There are these amazing machines called super colliders. They're basically particle accelerators that spin atoms at superfast speeds and them crash them into each other to see what happens. Kinda like NASCAR fans on Sunday afternoons except this is science. One of them, named Large Hadon Collider, has been functioning since 2009.
But before this there was a much bigger project called the Superconducting Super Collider, also known as Desertron. The project was first proposed in 1983 and after years of planning the actual construction began in 1991 near a little town called Waxahachi, Texas. It's planned circumference was to be 87.1 kilometers (54.1 miles in Americanese).
Two years later, in October 1993, the United States Congress pulled the plug. There had been some heated debate during the planning regarding the total projected cost of $4.4 billion, but in 1993 a report put the final cost at about $12 billion and everyone got freaked out. When construction ended, only 23.5 km (14.6 miles) of tunnel had been drilled. The project's director Dr. Roy Schwitters, a professor of physics at the University of Texas in Austin who had formerly taught at both Harvard and Stanford, called it "the revenge of the C students."
Now jump to last week when physicists from that same University of Texas in Austin announced that they had built a tabletop particle accelerator. Mike Downer, a professor in the College of Natural Sciences, was quoted as saying, "Until now that degree of energy and focus required a conventional accelerator that stretches more than the length of two football fields. It's a downsizing of a factor of approximately 10,000."
So what does all this mean to a meathead like me? I have no idea except that it sounds like the researchers will one day - maybe sooner than later - be able to do more with less and the human race will find new ways to either live in harmony with nature or destroy the planet. Stay tuned.
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