150 acres of dreams dashed: Buyer now sought for super-collider site

Houston Chronicle ^ | March 15, 2003 | Jim Henderson

[ItsJeff]

A damn shame.

[Bogey78O]

China's buying...

[butter pecan fan]

"One building is 28 feet wide and 600 feet long and it curves. There are not a lot of uses for that building. You couldn't even use it for a shooting range."

Spaghetti factory?

[ijcr]

Clinton Library?

[HHFi]

I lived in Waxahachie for eight years, and just moved back to Dallas in 1999. I had mixed emotions about this project. On one hand, I wanted it because I'm a big backer of scientific research, and also because a lot of people I knew depended on it for their jobs. On the other hand, Waxahachie is a gorgeous little town, with the largest concentration of restored Victorian homes in Texas (I bought one and restored it myself, and it was on the famous Gingerbread Trail home tour one year).

The SSC was threatening to bring in the kind of money and development that would have turned it from a quaint and charming historic town into a clone of every other strip-mall infested suburb in America. You could already see the tacky McMansions starting to replace the beautiful homes. Fast food joints, etc., were starting to line the street that lead to it, and all the commerce was being sucked to that end of town, resulting in one business after another going bankrupt in the historic town square. The SSC was just killing downtown. Downtown Waxahachie has actually revitalized since the SSC was closed down, and there are now fine restaurants, antique shops, a live music theater, etc. I'm taking a trip down there in April for a great meal and to see Steve Fromholz live, and just enjoy walking around it again.

[Physicist]

One of the reasons I went into high energy physics was that the prospects were so bright. This optimism seemed justified when I (a brand-new Ph.D.) was hired by Penn in August, 1993 to do detector development for the SSC. The project was halted two months later. That was half of the field of high energy physics in the U.S. Since then, the field has dropped by another third and has stabilized there, at about 1/3 the size it was when I graduated.

I'm not bitter about the lack of job prospects. Nobody owes me any sort of job. Lord knows I'm not in it for the money: after more than 11 years of college and 10 years experience at the Ph.D. level, I make less than the starting pay for a local public school teacher. That choice is entirely mine.

What bothers me is that the research is important, and we've irresponsibly ceded it to other countries and centuries. But I'm afraid the national opinion is dominated by people who believe that, "The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas", which slams the door on the notion that the research has any value at all.

[Fractal Trader]

Sorry, but the SSC was the biggest pork barrel project that we have ever witnessed in the sciences, and a sheer act of arrogance by the particle physics community. Basically, they said spend $40 billion -- and it would have probably been substantially more once overruns were factored in -- or else we will totally lose the particle physics race. There was no room for compromise, and they money dwarfed all other spending on sciences at the time.

I have talked to people in particle phsyics, and even they admit that they really blew it with the SSC. Some "science" is just not worth the cost. I would certainly put the civilian uses of the space shuttle and the international space station in that category. I would be tempted to put the "war on cancer" ther also, and leave cancer cures to the pharmaceuticals.

The scientific community can be incredibly arrogant, is often extraordinarily biased to produced scare-mongering chicken little prophecies in order to get more attention and funding and has lead to university faculty which is more interested in raising money for their labs and promoting orthodoxy rather than uncovering new knowledge.

I am a refugee from the "temple," and everything I have seen made me feel that politics (personal and governmental), rather than intellect, were what was primarily rewarded in academia.

[Physicist]

Basically, they said spend $40 billion -- and it would have probably been substantially more once overruns were factored in -- or else we will totally lose the particle physics race.

You're pulling these numbers strictly out of your ass. The costs of the SSC were known up front. If congress had set aside $5 billion in 1986, that's what it would have cost. But of course dollars aren't constant, and when appropriations fall short of what's needed, it stretches the program out. Those two factors alone stretched the cost to $11 billion, which was then determined to be too much.

There was no room for compromise, and they money dwarfed all other spending on sciences at the time.

More sphincter-calculus. The U.S. never spent $1.5 billion in any year on high energy physics, and it's well under a billion even now. The U.S. spends tens of billions a year on research.

I have talked to people in particle phsyics, and even they admit that they really blew it with the SSC.

We blew it big time, and it cost us most of our field. But understand this: the failures were entirely political and not scientific.

