[Physicist]

You're thinking of the superconducting supercollider. Reagan approved it in 1986 (in fact, the laboratory was later named after him), but congress killed it in 1993. To give Clinton his due, he did support the project, and it was killed over his tepid objections.

I came to Penn to do SSC development work in August, 1993. The SSC was killed in October, 1993. It represented half of the U.S. effort in experimental high-energy physics. Since then, the "base program" has shrunk by another third, so my field has shrunk by 2/3 in the last decade.

That's not to say that the field is dead; it is just in the process of moving out of the United States. Upon the cancellation of the SSC, many physicists turned to work on the LHC, a competing machine being built in Geneva. It should see first collisions in 2008.

There is no possibility of reviving the SSC. The incomplete tunnel has been filled in and the laboratory dismantled. Fermilab will own the energy frontier for another six years, but after that the future of physics lies in Europe.

[Ben Chad]

Most of this is an isometric exercise for my paltry brain. Does it have anything to do with the idea that the observable universe may have arisen from 'nothing' as the result of a vacuum fluctuation (was that an Alan Guth idea?)?