Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat happened to the Superconducting Supercollider?
Americans had the biggest colliders in the world, until they tried to build one that was too big. Hear the super story of the superlative supercollider.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield savings account through Apple Card, apply for Applecard in the wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC, terms and more at applecard dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
We're just days away from our twenty twenty four iHeart Radio Music Festival precedent by Capital On.
The biggest headliners in live music will be taking over to Mobile Arena, Las.
Vegas lost some special surprises at moments you are not going to want to miss. Stream only on Hulu iHeartRadio Music Festival.
And listen on iHeartRadio.
The most anticipated live music events of the.
Year this Friday and Saturday, starting at ten thirty pm Eastern seven thirty Pacific.
Hey Daniel, not that I'm looking, but where could I find the world's biggest laser?
Oh?
That's here in the United States at the National Ignition Facility. They have one hundred and ninety two beams.
Oh man, 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.
Oh wow, twelve meters impressive. And who's got the record for the biggest particle accelerator?
M that's actually a European project. That's the large adartn 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 superstory.
There, Nice, it's a Texas size tall tale.
I'm guessing it's a true story of intrigue and.
Politics, super colliding story. I am more hamm and cartoonist and the creator of PhD comments.
Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I definitely want more government dollars to build bigger particle collider.
Nice, I think we both agree on that. I also want more dollars.
You didn't specify what you're going to do with all that government catsh.
Make more podcasts episodes, So welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
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 to seven in white lab coats to figure out for you.
It's write 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's 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 un 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 spin offs of particle physics is that you can use particle beams to treat cancer.
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 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 ASSIS. So it's the biggest human made particle accelerator.
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 gravitational 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 a title? I mean, that's like an extra superlative.
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 god 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 secrets so 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 there'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 in itself, but also it depends on politics, right.
I try, well, you know, we try not to be political. We're serving up 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 collider is the 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.
Right, do you want the biggest laser, the biggest telescope, or the biggest microscope.
And there's another fascinating angle there in 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 a 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 built superior super conducting super collider superlatively named. And so before you listen to these asters, 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 have never heard the word super conducting super collider. I think it's similar to the let's see the large atron collider, but only 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 cold and a super COLLITERI so that sounds like it is massive or planning on crashing large autumns 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 SERN was created. I believe we tried to do it down in Texas or something like that, and Congress just either never approve the funding or cut off.
The funny 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 the past tense. So I know it's not around anymore, and there's a lot of supers, so it must be pretty cool.
I was impressed. Yeah, 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.
Ye like asking if super is bigger than large? That sounds like a Starbucks question. Is VENTI larger than small? Who knows?
I'd like a Venti conducting hypercollider Coffee Grande collider.
All right, So this was a big experiment that was almost built, so step us through Daniel, what was the superconducting super.
Colliddes, So the superconducting SuperCollider. 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 mighty. It's because we want to create a lot of energy in a 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 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 the higher the energy you're probing, the smaller the feature you can look at, for example, like inside the proton or inside the quark or whatever.
Oh I see. It's like literally the particles are smaller the faster they.
Go sort of you know, it's like you can probe substructures of the proton or if there is substructure to the quarks or to the electrons, you can see them only with higher energy collider that could break those tight bonds and sort of resolve them at those very high energies. And so, yeah, we want to explore the universe and one great way to do that is to create these really high energy collisions. So again it's not about the size of the collider, it's about the energy stored, and we measure that in terms of electron volts. But there's so many electron volts in these collisions that we have a crazy unit called terra 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. I see.
Take me back in history. So we're talking about the eighties, right, So the superconducting super collider was going to be 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 you know, 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.
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 did it and they didn't. Just it was just kind of 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 our ICBMs for you know, dropping weapons on your enemy's 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. But 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 physics.
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, bigger than anybody's ever built one before, and we'll just put American particle physics on the app. I mean, we 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 synchrotron technology. So Americans were already leaders, and this was like, let's hang on to the leadership in this area. And so it was like nineteen eighty three and he started this project. But these things take, you know, decades to plan and decades to build. And so you're at the mercy of the changing political.
