Accidental Blogger

The Hadron Super Collider near Geneva, Switzerland has been in the news recently. Today is D-Day (some think Doom’s Day), the day scientists all over the world will be eagerly waiting to find out what happens when a bunch of accelerated protons are made to collide with each other, resulting in a spectacular smash-up of matter. [see here for several related articles]

What many remember but others may have forgotten is that the building of the Super Collider was originally begun in Texas until the US govt (under the Clinton administration) decided to drop the project. Now that the atom smashing party has begun and all eyes are on a tunnel in Switzerland, many in Texas are experiencing a "what if" feeling.

If you are reading this, rest assured the startup of the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland early this morning, did not immediately fulfill naysayers’ predictions that it would create a black hole that would gobble up the world.

Scientists planned to fire the first stream of protons around a 17-mile tunnel at 2:30 a.m. Houston time, a prelude to experiments that will send them crashing head-on into each other at velocities previously unattained in laboratories. The LHC will be more powerful than any existing atom smasher.

In theory, the collisions should reveal traces of elusive theoretical particles, including the Higgs boson, postulated to be the missing link explaining how the building blocks of the universe attain mass. It could also reveal the nature of mysterious dark matter that makes up much of the cosmos.

It’s a bitter sweet moment for Texas physicists, who 15 years ago were working on the Superconducting Super Collider project, a $4 billion effort near Waxahatchie that would have created a particle accelerator three times larger than the LHC.

After spending $2 billion on the effort, Congress pulled the plug in 1993, handing off future leadership in a vital scientific field to the CERN laboratory near Geneva. It resulted in an exodus of American scientists to Europe to work on the hottest physics project on Earth. Former President Bill Clinton, who signed the legislation killing the project, later admitted he thought the cancellation was a mistake.

Although Americans are contributing to the LHC experiment, it will not have the impact on U.S. scientific development or the economic and academic benefits for Texas that would have come with the Supercollider.

We wish the venture scientific success, and no black holes, but we can’t help regretting that it didn’t happen in Texas.