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1 posted on 03/15/2003 10:48:51 PM PST by ItsJeff
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A damn shame.
2 posted on 03/15/2003 10:54:44 PM PST by ItsJeff (Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya!)
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To: ItsJeff
China's buying...
3 posted on 03/15/2003 11:16:44 PM PST by Bogey78O (check it out... http://freepers.zill.net/users/bogey78o_fr/puppet.swf)
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To: ItsJeff
"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?

4 posted on 03/15/2003 11:35:54 PM PST by butter pecan fan
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To: ItsJeff
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.

6 posted on 03/16/2003 4:00:21 AM PST by HHFi
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To: ItsJeff
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.

7 posted on 03/16/2003 4:44:35 AM PST by Physicist
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To: ItsJeff
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.

11 posted on 03/16/2003 6:10:24 AM PST by merak
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To: All
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.

17 posted on 03/16/2003 6:59:14 AM PST by Physicist
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To: RadioAstronomer
Gettin'-rich-on-public-largesse ping.
24 posted on 03/16/2003 10:06:36 AM PST by Physicist
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To: PatrickHenry
Could you do the ping thing?
25 posted on 03/16/2003 10:07:03 AM PST by Physicist
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To: ItsJeff
I still have my Supercollider hat. Got it for working on the project.
27 posted on 03/16/2003 11:37:59 AM PST by RightWhale (Theorems link concepts: Proofs establish links)
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To: ItsJeff

I wish the US Government would reactivate it and use it for its intended purpose. I remember reading about this in old issues of National Geographic when I was young. We need more facilities like this. These are as important as the space program. We cannot let europe and china take any lead.


48 posted on 02/07/2005 6:40:46 AM PST by Paul_Denton (The UN is UN-American! Get the UN out of the US and US out of the UN!)
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To: ItsJeff
"The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas,"

One thing that made me feel the right decision had been made was after the cancellation when I heard some physicists on the radio whining about how they had thought the people of this country wanted a SSC, how they had already taken their kids out of the schools they had been attending, etc.

49 posted on 02/07/2005 6:51:15 AM PST by wideminded
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To: ItsJeff
A perfect example of why congress is second only to Al Qaeda as the most hated group on the planet.

First they deem something important enough to take peoples' homes from them, then a couple of years later it is so unimportant that given an identical estimate to shut it down or continue it, they decide to shut it down.

Meanwhile, the space station has proved to be utterly pointless, built in the wrong orbit merely as a foreign aid device that lets the Russians save face.

51 posted on 02/07/2005 6:54:09 AM PST by hopespringseternal
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To: ItsJeff
Just a little aside to those of you who are not from Texas or don't know how to pronounce Waxahachie. It is WALKS-ah-hachie. I remember hearing the pronunciation butchered on national TV.
53 posted on 02/07/2005 7:06:21 AM PST by Ditter
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To: ItsJeff

FReeper National Compound!


56 posted on 02/07/2005 7:19:39 AM PST by rabidralph (Congratulations, Pres. Bush and VP Cheney!)
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To: ItsJeff
little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists

Instead they are working in Europe. This is a public sector crime.

63 posted on 02/07/2005 12:47:10 PM PST by RightWhale (Please correct if cosmic balance requires.)
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To: ItsJeff

I was thinking an 18-mile long tunnel would be a great all-weather training facility for marathon runners.


75 posted on 02/07/2005 6:16:53 PM PST by SamAdams76 (What If The Flintstones Had iPods?)
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To: ItsJeff
You obviously haven't heard...

Home Depot has purchased the Super Collider site to chop up and sell as fence post holes...

76 posted on 02/07/2005 6:25:56 PM PST by aMorePerfectUnion
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To: ItsJeff
gee the goverment got involved in something and totally screwed it up 6 ways from sunday and pissed away billions of dollars doing it with nothing to show for it but a hole in the ground that is so typical its barely newsworthy. vote straight libertarian every election people www.lp.org
83 posted on 02/08/2005 7:23:15 AM PST by freepatriot32 (Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, a pantomime horse in which both men are playing the rear end. M.Steyn)
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To: AdmSmith; bvw; callisto; ckilmer; dandelion; ganeshpuri89; gobucks; KevinDavis; Las Vegas Dave; ...
Note: this topic is from March 15, 2003.

84 posted on 12/28/2008 2:48:16 PM PST by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______Profile finally updated Saturday, December 6, 2008 !!!)
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