A blog by Hamish Johnston on physicsworld.com reports that a group at the American Physical Society March meeting in Dallas “broke in” to the old Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) site just south of the town for a look at the derelict project.
The group managed to get into the site and has posted photos of the site in the present day as well as in its heyday, what they call “The high water mark of American Science,” with a double meaning: A high-reaching project now partially under water from flooding.
The SSC, conceived in 1983, was to be the next big particle collider after Fermilab’s Tevatron. It would have a circumference of 87 km and a maximum collision energy of 40TeV. Compare that to today’s Large Hadron Collider at CERN, at 27 km and 14 TeV.
After the SSC was cancelled ten years later, a few buildings on the surface and tens of kilometers of tunnels deep underground were left. The physicists report that the tunnels are well below the water table and therefore flooded long ago. In all, a very sad visit to What Might Have Been.
