[jackbill]

That's simply flat-out wrong. Perhaps you're thinking of the Isabelle project that was cancelled a decade or so before the SSC.

No, I'm talking about CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

[Physicist]

LEP is a completely different type of machine that measures totally different physics, and LHC was never intended to do general-purpose physics. Since the demise of the SSC, the LHC experiments have been re-thought in order to do general particle physics, but it still does not have the energy reach.

In 1988 I was at KEK (Kou Enerugi Butsurigaku Kenkyuujou, the National Laboratory for High Energy Physics in Japan) when Carlo Rubbia (then director of CERN) came to pitch the LHC. Of course, people were concerned that there was too much overlap with the SSC. Rubbia explained that there was very little overlap, because the LHC could not do a "minimum bias" program. This was because each interaction region would produce 5 kilowatts of pi-mesons. The packed hall gasped en masse. Everybody instantly recognized that track reconstruction was impossible in such a high-rate environment. The LHC was designed to measure one signature (the 4-muon decay of the Higgs, which would have been tough at the SSC) and to do it well.

After the SSC fell, of course, the LHC was the only game in town, and the impossible became the absolutely necessary. People started to devise ways of doing track reconstruction under such conditions. We'll see how well the schemes work (they have to work, so they will) in maybe 2008, 16 years after what should have been the completion date of the SSC.