Times, right because you can change governments in between a project or in lease 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 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 terra lect jumbolts that eventually became the LHC. The LYC was on a similar timescale to the super Conducting super Collider. Of course, it ended up being delayed by ten years, et cetera, et cetera. But that's sort of the scales like fourteen TeV at cern. But this one, the super conducting super collider, this thing was going to be forty t ev.
Wow, it was going to be three times.
Almost three times more energetic than the LHC is today.
Wow. That's They were swinging for the fences.
They really were, and they were like, let's go really really big. And you can read the stories at the time and the discussions among the physicists and some of them were thinking, wow, that's really big, Like is that maybe a too big should we go for thirty five? Should we go for thirty And a lot of this internal discussion was like, no, we got a hold for forty because if we start sliding down, they're just gonna dial the knob down and then we're just going to get a small one like the Europeans are getting.
Oh, I see 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 going to build this thing and fund this thing. I had 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. M famous last word, famous last words. They flew a little too close to the sun.
Know where they're going to cancel this podcast?
In no way they are going to cancel this podcast, not until it costs as much as the superconductive super collider, and were are ways 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 for Meulab 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 going to build the thing. It 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.
With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill. The price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With mint Mobile, You'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used mint Mobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you, So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans. Jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. You can use your own phone with any mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with your existing contacts. So dit your overpriced wireless with mint Mobiles deal and get three months a premium wireless service for fifteen bucks a month. To get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mint mobile dot com slash universe. That's mintmobile dot com slash universe. Your wireless build a fifteen bucks a month at mintmobile dot com slash universe. Forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars per month new customers on first three month plan only speeds slower about forty gigabytes On unlimited plan. Additional taxi spees and restrictions apply. See mint mobile for details.
AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested, so buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power, so how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control. It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has forty eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spa and less, like Uber eight by eight and Data Bricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at Oracle dot com slash Strategic. That's Oracle dot com slash Strategic Oracle dot com slash Strategic.
If you love iPhone, you'll love Applecard. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high Yield Savings account through Applecard. Apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Applecard owners subject to eligibility. Applecard and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com.
All right, we're talking about the superlatively superiorly named supercondizing SuperCollider, which was almost built in a small all 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, yes, 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 it the Reagan Tron.
Yeah, there was some pretty silly names.
He is, he's a little robotic himself.
That makes it sound like you're colliding Reagan's and you know we only have one of them, Raygons, I guess.
You know.
So they actually did start building this thing, I mean, they decided to build it, and they started to prove 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 These things always start out for you know, a couple billion dollars, and in eighty seven Congress was told it was gonna be, oh, it's gonna be 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 LEDC is not really that outrageous, right, But 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 the scale of like government projects, a few billion dollars is not a lot of money. It's say it's an aircraft carrier, it's half an aircraft carrier, it's a few fighter jets. 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 one hundred billion dollars.
All right, So it ballooned and costs and what happened like did they start digging and suddenly they hit rock or something? Why did they underestimate or why did costs go up?
Well, costs always go up. You know, these are physicist, they're not financial planners.
You just gave me so much pressure us here, Daniel as your business partner.
One problem was that we expected, or we hoped for international cooperation. We were hoping other countries were going to be like, hey, that sounds like a great project. We'll pitch in a billion or here's a half billion 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 it's like you're buying a place at the table or at the the sience table kind of right, Like japan can be like, hey, here's a few billion dollars, but we get DIBs on 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 thick here. 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 approved 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, and 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 with the Large Electron Positron Collider and also the LHC, the Large Cadron Collider, so they weren't gonna be pitching in, and so 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 delegate moment there in the Japanese government and were 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, it doesn't get that much time. You got to really be 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 fancy dinner and he actually fainted and puked on the prime minister.
As he was about to ask about the this collider.
Yeah, that was the night he was supposed to ask for money for the superconducting super collider, but instead, you know, rolfed on his.
Lap, and so it's like, hey, can you give.
