. All Right, I like these answers. They're pretty super I like the person who broke it down. They're like trying to figure it out like you used to past tense. So I know it's not around anymore, and there's a lot of super so it must be pretty cool. I was impressed, you have. They made a lot of progress just based on the name of the thing and how I read the question. So super job to that person like asking if super is bigger than large? That sounds like a Starbucks question. It's venty larger than small. Who knows. I'd like a venti conducting hyper collider, coffee grande collider. Al Right, So this was a big experiment that was almost built. So step us through Daniel. What was the super conducting SuperCollider? So the super conducting super collider. It's really a tragedy and it still pains me to this day that we didn't build this thing because not only would it have been a huge collider, it would have been the biggest collider of its time, and even still today, it would be bigger than any collider we have. Now, you know, we measure these colliders not just in size, Like, it doesn't really matter how physically large they are. Yes, it does, Daniel. If you're gonna put it in Texas, it has to be the biggest one. We measure these things in terms of their energy, So it really is about the energy of the particles. Because remember, the goal of building a big collider is not just to say, look upon my works, e mighty. It's because we want to create a lot of energy in a small space, because that allows us to probe really massive particles. Remember e equals mc squared. If you put a lot of energy into a small space and then as long as you're above some m that nature has, you can create that particle. And so it's a great way to just sort of like search the cosmos for new kinds of particles without knowing in advance that they are there. Right. It's it's kind of like having a big telescope and just having more magnification or having a better microscope and having better you know, ability to look at smaller things. It's like the more energy you have, the more you can probe what happens at the quantum level. Yeah, and it's very similar to having a more powerful microscope because the more energy you have, literally the smaller distance scale you can probe, because there's this anti correlation between sort of the width of the wave function and the energy of the particle, and so higher the energy you're probing, the smaller the feature you can look at, for example, like inside the proton or inside the cork or whatever. Oh I see, it's like literally the particles are smaller the fact where they go sort of you know, it's like you can probe substructures of the proton or if there is substructure to the cork, so to the electrons, you can see them only with higher energy collider that could break those tight bonds and and sort of resolve them at those very high energies. And so yeah, we want to explore the universe, and a one great way to do that is to create these really high energy collisions. So again it's not about the eyes of the colliders, about the energy stored. And we measured that in terms of electron volts. But there's so many electron volts in these collisions that we have a crazy unit called tera electron volts trillion electron volts and to orient you, a billion electron volts is about how much energy they're stored in a proton, So a terra electron volts is like a thousand times the energy of a proton. Take me back in history, So we're talking about the eighties, right, So the super conducting super collider was going to be built in the eighties, and it was actually conceived by Ronald Reagan, the president. Yeah, and so we're back in the Cold War, you know, and back then a lot of science was closely linked to national pride and to national security. People felt like as long as we were on the cutting edge of science, including space and including particle physics and weapons physics, that we were secure and we were beating the Russians or the Soviets at the time in all these technologies, which you know, contributed to our national defense dot dot dog. But it's literally like bragging rights, like the moonshot, like getting to the moon, you know, didn't directly improve our national security, but just being able to say that we didn't and they didn't just it was just kind of a a national pride thing. Yeah. I think it motivates the population and makes us feel secure and all that stuff. And there's also some direct spin offs, you know, going to the moon helps you develop rockets, which is important for I. C. B M. S. For you know, dropping weapons on your enemies, populations, and all sorts of terrible things. Particle physics is much less direct, right, maybe if you are understanding the nature of the universe, eventually you could tap into that energy source or build new things or whatever. You know. World War two was a lesson that, like nuclear physics and particle physics could directly lead to weapons technology, you know, the development of the atomic bomb and the understanding of the atom. So there was a lot of ideas wrapped up in there, like we should be at the forefront, Americans should be at the leading edge of particle So you tell me that no politician at that time said the words you mean, you want to build a giant particle gun, great, can we aim it? You definitely can't aim this kind of thing at all. And