Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What happened to the Superconducting Supercollider?

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

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.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest personal lives, too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this. I've been surviving rabies for the past.

20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 190 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 12 meters across. Oh, wow, 12 meters. Impressive. And who's got the record for the biggest particle accelerator? That's actually a European project. That's the large Hadron 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-sized tall tale, I'm guessing. It's a true story of intriguing and politics. Super colliding story. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, 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 going to do with all that government catch.

Make more podcast episodes. Welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard 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 24-7 in white lab coats to figure out for you. That's right. 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, it'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 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 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 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 at us. 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 June. Geneva, right? That's the biggest one. That's the record holder. And so a 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 today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question, What happened to the superconducting 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 superconducting 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. Yeah. Why would you put super twice in a title? I mean, that's like an extra superlative. Yeah, 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 got 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 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? That's right. 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 colliders, a 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.

That's 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 superconducting super collider? Superlatively named. And so before you listen to these answers, think about what comes to mind when you hear the words superconducting 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 U.S. government caught funding for it. Actually, I have never heard the word superconducting super collider. I think it's similar to the LHC, the large hydrant 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 large collider and a super collider is 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 superconducting supercollider was the United States attempt to create the biggest supercollider before CERN 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 funding. 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 pass 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 wrote the question. So super job to that person. Yeah. Like asking if a super is bigger than large? That sounds like a Starbucks question. Is Venti? larger than small? Who knows? I had like a venti conducting hypercollider.

Coffee. Grande Collider. All right. So this was a big experiment that was almost built. So step us through it, Daniel. What was the superconducting supercollider? So the superconducting 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 going to 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 worksy 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, 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 quantum. quark or whatever. Oh, I see. It's like literally the particles are smaller, the faster they go, kind of. 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 80s right so the superconducting supercollider was going to be built in the 80s, 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 dot right it's literally like bragging rights like the moon shot 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 this feel secure and all that stuff and there's also some direct

spinoffs you know going to the moon helps you develop rockets which is important for 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 II 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. Are you telling 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 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 map.

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 1983 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 government in between a project or lose 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 it 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 13 or 14 terra-electron volts, that eventually became the LHC.

The LHC was on a similar time scale to the superconducting supercollider. Of course, it ended up being delayed by 10 years, et cetera, et cetera. But that's sort of the scales, like 14 T.EV at CERN. But this one, the superconducting supercollider, this thing was going to be 40 TEV. Wow. It was going to be almost three times more energetic than the LHC. is today. Wow. 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 too big? Should we go for 35? Should we go for 30? And a lot of this internal discussion was like, no, we got a hold for 40 because if we start sliding down, they're just going to 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 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. Famous last words. Famous last words. They flew a little too close to the sun. There's no way they're going to cancel this podcast, Daniel. No way they are going to cancel this podcast. Not until it costs as much as the superconducting supercollider.

And we're a 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, Fermilab 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 Waxahatchee, 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. Wow. All right. Well, let's get into what happened

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All right, we're talking about the superlatively, superiorly named Superconducting Super Collider, which was almost built in a small town outside of Texas in the 80s, started by Reagan, but it was never built. And so the question is, what happened? Did they have a name for it? Was it the Superconducting Super Collider from the start? There were a lot of names floated around. You know, some people wanted to call it the Desertron because it was out there. The desert trot, no.

No. Yes. Or even worse, some people wanted to call it the Gippertron for Ronald Reagan. You know, because he championed the project. They should have called the Reagan Tron. Yeah, there was some pretty silly names. He is a little robotic himself. That makes it sound like you're colliding Regans.

You know, we only have one of them. Ray Gons, I guess, you know. So they actually did start building this thing. I mean, they decided to build it. They started spending money. They approved the money. They approved the money. They started spending the money.

What 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 87, Congress was told it was going to be, oh, it's going to be about $4 billion, $4.5 billion. And then a few years later, the project cost looks like they were rising to $8 billion, $10 billion, eventually up to like $12 billion. What? In comparison, the Large Hadron Collider was about a $10 billion project. So 12 billion for a collider three times the size of the LHC is not really that outrageous.

Right. But, you know, they sold it for four and then it turned out costing 12, 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 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 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. The only other project that had ever been at this scale was like the International Space Station, which also ballooned and cost

and went up from $10 billion to $100 billion. All right. So it ballooned and cost. And what happened? Like, did they start digging and suddenly they hit rock or something? Why did they underestimate or why did they underestimate made or why did cause go up? Well, costs always go up. These are physicists. They're not financial

planners. You just gave me so much assurance here, Daniel, as their business partner. One problem was that we expected or we hoped for international cooperation. We were hoping other countries were 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 U.S. 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 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 thicker. Also, it's just national prize. You can say this was a Japanese project. And the Japanese parliament can say, look, we approve 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 really. at Herring, but it's also important to the people who make the political decisions about money, so you've 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, the large electron positron collider and also the LHC, the large Hadron Collider. So they weren't going to 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 by then it was Bush, Bush Senior, who was president? Bush was president.