Some "science" is just not worth the cost.

Agenda revealed.

[Fractal Trader]

I stand by my comments. I read with diligence most of the press clippings as this progressed, since I had once wanted to be an atomic physicist.

Most major advances in science are the result of brainpower, and not laboratory "research." If something truly requires millions and billions of dollars of research, then that money is far better spent by the private sector, which can do the job most efficienty and focus it on commercial returns. Academic labs are fiefdoms run by researchers who think their Ph.D's made them managerial geniuses -- Not!

One of the biggest problems nowadays in biotech is that most of their companies are run by pointy heads who have no conception of how to manage a business. In software, we used to have that problem. We found out that we could run our businesses far more effectively with high school and college dropouts.

[merak]

It was a cursed quest not for oil or gold or any other tangible resource, but for a brief glimpse -- through a window measured in billionths of a second -- at the creation of the universe.

That involves a gigantic assumption, i.e. that the universe was "created" and hasn't simply always been there.

[Physicist]

Most major advances in science are the result of brainpower, and not laboratory "research."

Ridiculous. You can't do any sort of science with theory alone. Theory must be complemented by experiment, or it cannot be connected to the real world. It's just pointless navel-gazing.

If something truly requires millions and billions of dollars of research, then that money is far better spent by the private sector,

With some rare exceptions, the private sector does not do basic research, and won't. But all of the applied research done by industry is predicated upon the discoveries made by basic research.

which can do the job most efficienty and focus it on commercial returns.

The purpose of basic research is not commercial returns. The purpose is to gain the understanding that will someday be required for future economic, military and survival-oriented endeavors.

But if it's commercial returns you're after, then you should be perfectly happy with high energy physics. A single spinoff technology--the World Wide Web you're using right now--has generated enough commercial returns to pay for the entire worldwide effort in high energy physics from the beginning of time onward.

[txzman]

Another legacy of teh Clinton Administration. The science that this site would've provided would have been beyond calculated value to the United States.

All one has to do is look at what has come out of Fermi in the last 25 years.

[Physicist]

That involves a gigantic assumption, i.e. that the universe was "created" and hasn't simply always been there.

That's not an assumption, but an observation. The universe (meaning all the space we can in principle geometrically travel to) is of finite age. We can observe the development of the universe from an extremely primordial state (we can see directly that it was a radically different place) and measure accurately (by several methods) how long ago that was.

[ItsJeff]

Another legacy of teh Clinton Administration...

I dunno. I feel funny criticizingd him for NOT spending money.

[Physicist]

I dunno. I feel funny criticizingd him for NOT spending money.

Two words: defense budget.

[Physicist]

High energy physics research expenditures, 1960-1995. In the last few years, by comparison, it has stabilized at just under $700 million per year, in 2003 dollars. I'll guess that that's somewhere around $600 million per year on this graph.

I should add that many of the dollars now being spend by the U.S. on high energy physics are directed at experiments and laboratories in Europe. They have the equipment, and we don't.

[Physicist]

I wrote: I'll guess that that's somewhere around $600 million per year on this graph.

Not a bad guess: $700 million in 2003 dollars is $580 million in 1995 dollars. Here's a cool website that has conversion factors from 1665 onwards.

[merak]

That's not an assumption, but an observation.

The only way that could be an observation would be if you were there fifty gazillion years ago and SAW the universe being created. Anything else is in fact a collection of assumptions, along with a few observations of phenomena which can be observed, measured, and INTERPRETED, in accordance WITH the assumptions.

Other than that, I notice that every other sentence on your FR page begins with 'I' or 'My'. That's the basic characteristic of an egomaniac, not somebody interested in discovering the laws of the universe or whose judgement on what was going on fifty gazillion years ago I would view as meaningful.

[Physicist]

The only way that could be an observation would be if you were there fifty gazillion years ago and SAW the universe being created.

But light travels at a finite speed, therefore to look outwards in space is to look backwards in time. We can very nearly see all the way back to the very beginning; what stops us just short is that the early universe was dense enough to be opaque to light.

We have hopes that gravitational waves will someday allow us to see even further back.

Other than that, I notice that every other sentence on your FR page begins with 'I' or 'My'.

LOL! It is, after all, MY webpage.