you know, at the time people were thinking about particle guns, but mostly in terms of star wars. This was more for science. And so this was a project originally conceived by Reagan and they thought, well, let's build a huge particle collider, bearer than anybody's ever built one before, and we'll just put American particle physics on the map. I mean, we're already were sort of leaders in this area, a lot of Nobel prizes for developing the technology behind particle colliders and you know, and Lawrence developed the sincratron technology. So Americans were already leaders, and this was like, let's hang onto the leadership in this area. And so it was like three and he started this project. But these things take, you know, decades to plan in decades to build, and so you're at the mercy of the changing political time, right because you can change government in between a project or at least support potentially absolutely. And you know, then the Berlin Wall fell down and the Soviet Union collapsed and we no longer had the same adversary, which fueled the Cold War, which made us want to necessarily fight these battles and uh, you know, beat the Russians, all right. So Reagan was involved, he championed in and it was aiming pretty high, like at the time, what was the biggest collider in terms of energy. The Europeans were planning their own collider, which was going to be around thirteen or fourteen terror electron volts that eventually became the LHC. The only C was on a similar time scale to the super Connecting super Collider. Of course, it ended up being delayed by ten years, etcetera, etcetera. But that's sort of the scales like fourteen TV at CERN. But this one, the super conducting super collider, This thing was going to be forty t EV. It was three times almost three times more energetic than the LHC is today. That's there were swinging for the fences. It really were, and they were like, let's go really really big. And you can read the stories of the time and the discussions among the physicists and some of them were thinking, wow, that's really big, Like is that maybe too big? Should we go for thirty five? Should we go for thirties? And a lot of this internal discussion was like, no, we gotta hold for forty because if we start sliding down and they're just gonna dial the knob down and then we're just gonna get a small one, like the Europeans are getting start high, Start high. I have a big starting offer. But there was also there was some you know, arrogance there. They were like, you know, America's in the lead. There's no way the government's not gonna build this thing and fund this thing at a lot of political support in the beginning, and so they thought, you know, let's just ask for as much as we can get. There's no way they're going to cancel this thing. Famous last words, his last words, they flew a little too close to the Sun's where they're going to cancel this podcast. In no way they're going to cancel this podcast, not until it costs as much as the super connective super collider, and we're always off from that. But they had a huge competition to see where this thing should go. Because it's such a big project. They can't just say, well, look, firm Lab is the center of particle physics, we'll just put it there. It was, you know, billions and billions of dollar projects. So they had to have it politically balanced, and they had this big competition, and Texas offered a lot of money to help build the thing. So they decided to put it south of Dallas in this town called Waxahatchie, Texas. It was a really little town and they were gonna build the thing. Was going to be all the way around the town, like the whole town was going to be surrounded by this thing, all right, well, let's get into what happened and what we learned from this project. But first let's take a quick break. All right, we're talking about the superlatively superiorly named super condieing super Collider, which was almost old in a small town outside of Texas in the eighties, started by Reagan, but it was never built. And so the question is what happened? What did they have a name for it? Was it the super conducting super collider? From the start, there were a lot of names floated around. You know. Some people wanted to call it the Desert Tron because it was out there, the Desert Tron no no, or even worse. Some people wanted to call it the Gipper Tron for Ronald Reagan, you know, because he championed the project. Should have called the Reagan Tron. There were some pretty silly names. He is used a little robotic himself. That makes me sound like you're colliding Reagan's and you know we only have one of them, but Reagans, I guess. You know. So they actually did start building this thing, I mean they decided to build it. They started saving the money, they proved the money, they started spending. The money was the initial budget for it. The initial budget for this thing, you know, depends on what you call initial And these things always start out for, you know, a couple billion dollars, and in eight seven Congress was told it was going to be ours and about four billion dollars, four and a half billion dollars. And then a few years later the project cost looks like they were rising to eight billion, ten billion, eventually up to like twelve billion dollars. What in comparison, the large Hadron Collider was about a ten billion dollar