And there was a bit of a political, delicate 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. Japanese prime minister in person. And, you know, he doesn't get that much time. You've got to really be like an important issue to get all the way up to like the presidential negotiation level. So everybody was prime 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 end of 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. Oh, man. It's like, hey, can you give it to be blah? And so that didn't work out, you know, so we didn't end up getting money from Japan. Really? Do you think the 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 Japanese, didn't contribute. So it was going to be an all-American project. And, you know, cost start going up and nobody else is helping out. And then the political support started to dwindle. But they did start digging. They started spending money. They spent like billions of dollars. They dug kilometers and kilometers of tunnels. Well, maybe 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 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 Fermilab where you already have a laboratory and a community and land is you're going to 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 90 kilometers around. So you have to dig this tunnel underground that's 90 kilometers in circumference.

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 were talking about a ring, like a tunnel in this 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 LHCs inside the Superconducting Super Collider. I mean, the large Hadron Collider is like 30 kilometers around.

This thing's 90 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 it. And like a running track. Yeah, 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 Fermilab.

You're living in Chicago, and now your next job opportunity is like Waxahatchy, Texas. It was not always that attractive, you know, nothing against small town Texas, but not everybody wanted to move there. Right. So there were a lot of obstacles to get in this thing off the ground. They had to convince Starbucks to open a branch there. It was a mess. 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 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 in the magnet technology to make them bend even harder. So the LHC went for smaller tunnel, bigger magnets.

And the Superconducting Super Collider 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 SSC weren't going to be as powerful as the LHC, they still had to be really, really cold. Because remember, these are electromagnets.

And the way you generate those magnets is 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 superconducting 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 superconducting for super strong magnets. Wow. All right. So they planned it.

They actually grew up the plants and they actually started building it. Like they dug up the tunnel. Yeah. There's 23 kilometers of tunnel that they dug and are still there. They spent $2 billion building buildings and digging this tunnel. But then they started to lose supporting Congress. So now it's like 1992 or so. Enthusiasm is waning a little bit

because not only does it seem like the Cold War 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 1992, 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 20 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 all the time. 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 $6 billion? Yeah. And so if you're a project that's going to take 20 years to fund, you need to be approved 20 times, basically, in order to be completed. So in 92, 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 have six-year terms, et cetera. So he was saved. And, you know, Carlo Rubia, the guy who 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 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 10 years behind schedule. But 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 bamboozled. We did. We got rubyed. 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 $12 billion. 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 see. He didn't want to spend money on the Gippertron. The Gippertron, exactly. If we had named it the Clintron, you know, then maybe it would have succeeded.

Yeah, there he go. The Bill of Don. 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 have been hogging the budget for years. This is unfair.

Even other particle physicists were thinking, look, this one massive project is just sort of like pulling all the oxygen out of the room. You can't get funding for 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 $12 billion, that's $12 billion 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 $12 billion in the U.S. government.

If they decide to spend this much, they might not necessarily cut it from other projects. Right. And when people talk about, is $10 billion worth it to build another collider, you know, you don't necessarily have to assume that $10 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's a complicated political question. But preferably particle physics. You're the top of the list, at least, you know. Particle physics, then cartoonists, then podcasts. Yes. Yes. 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. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you.

On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum. the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford. And in session 421 of therapy for black girls, I sit down with Dr. Athea and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system. right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from, you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyperfixation

and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel is how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets angry, about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett, where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to therapy for black girls on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Get fired up, y'all. Season two of Good Game with Sarah Spain is underway. We just welcomed one of my favorite people and an incomparable soccer icon, Megan Rapino,

to the show, and we had a blast. We talked about her recent 40th birthday celebrations, hosting a podcast with her fiance Sue Bird, watching former teammates retire and more. Never a dull moment with Pino. Take a listen. What do you miss the most about being a pro athlete? The final. The final. And the locker room.

I really, really, like, you just, you can't replicate, you can't get back. Showing up to locker room every morning just to shit talk. We've got more incredible guests like the legendary Candace Parker and college superstar A.Z. Fudd. I mean, seriously. all. The guest list is absolutely stacked for season two. And, you know, we're always going to

keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, Daniel. So the superconducting, Collider, biggest collider ever to be built in Texas, just got killed by the house. And what was a reaction? Well, it was in 93, 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 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 in particle 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 2,000 positions at the Super Connecting 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.

