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One of the best things that happened to American physics was the cancellation of the SSC in the 1990s.
We should *absolutely* debate whether another particle accelerator is the best investment of time and talent for physics. https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1273950897798701056
We should *absolutely* debate whether another particle accelerator is the best investment of time and talent for physics. https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1273950897798701056
Yes, we absolutely *do* choose, and we should. It’s not a zero game, and James should know that’s a strawman. https://twitter.com/jbbeacham/status/1273950901783465984?s=20
Maybe? My understanding is that the money simply went to other areas in physics. Trying to dig up the data; here’s the NSF (but not sure if SSC was actually DoE) https://twitter.com/pfau/status/1274032986724368384?s=20
The LHC nightmare scenario was utterly predictable, and @skdh’s book does an excellent job of diagnosing why. No good reason to think there’s much out there in the “energy desert”. https://twitter.com/DovTeitlebaum/status/1274036305194713088?s=20
Steve Weinberg was the main proponent of the SSC, and framed it in terms of an explicitly reductionist program. We’ll learn more by looking at the building blocks. (Don’t cancel me, philosophers of science, speaking roughly.)
The alternative vision was Phil Anderson (among others)—“more is different”. We should look at emergent phenomena, which will show us things that can’t be imagined just by looking at the pieces in isolation.
Yes!—a loss of about a billion dollars/year in DoE budget to basic science around 1993, roughly equivalent to SSC operational costs (I'm looking at the Office of Science R&D bar). It looks like that was "replaced" by renewables/efficiency research. https://twitter.com/theory_dad/status/1274047589713883137?s=20