project. So twelve billion for a collider three times the size of the Late C is not really that outrageous, right, you know, they sold it for four and then it turned out costing twelve so they were in a bit of a political buying there. And these days, like a few billion dollars, I feel like we throw that number around like like nothing. Well, these days, in the epic of the pandemic, you know, we're spending tons of money just to dig ourselves out of this economic hole. But you're right in in the scale of like government projects, a few billion dollars is not a lot of money. It's a it's an aircraft carrier, it's half an aircraft carrier, it's a few fighter jets. It's it's not that much money for secrets of the universe, but it's a lot of money for science. You know. The only other project that had ever been at this scale was like the International Space Station, which also ballooned in cost and went up from ten billion to a hundred billion dollars. All right, So it balloons and couts. And what happened like did they start digging and suddenly they hit rock or something? Why did they underestimate or why did cause go up? Well, costs always go up. You know, these are physicists, they're not financial planners. You just gave me so much pressure us here Daniel as their business partner. One problem was that we expected, or we hoped for international cooperation. We were hoping other countries were gonna be like, hey, that sounds like a great project. Will pitch in a billion, or here's here for this piece. And that's commonplace these days for the big international projects. For example, the US contributed huge amounts of money hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars towards the LHC. And it's like it's like you're buying a place at the table or at the science table kind of right, Like Japan can be like, hey, here's a few billion dollars, but we get DIBs on and having a certain number of scientists or is it like office space, what do you negotiate? Well, that's a great question. Really what you get is just access to the data that you get to use the data to do science. But it's a little thickier. It's also it's just national pride. Like you can say this was a Japanese project, and the Japanese Parliament can say, look, we have proved this thing, and look the Higgs boson was discovered using Japanese technology and Japanese scientists, and there's a lot of national pride involved, like we're awesome. Yeah, Like Congress would have preferred if the money they spent to build the LHC had been spent on an American collider to discover the Higgs boson on American soil. I mean, I don't personally care. I'm happy to work with international scientists. I think the whole nationalism and science thing is a red herring. But it's also important to the people who make the political decisions about money. So you got to play that game a little bit. Anyway, the Americans, they hype this thing so much as an American project that the international community didn't really want to jump on board. You know, you can't be like, look, this is an awesome American red, white, blue project. We're going to dominate this thing. Oh and by the way, can we have a billion dollars so you can be part of our American is awesome project. Yeah. And you know, CERN was building their competing set of colliders, the Large Electron Positron Collider and also the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, so they weren't gonna be pitching in and so, um, we were going to ask the Japanese for a bunch of money. But then we actually got really unlucky with that one. What happened so that by then it was a Bush Bush Senior, that's where it was. President Bush was president, and there was a bit of a political delicate moment there in the Japanese government and where they going to support this thing. And so the Americans got Bush to agree to raise this issue with the Japanese Prime Minister in person. And you know he doesn't get that much time. You gotta really happy, like an important issue to get all the way up to like the presidential negotiation level. So everybody was primed for Bush to like press this issue with the Japanese Prime minister. But I don't know if you remember there was this one trip where Bush went to Japan and they were having a Nancy dinner and he actually fainted and puked on the Prime minister as he was about to ask about the collider. Yeah, that was the night he was supposed to ask for money for the super conducting super collider, but instead, you know, rolfed on his lap, and so it's like, hey, can you give us a big and so that didn't work out, you know, so we didn't end up getting money from Japan. Really, do you think that Japanese based that decision on the puking. No. I think it just never really got discussed. You know, if this is a priority for Americans, they're going to bring it up. This is our opportunity just sort of didn't happen, and then other things came up that were more important, and so the Japanese didn't contribute. So it was going to be an all American project, and you know, costs start going up and nobody else is helping out. And then the political support started to dwindle, but they did start digging and they started spending money. They spent like billions of dollars. They dug kilometers and kilometers of tunnels. Well, maybe to take a step back here and paint a picture for us. So this was going