It was doomed by budget issues and political concerns over “luxury science,” among other conflicts. House of Representatives voted to kill the project in 1992, just a year after it began.

As Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura notes in the new video above, all that’s left of the collider in Waxahachie now is “a 14-mile scar on the soul of American physics.” Despite this ambition to build a particle accelerator that likely would have found the Higgs long ago (among other discoveries), the U.S. According to Scientific American, the Superconducting Super Collider “was to have 20 times the collision energy of any existing or planned machine it would have had five times the energy of even today’s LHC collisions.” The project was to have a circumference of 51 miles, and was planned to encircle the desert town of Waxahachie, Texas.īut it was all just a beautiful dream. At the time, Reagan’s scientific advisor encouraged the physicists involved to think big. The Superconducting Super Collider, also known as the Desertron, first got going in the early 1980s, and was approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. But if things had gone just a little differently, the Americans would have been the ones to prove the existence of the Higgs, the so-called “God particle” whose existence physicists needed to prove in order to verify the rest of the Standard Model, which describes how the fundamental particles of the universe behave and interact. Today, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva-the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator, known for discovering the Higgs boson-grabs most of the atom-smashing headlines.

Waxahachie texas supercollider