And so that didn't work out, you know, so we didn't end up getting money from Japan.
Really, do you think they 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. It 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 he said, 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, a building, what what was this collider going to look like?
Well, you've got to build a whole new laboratory, right, the consequences of not building it at Fermi Lab, where you already have a laboratory and a community and land is it You get to buy new land to 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 ninety kilometers in circumberaniss 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 this shape of a circle, kind of like the large Heathern Collider, but bigger.
I imagine, much bigger, Like if you looked at a map, you could fit like you know, eight LC's inside the superconducting super collider. I mean the large Hadron Collider is like thirty kilometers around. This thing's ninety kilometers around. Wow, 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 going to have some straight shot parts of it, like stretch out the circle into more of like an oblong. Well, you don't need to bend it all the time. Oh, you could have linear sections where you just accelerate and 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 had 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 Fermulab, you're living in Chicago and now your next job opportunity is like Waxahatchie, 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 in this thing off the ground.
You had to convince Starbucks to open a branch there. It was a mess. And you need a big 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 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 going to 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 Superconducting SuperCollider were like, hey, we're in Texas, let's just make it huge and not worry so much about the magnets.
I see, because it's tricky, right, I mean, those magnets are really tricky.
The magnets are really tricky, and that's the superconducting part. Even though the magnets at the sc weren't going to be as powerful as the LHC, they still had to be really really cold because remember these are electro magnets, and the way you generate those magnets, you have loops of wire in a coil. You turn it 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 cold 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 nineteen ninety two 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 I see.
And also I think we started going into a recession or something, didn't we.
Yep exactly, and so we weren't just like spending money out the wazoo anymore. And so it was in nineteen ninety two the US 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 worth of funding and the government's 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 bill and they're like, what this 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's still important. You know, the Senate is sort of slower moving than the House. Those guys are six year terms, et cetera. So he was saved. And you know, Carlo Rubia, the guy who was 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 build a collider at CERN and it's going to be just as good and it's going to be turned on before yours and you're wasting your time and your money.
What 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 bamboozle.
We did. We got rubied, we got faked out. We did get faked 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.
Oh, I said, he didn't want to spend money on the kipper.
Tron Gippertron exactly. If we had named it the Clintron, you know, then maybe it would have succeeded.
Hey, yeah, there you go, the Billtron. Yeah, you guys should have played that game a little better.
And you know, it had criticism not just from politicians but also from other scientists. Scientists in 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 mega project, 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 is 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 the future, you know, buy 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. So it is a complicated political.
Question, but perfectly particle physics the.
Are the top. Particle physics. Then cartoonists, then podcasts, Yes, yeah.
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.
When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, You're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite, but the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce U waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit US dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
We're just days away from our twenty twenty four iHeartRadio Music Festival, preceded by Capital Wa.
The biggest headliners in live music will be taking over to Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, plus some.
Special surprises of moments you are not going to want to miss. Stream only on Hulu the Irradio Music Festival.
And listen on iHeartRadio.
Anticipated live music events up the.
Year this Friday and Saturday, starting at ten thirty pm Eastern, seven thirty Pacific.
Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret, When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories. I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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, it was.
In ninety three. It was finally killed, and you know, in particle physics, people felt like the world had ended, you know, really they couldn't believe it. They thought, look, we've built this big thing, We've already gotten funding, we started building a tunnel. We are the most important kind of physics there is. There's a lot of arrogance in 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 shrenk all of a sudden. There aren't these two thousand positions at the Superconnecting super Collider Laboratory to support people. People have 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, wow, to make money, to make money, and you know what's partially the cause for the financial collapse in the two thousand and seven and two thousand and eight, whereas a lot of physicists were on Wall Street not really not really understanding what they're doing.
What you're drawing a line directly from physicists leaving to field in ninety three to the economic collapse of two thousand and eight.
I'm not drawing a 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 this a correlation. I just said the one thing, and then the other thing happened.