to be three times more powerful than the LHC. And it's a collider. So what are we talking about like a tunnel, a ring building? What what was this collider going to look like? Well, you got to build a whole new laboratory, right, the consequences of not building it at Firmi Lab where you already have a laboratory and a community and land. Is it gonna buy new land and build a whole new laboratory and build the collider itself. The collider itself is a huge tunnel and it was going to be ninety kilometers around. So you have to dig this tunnel underground that's nine kilometers in circumbent, and then in it you've got to build the instrument, the actual collider itself, which is you know a series of vacuum tubes and little accelerator cavities and magnets to bend the thing. So it's a lot of work. It's a huge piece of infrastructure. You're talking about a ring like a tunnel in the shape of a circle, kind of like the large Hadron collider, but bigger. I imagine, much bigger, Like if you looked at a map, you could fit like you know, eight l ah c's inside the super conducting super collider. I mean the large hadron colliders like thirty kilometers around. This thing's ninety kilometers around. So it's much bigger. And it was so big. In fact, they were going to make it not a perfectly a circle. They were gonna have some straight shot parts of it, like stretch out the circle light into more of like an oblong Well, you don't need to bend it all the time. You can have linear sections where you just accelerating like a running track, like a running track exactly. But then they had to build experimental halls where they were going to surround the collider with the detectors to see the collisions. And you have to build a whole place for the scientists to live. And you know, one problem was just like getting scientists out there. You know, you're working at firmula, you're living in Chicago, and now your next job opportunity is like waxa hatchie Texas. It was not always that attractive. You know, nothing against small town Texas, but not everybody wanted to move there. So there were a lot of obstacles to get into this thing off the ground. Had to convince Starbucks to open a branch there. It was a man. And you need a bigger circle because the more energy that you have in your beam and your particles that you're accelerating, it's harder to kind of make them go in a circle when they're they're going faster. That's right, That's what the magnets are for. They're there to curve it into a circle. So you either need a larger tunnel if they're going faster, or you need stronger magnets. And so the Large Hadron Collider made a different choice. They were like, we're going to build our collider inside an existing tunnel. We're just gonna work really really hard on the magnet technology to make them bend even harder. So the LEDC went for smaller tunnel, bigger magnets, and the super Conducting super Collider were like, hey, we're in Texas, let's just make it huge, and that worries so much about the magnets, I see, because it's tricky, right, I mean, those magnets are really tricky. These magnets are really tricky. And that's the super conducting part. Even though the magnets at the SSC weren't going to be as powerful as the LHC, they still have to be really really cold because remember these are electro magnets, and the way you generate those magnets, you have loops of wire and a coil. You turned on the current and you get a magnet through the center of it, and the stronger the current, the stronger the magnet. And if you have super conducting coils, then you have really high currents and you have really strong magnets. So these things are cooled down to super cool temperatures to be super conducting for super strong magnets. All right, So they planned it. They actually drew up the plants and they actually started building it. Like they dug up the tunnel. Yeah, there's twenty three kilometers of tunnel that they dug and are still there. They spent two billion dollars building buildings and digging this tunnel. But then they started to lose support in Congress. So now it's like or so enthusiasm is weighing a little bit, because not only does it seem like the Cold War is sort of over, there was a huge amount of money being spent on the International Space Station, and people didn't have the appetite for like two of these massive projects. And also I think we started going into a recession or something, didn't we Yeah, exactly, and so we weren't just like spending money out the wazoo anymore. And so it was the U. S. House of Representatives actually voted to kill this project. You know, it needed authorization every single year. It's not like you know, some centrally planned government where you can say, here's twenty years where the funding the government is not going to change. The House changes every two years, and you know, they had to reauthorize funding because they get the bill every year. Every year they look at the budget and the build they're like, what is now six billion dollars? Yeah, and so if you're a project that's going to take twenty years to fund, you need to be approved twenty times basically in order to be completed. So in ninety two the House killed it, but then the Senate saved it. The Senate was like, no, this is a big deal. It is still important. You know, the Senate sort of slower moving than the House. Those