@justinfothe2199
"Because they didn't call it a Super Duper Collider.". LOL!! Great response Mr. Tyson!!
@JeffRyman69
If memory serves, the superconducting magnets were originally to be made in Louisiana as part of a deal to spread the bounty of manufacturing the collider parts around the country. At some point one of the deals that had been made in Congress broke down. There was another deal that had been negotiated to build the Advanced Neutron Source reactor at Oak Ridge National Lab and that figured into the deal. Because of pressure from the nonproliferation folks in DOE the ANS reactor got cancelled upsetting the TN senator. He retaliated and one consequence was the cancellation of the superconducting magnets being produced in Louisiana. The Louisiana senator at the time had a lot of influence and killed the SSC for spite.
@VagabondTexan
One interesting aside that actually created some problems on the site was that it was discovered that A) Fire ants were really good at getting into the structure, as anyone who has dealt with fire ants can attest, and B) said fire ants rather liked the flavor of the wire insulation they were using at the time.
@chrisll3874
As an American citizen I am totally disgusted by assertions in chat that Americans chose to be ignorant anti science idiots. You are 100% accurate but I am still disgusted.
@fingerman4086
The thing about the SSC is that it prioritized energy per proton beam, shooting for a 40TeV collision energy. Modern research indicates that this actually isn’t as important as we once thought, w the LHC reaching 3.5 when it first fired up, getting luminosity higher was actually what we’ve found to be particularly useful. The design of the SSC wouldn’t have made this impossible, but the production costs would’ve been even more immense. Watch Bobby Broccoli’s video on this topic, it’s fascinating
@REALfish1552
Since the LHC was first proposed in 1984, and the design was already being finalized when the SSC was cancelled in 1993, with construction starting in 1998, CERN didn't just step up that day and decide to suddenly build one.
@rayl3103
Why couldn't the scientific community convince the federal government - STOP! You already know the answer so why finish the sentence?
@Birdman_in_CLE
Had they built it in Illinois connected to Fermi we would be using it now. Fermi' current loop was planned to be stage 1 and inject already accelerated particles. The cost was projected to be 3/4 of the Texas facility.
@lemmingsoup852
If they would have called it the NASCAR super collider it would have been built.
@MCXL1140
Bobbi broccoli has a 3 part documentary on this topic. It's very good.
@Lockfreak123
A lot of Americans seem to have either a "but, why?” or a "we cant do it" kind of attitude and I dont understand why.
@ChaseNoStraighter
A slight but important correction, the magnets only provide a force perpendicular to the path of the charged particles and bend the path into a circle. Radio frequency cavities provide a force in the direction of the charged particles, accelerating them and adding energy to them.
@owlstead
There are of course a lot of superconducting magnets in the large hadron collider as well.
@FranciscoMNeto
They would rather fund war than the SSC. 'nuff said
@dougmarshall4010
They couldn’t afford a $10-15 billion SSC that would have dwarfed the CERN collider but they can find $900 billion every year for the military.
@peted5217
It was victim of similar current US Gov't policy favoring different goals than the last crew
@Gorphee
The answer is the same reason for why corporations have the same rights as humans, and why lobbying is still allowed if not promoted openly in the US, along with the thousands of other changes that happened slowly after WWII to now... It is all in the name of profit for the 1%... There was going to be no feasible return on the money spent on such a huge endeavor... It's the same reason why NASA stopped going to the moon (which was all due to funding)... When you make every decision based on how much money you can make, the losers will always be the people. Governments are not and should never be making people wealthy/wealthier. A perfect example, prisons should never ever be run by for-profit corporations, because there will always be a need to have more and more prisoners... Even now, these for-profit prisons have a minimum required amount of prisoners, and if they go below that, there are fines/fees that the government must pay these companies... So what does that cause??? It promotes an incentive for states/counties to arrest more and more people, to keep them from having to pay those fines.... It's insane.
@BOYSWILLBEBOYS2010
Nah. It’s because insurance & pharmaceutical companies didn’t stand to gain anything from it. No gain to them = no “campaign contributions”.
@rekrap115
glad something I learned in class (superconductors) is being talked about. Would be really cool if we could find the combination and the temperature to have them in daily devices.
@damianleiter