![]() “There’s no doubt the LHC is an exciting project, but the SSC was supposed to be bigger in every way,” McIntyre adds. It might even prove if there is a “theory of everything” law about all matter. In the months to come, the collider will hurl particles at each other, and the results could tell us more about the “Big Bang Theory” and how the universe was created. ![]() It could answer some critical questions about how the universe was formed and how it works, possibly even answering the question if other dimensions are out there, as some believe. In all, about 12 current Texas A&M scientists and researchers were involved in the SSC project, McIntyre says, “and all of us were extremely disappointed it never fully developed.”Īt the Large Hadron Collider, organized by a consortium of European nations and formally called the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, particles will be whirled around the 17-mile ring at super speeds. But the plug was pulled on it, and now the Europeans are about to do what we started almost 25 years ago.” “It had all of the earmarks of being one of the greatest projects ever, and the knowledge we could have learned from it had the potential to be staggering. “It was a great opportunity that just fell between the cracks,” says Peter McIntyre, professor of physics at Texas A&M University who was one of the scientists who proposed the SSC in 1983. Constructed near Waxahachie with a 52-mile tunnel, the SSC would have been more than three times larger than the LHC and more powerful in numerous ways, but the entire program was scrapped within a few years due to budget concerns, political bickering and other woes. ![]() The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a $9 billion, 17-mile tunnel where beams of protons will travel near the speed of light, has taken the place of the once-promising Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which when started in the 1980s, was one of the largest scientific projects ever initiated by the United States. 10, a switch will be flipped inside a huge underground laboratory in Switzerland that could answer some of science’s deepest mysteries – and immediately puts Europe on much of the cutting edge of scientific research that could have started in Texas decades ago, observes a prominent Texas A&M University physicist who was in the project’s vanguard.
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