guys a six year terms, etcetera. So he was saved. And you know, Carlo Rubia, the guy who has ended up being the director of CERN, he came over and testified to Congress and he said, you guys are wasting your money because we're building a collider at CERN and it's going to be just as good and it's gonna be turned on before yours, and you're wasting your time and your money. But it was three times smaller. It was smaller, and his collider was ten years behind schedule. But you know, it was in competition. He wanted the Europeans to discover the Higgs boson or what lay beyond it, and so he didn't want the American competition. We totally got bamboozl we did, we got ruby, we got faked out, we did get packed out. And you know, at that point, it was well over its budget. It looked like it was going to cost like twelve billion dollars. And now Clinton was president and Clinton was not terribly excited to spend a lot of money on a project that seemed like Ronald Reagan's pet project. I said, he didn't want to spend the money on the kipper Tron kimber Tron exactly. If we had named it the Clintron, you know, then maybe it would have succeeded. He yeah, there you go. Yeah, you guys should have played that game a little better. And you know, it hadicism not just from politicians but also from other scientists. Scientists and other field felt like, hey, this is too much money. Particle physicists been hogging the budget for years. This is unfair. Even other particle physicists. We're thinking, look, this one massive project is just sort of like pulling all the oxygen out of the room. You can't get funding from any other kind of particle physics experiment. Some people thought, instead of having one megaproject, we should have like a healthy ecosystem of smaller ones, right, because if this project is taking the twelve billion dollars, that's twelve billion dollars that it's not going to other science projects. Yeah, and it's not necessarily a zero sum game, right, Like, there is a lot more money than twelve billion dollars in the US government, if they decided to spend this much, they might not necessarily cut it from other projects. Right, And when people talk about is ten billion dollars worth it to build another collider, you know, you don't necessarily have to assume that ten billion is coming from other science projects. Maybe it's coming from the defense budget, or maybe it's just an investment. You borrow the money from their future, you know, by bonds, and then invest in basic research and in education. In my view, it's always good to spend money on basic research, particle physics or otherwise because it pays for itself. You get that money back in terms of educating your population or understanding the universe or whatever. Me So it's a complicated political question, but preferably particle physics. You the top of particle physics, then cartoonists, then podcasts. All right, let's get into what we could have learned from this project and what happened when it was canceled. But first let's take another quick break. All right, Daniels, So the super conducting super collider, biggest collider ever to be built in Texas, just got killed by the House. And what was the reaction. Well, and it was finally killed, and you know, in particle physics, people felt like the world it ended, you know, they couldn't believe it. They thought, look, we built this big thing, We've already gotten funding, we started building a tunnel. We're the most important kind of physics there is. There's a lot of arrogance and particle of physics, I will admit. And so they were just totally shocked. They were totally shocked, and a lot of people lost their jobs and left the field, you know, because suddenly the field shrank all of a sudden, there aren't these two thousand positions at the Superconnecting super Collider Laboratory to support people. People had left their jobs at universities to move down there and work full time at this lab, which was now you know, become a ghost town. So the whole field just contracted, like the number of particle physicists shrink, not just the number of colliders and the amount of money spent on stuff, but the number of people involved. And a lot of those people went into finance to make money, to make money, and you know what's partially to cause for the financial collapse in the two thousand seven and two thousand and eight was a lot of physicists not really want, not really understanding what they're doing. What you're drawing in line directly from physicists leaving to field the nineties three to the economic collapse of two eight. I'm not drawing the line. I'm just saying one thing and then I'm saying the other thing. There's a correlation, you're saying I didn't even say there's a correlation. I just said the one thing and then the other thing happened. But I will not pretty sure you said that was to cause Daniel. We can let's rewind the tape. But I will note that I think it's always a mistake to not invest in keep keep physicists away from the actual money, and just give them the money. I do think that's smart. I do not think it's a good idea to have physicist anyway. Um, there was sort of a celebration in other fields, condensed matter physics that always felt like particle physics got too much of the pie. You know, they thought this come up in for high energy physics was long overwhelmed. They were