Right. And a lot of those people went into finance. Wow. To make money. To make money. And you know what's partially to cause for the financial collapse in the 2007 and 2008 was a lot of physicists working on Wall Street, not really one, not really understanding what they're doing.

What? You're drawing a line directly from physicists leaving the field in 93 to the economic collapse of 2008? I'm not drawing a line. I'm just saying one thing. and then I'm saying the other thing. Oh, I see. There's a correlation you were 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 note... I'm pretty sure you said that was the cause, Daniel. Let's rewind the tape. But I will note that I think it's always a mistake to not invest in basic research. 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 comeuppance for high energy physics was long overdue. Wow. They were dancing in your grave. They were in the street celebrating. Yeah, they sort of were. And of course, it left an opening for the Europeans to build their collider and discovered the Higgs boson. Right. And they did. And they did. I mean, a few, 20 years later.

20 years later, exactly. But it, 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 97, 98, when I graduated from college and started grad school. And people were still reeling from this. You know, it was like a, 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. Project that shall not be finished. That should have been named the Billotron, the Clintron. But now we don't talk 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 step us through. Let's rub it in, Daniel. What could we have learned from this, from the Gippertron? That's potentially... 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 10 or 15 years earlier. You know, if the Super Conducting Super Collider had been built and turned on like expected, you know, around the year 2000. Wow. Then it would have been so powerful. It would have found the Higgs boson very quickly. You think so? You know, that's 10 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? 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 80s. They started digging the tunnel in the 80s. It seemed pretty likely it was going to turn on 2000, 2001, 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 answering some mysteries of the universe. I don't really care if Americans or Europeans discover 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 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 we could have known this sooner. That's really worth a lot. Right, because we ain't getting younger. So the sooner we get answers to 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 LHC, 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 the mysteries of the universe, the pink unicorns, are just above what the LHC can do. It could be, right? It could also be that there's nothing there, and we'd build a 40-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 unless 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 pull.

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 U.S. Treasury for billions of dollars.

You're like, I would spend billions of dollars of other people's money. It's our money. It's our money, man. We are the taxpayers. 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 LACC upgrading itself and aren't there plans for a bigger collider now? Yeah, there are plans. There's conversations about building a 100-TEV collider. What? Which would dwarf even the super-conducting super-duper. The super-duper. But, you know.

Super, the super-duper-conducting. Super duper collider. What we've got to do is figure out who's going to be president in 15 years and name it after that person. Or just keep changing the name. Why not? No, but the SSC still overshadows these conversations.

Every time somebody's like, let's build a really big one. People are like, yeah, but remember that time. We asked for too much money. You traumatized. And 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 a hundred billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a collider 50 billion is a lot of money 20 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 failed 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. What's that? You need to run for president. That is never going to happen. Why send 20-30-6? I want to build the $100 billion white citron.

Do we get about 2,000 votes? Yeah, I'm a one-issue candidate. I'm going to slash the U.S. spending except for particle physics. Right, right. No, frankly, I'm frustrated. I don't understand why spending money on basic research isn't a 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 my campaign speech. All right. Let's hope this goes viral then. But, you know, people also tend to view science as a zero-sum game. So if you're out, 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 than 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 president? Is that what I'm hearing? I'm saying I have 16 years to think about it. So let's see how your platform evolves. So it's a delicate balance.

You know, you've got to have good project management skills. Your project doesn't go four or $8 billion 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 Labcoast 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 collider. 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 superconducting supercollider, and they have the secrets of the universe, and they are laughing at us because we're so clueless. Oh, man. Now I have FOMO. Exactly. Fear of missing out to a multiverse observer. Jeez.

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 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. I was diagnosed with cancer on Friday and cancer free the next Friday.

No chemo, no radiation, none of that. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us podcast, I sat down with Warren Campbell, Grammy-winning producer, pastor, and music executive to talk about the beats, the business, and the legacy behind some of the biggest names in gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. Professionally, I started at Death World Records. From Mary Mary to Jennifer Hudson, we get into the soul of the music. and the purpose that drives it. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure, and, of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an Iheart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Hey, I'm Kurt Brown-Oller. And I am Scotty Landis, and we host Bananas, the podcast where we share the weirdest, funniest, real news stories from all around the world. And sometimes from our guest's personal lives, too. Like when Whitney Cummings recently revealed her origin story on the show. There's no way I don't already have rabies. This is probably just why my personality is like this.

I've been surviving rabies. for the past 20 years. New episodes of bananas drop every Tuesday in the exactly right network. Listen to bananas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.