But I will know pretty sure you said that was the cause, Daniel. If 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 physicists in finance anyway. 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 he energy physics was long over ten.
They were dancing in your grave. They were in the streets celebrating.
Yeah, they sort of were. They sort of were. And of course it left an opening for the Europeans to build their collider and discover the Higgs boson.
Right, and they did, and they did, I mean a few twenty years later.
Twenty years later exactly. But it's uh, you know, it was sent shockwaves into particle physics that I still felt a few years later. I didn't join the field until like ninety seven, ninety eight, 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 out but it left a huge mark on the field.
The project that shall not be.
Named, Project that shall not be finished.
That should have been named the Billatron 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 you step us through. Let's rub it in, Daniel, what could we have learned from this from the Gippertron.
What would that's potentially 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 seen 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, Wow, then it would have been so powerful it would have found the Higgs boson very quickly, you think, So, you know that's a ten years 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.
Uh 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 and two thousand and one, that kind of timescale. And so the sooner you build these things, the earlier you learned this stuff, and the further down the road you are answering some mysteries of the universe. Right. I don't really care if Americans where Europeans discovered the Higgs boson, but we would have found it sooner or would have had the answer to these questions. And there was a whole decade there where we didn't know if Higgs boson existed, if it was real or not, and we could have been in the know. And so to me, that 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 the better, Right, Yeah, you don't want 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 a 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 LAEDC 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 in order to unravel some of the mysteries that we're struggling with today.
Right, it could be that, I think the mysteries of the universe, the pink unicorns are just above what the LAC can do.
It could be, right, It could also be that there's nothing there and we'd build a forty TeV 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. And this 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 exoplanet 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 exoplanets? I would pay billions of dollars, you know, of government money. Personally, I would write the check from the US 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 LAC upgrading itself? And aren't there plans for a bigger collider?
Now?
Yeah, there are plans. There's conversations about building a one hundred TeV collider, which would dwarf even the super conducting super collider super duper but you know, super super duper collier conducting super duper collider. All we got to 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. You've got PTSD.
Particle traumatic stress science syndrome.
Yeah, nobody really knows, Like how much money will the political system tolerate? Like, one 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 mediates 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 VLHC, 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 need said was that you need to run for president. That is never going to happen six.
I want to build one hundred billion dollar whitesetron.
Do we get about two thousand votes?
Yeah, I'm a one issue candidate. I'm going to slash the US spending except for particle physics.
Right.
No.
Frankly, 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 improve 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 improves society. It's a good investment in ourselves. So I don't understand why we don't have a trillion dollar science budget.
Because you're not running for office, Daniel, I think you need to do it.
That was my pitch right there.
That was all right, this goes viral then.
But you know, people also tend to view science as 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 of 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 have.
Well at the moment, At the moment, is not that hard, Daniel, I think, I think right now, are.
You saying you're not voting for me for president?
Is that what I'm here?
I'm saying I have sixteen years to think about it, So that's right. You know, let's see how your platform evolves.
So it's a it's a delicate balance. You know, you've got to have good project management skills. 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, 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 answers 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 kind of makes you think of what could have been or what we could know but currently don't know, if only we explored more.
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, no, I have Fomo mold exactly, fear of missing out to a multiverse observer geez. And it's in in it too, so it's infinite.
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 explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digest yesters to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
We're just days away from our twenty twenty four iHeartRadio Music Festival, presented by Capital On.
The biggest headliners in live music will be taking over to Mobile Arena, Las Vegas.
Lost some special surprises of moments you are not going to want to miss. Stream only on Hului are Radio Music Festival.
And listen on iHeartRadio.
The most anticipated live music events of the.
Year this Friday and Saturday, starting at ten thirty pm Eastern, seven thirty Pacific.
Guess what, Well, what's that?
Mango?
I've been trying to.
Write a promo for our podcast, Part Time Genius, but.
Even though we've done over two hundred and fifty episodes, we don't really talk about murders or cults. I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy. We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food? And how do dollar stores make money? And then of course can you game a dog show? So what you're saying is everyone should be listening. Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