dancing in your grave. They're in the streets celebrating. Yeah, they sort of were. The sort of were and of course, it left an opening for the Europeans to build their collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and they did, and they did, I mean a few twenty years later, twenty years later exactly, but it's you know, it was sent shock waves into particle physics that I still felt a few years later. I didn't join the field until like nine when I graduated from college and started grad school, and people were still reeling from this. You know. It was like the thing that happened that nobody wanted to talk about, but it left a huge mark on the field. The project that shall not be named, that shall not be finished, that should have been named the Bilotron, the Clintron, but now we don't talk about it about it anymore. Yeah, all right, Well that's a shame and sort of I guess a tragedy and a victim of politics and changing, you know, political landscapes. So maybe it step us through. Let's rubbit in, Daniel, what could we have learned from this from the different on what that's potentially what? What what amazing discoveries do we miss out on? Well, we don't know. But maybe that's the most painful part for me personally, because I feel like we could have purchased knowledge, We could have pulled back the curtain and seeing what nature has and we still don't know the answer to those questions, but we could have those today, you know. So Number one, we would have found the Higgs boson, and we would have found it ten or fifteen years earlier. You know, if the super conducting super collider had been built and turned on like expected, you know, around the year two thousand, then it would have been so powerful it would have found the Higgs boson very quickly. You know that's a ten year Yeah. Absolutely, it was definitely equipped. You don't think there would have been delays or like you would have looked in the wrong place by accident. No, it's powerful enough to definitely discover it. Of course, there could always be delays. That certainly happens in a lot of these big experiments. But you know, they started building this thing in the eighties, they started digging the tunnel in the eighties. It seemed pretty likely it was going to turn on two thousand, two thousand one, that kind of time scale. And so the sooner you build these things, the earlier you learn this stuff, and the further down the road you are to answering some mysteries of the universe. Right, I don't really care if Americans or Europeans discover the Higgs boson, but we would have found it sooner, would I had the answer to these questions. And there's a whole decade there where we didn't know the Higgs Boson existed, if it was real or not, and we could have been in the know. And so to me that's sort of tension, like that we could have known this sooner. That's really worth the luck, right, because we ain't getting younger, so the sooner we get answers to the better. Right. Yeah, you don't wanted to discover the secrets of the universe after you're dead, that's right. But the really painful part is just the missed opportunity for future exploration. I mean, we're really limited by the energy of these machines. The more energy is in the machine, the easier it is to create these new, really heavy particles. And the thing that we don't know is where are the new particles after the Higgs boson? What else is there to discover? People have ideas, but they're just really ideas, and we can talk about some of those in the moment. But the point is that this is untapped territory. We don't know what to expect. You just have to go look. It's sort of like landing on a new alien planet, right opening up the hatch and walking around. You don't know if it's going to be dust and rubble and nothingness, or if it's going to be like filled with crazy things that blow your mind. And so we could have turned this thing on, We could have pulled back the curtain. There could be things waiting for us to discover that we might have found. Now the late c it found the Higgs boson, but so far it's found nothing else, and that tells us that maybe it needed more energy. Maybe we needed a bigger collider in order to find those secrets or to unravel some of the mysteries that we're struggling with today. Right, it could be like like the mysteries of the universe, the pink unicorns are just above what the l can do. It could be, right, it could also be that there's nothing there and we'd build a forty TV collider and found nothing, but you can't tell, or just like found the Higgs boson and that's it. Yeah, but you can't tell them if you don't look. And the amount of money we're talking about, you know, a few billion dollars, it just it pales in comparison to like the amount of just money wasted on toilets by the military. So it pains me to think that we almost pulled back the curtain and could have seen these things if they are there, but didn't you know. It's like if somebody told you, oh, you could have landed a spaceship on this exo planet and we could have had pictures of it right now, Like, wow, that would be exciting. How much would you pay for pictures of the surface of exo planets? I would pay billions of dollars of government money. Personally, I would write the check from the U. S. Treasury for billions of dollars, like I would spend billions of dollars of other