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Swiss supercollider12/30/2023 An industrial train engine, servicing companies like these, hauls black rotund tankers and covered hopper boxcars with more rust than paint through every part of Waxahachie. You see evidence of this just outside and within the city limits: Redox Chemicals, Wesco Chemicals, Helena Chemical, Schirm Chemical, Magnablend. Waxahachie, the seat of Ellis County, was once a wealthy cotton nexus of the southwest, and today is a small blue-collar city of 30,000 that now depends on companies rooted in industrial science. Sean Carroll, in his book The Particle at the End of the Universe, called it a “sleepy hamlet.” Even when the SSC project first broke ground, this was not the case. Prominent physicists have a shared tendency to mischaracterize Waxahachie as a bucolic Victorian town in the fading years of its antebellum glory, a place that would exalt the worldly benefits of a multi-billion dollar science project. Since Congress canceled the project twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Waxahachie has witnessed the bizarre and disquieting history of its failure. ![]() The collider’s tunnel would have entrenched Waxahachie in a topographical oval that curved east before the southern Dallas County line, then running southwest under Bardwell Lake and curving north at Onion Creek. Nobody doubts that the 40 TeV Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have discovered the Higgs boson a decade before CERN. And yet the tools required to prove or disprove certain hypotheses often require significant amounts of money.įive-thousand miles southwest of Geneva, just outside Waxahachie, Texas, are the remnants of a super collider whose energy and circumference-true to American sensibility-would have dwarfed those of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. People have to trust physicists more than ever before, a tall order considering the arcane nature of theoretical science. Many physicists condemned the announcement as sensational, a swat at the hard reality of modern experimental physics, which is forevermore Big Science: a political animal of bureaucracy, real estate, diplomacy, rhetoric, and tax-based funding. Most physicists were incredulous, and rightfully so, as the “superluminal” neutrinos turned out to be an artifact of miswired fiber optics and a bad atomic clock. If the phenomenon was real, almost all we knew about physics would crumble. A year before, a team of physicists at CERN announced the observation of neutrinos rushing faster than the speed of light. History has shown them the political consequences of premature announcements. The conference room then reassumed its churchlike sobriety. ![]() ![]() Mild applause ensued, a man removed his glasses and dabbed a handkerchief at his tears. That summer, at the official announcement in Geneva, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the stately director general of CERN, declared “I think we have it.” It was an enormous scientific discovery-arguably one of the biggest of the 21 st century, a claim bolstered by its recent Nobel Prize award-but the celebration, on the whole, was restrained. Eventually their reticence suffused the name of the particle itself, as it was quickly described as a Higgs- like particle. Most were reluctant to claim outright that what they’d observed at the CERN particle collider in Geneva was indeed the elusive Higgs, the subatomic particle that could explain how all matter acquires mass. When the discovery of the last particle in the Standard Model of physics, the Higgs boson, was announced in the spring of 2012 many physicists, afflicted by an anxiety special to their profession, soon began hedging that same announcement.
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