people's money. It's our money. It's our money, man, we are we earned that money, we gave it to the government. We want them to do good stuff with it. Right Well, is the door closed? Like just because this collider didn't take off or was built, isn't the l a C upgrading itself? And are their plans for a bigger collider. Now, yeah, there are plans conversations about building a one hundred TV collider, which would dwarf even the super conducting super collider super duper but you know, super super duper collider conducting super duper collider. What we gotta do is figure out who's going to be president in fifteen years and name it after that or just keep changing the name. Why not? No, but the SEC still overshadows these conversations. Every time somebody's like, let's build a really big one. People like, yeah, but remember that time we asked for too much money. Traumatized, we crashed and burned. Yeah, we're traumatized. We've got PTSD particle traumatic stress science syndrome. Yeah, nobody really knows, like how much money will the political system tolerate? Like, hundred billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a collider, Fifty billion is a lot of money, twenty billion is a lot of money. How much can we afford to spend on these things? So we're talking about new colliders to maybe discover what dark matter is, maybe figure out what the graviton is. Is there a particle that media is gravity? Is there a whole spectrum of crazy particles out there we haven't even anticipated. We're talking about spending that kind of money, maybe building one in China, maybe building one in Europe. The v LHC, they call it the Very Large Hadron Collider. But overshadowing all these conversations is a memory of the SSC, why it fail, and how to avoid that kind of scenario in the future. Well, I think I have the solution, Daniel. I think it's pretty clear to me what needs to happen with that. You need to run for president. Man is never gonna happen. I want to build a hundred billion dollar white c atron. Do we get about two votes? Yeah, I'm a one issue candidate. I'm gonna slash the US spending except for particle physics. You know. Frankly, I'm I'm frustrated. I don't understand why spending money on basic research isn't the bipartisan issue. You know, if your goal is to understand the universe, it's definitely worth the money. If your goal is to prove education, it's definitely worth the money. If your goal is to improve technology or economics or anything, even you know, potential military applications spend money on basic research. Republicans, Democrats, centrists, liberals, conservatives, everybody should agree that money for basic research improve society. It's a good investment in ourselves. So I don't understand why we don't have a trillion dollar science. But because you're not running for office, Daniel, I think you need to do it. That was my pitch right there. All right, let's go viral then. But you know, people also tend to view science is a zero sum game. So if you're asking for money for your big collider, then probably it's going to squeeze the budget of other projects. And then you get into this question like what's more important, you know, researching potential vaccines for future viral pandemics or studying some crazy particles and nobody's ever seen before. And those are really hard conversations to happen. Well at the moment, At the moment, it's not that hard, Daniel, I think. I think right now, are you saying you're not voting for me? For presidents? What I'm here, I'm saying that sixty years to think about it, that's right, you know, let's see how that your platform involves. So it's a it's a delicate balance. You know, you've got to have good project management skills to your project doesn't go four or eight billion dollars over budget. But you also have to understand the political landscape and how it's changing, and how the various national governments are involved, want to be involved or don't want to be involved. It's really complex to manage such a big international project. You're saying the problem is people getting people to agree. Yeah, that's right. But science is by people and for people, and so it's important that people are invested. And hey, that's one reason why we do this podcast is that people understand why these projects are so fascinating, why they're important, the secrets we could learn about the universe, and why they're important not just for a few thousand people in lab coats around the world, but for everybody, because everybody wants to know the answer to the questions what's the universe made out of it? How did it start? And those answers could lie at the heart of the next big particle collector. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that, and and it makes you think of what could have been or what we could know but currently don't know. If only we explored. That's right. There is some element of the multiverse out there in which they did build the super connecting super collider, and they have the secrets of the universe, and they are laughing at us because we are so clueless. Oh man, Now I have FuMO mode exactly fear of missing out to a multiverse observer geez. And it's infinite too, so it's infinite fomo. That's exactly what I have. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcast For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. No