Pros And Cons Of SSC Cancellation

The United States Congress’ decision to cancel the Superconducting Super-Collider (SSC) in 1993 was wise because the costs of the SSC would have been far too great (especially considering that there was a significantly cheaper alternative in Europe) and the tangible benefits of the discovery of the Higgs would have been minimal -- whether the SSC cancellation was “good” or “bad” for physics is immaterial because it would have been a poor policy decision either way. However, further justifying the government’s decision, the SSC cancellation was beneficial to a number of aspects of physics: it allowed Congress to allocate more money to other fields within American physics, and for Europe to take up the slack in funding High Energy Physics (HEP), ensuring that HEP didn’t actually lose resources.

Steven Weinberg, a noted American physicist, argued “without the SSC we shall lose a generation of high-energy physicists who will have to do their research in Europe or Japan.” Weinberg’s warning was prescient: Europe became the new hub for HEP research at the expense of America; those who warned of this eventuality, however, failed to elucidate the meaningful harm of it. In 2013, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva proved the existence of the Higgs boson using a facility that already had the infrastructure to support the project. If the science could be done anyway at a much cheaper price, does that not benefit science worldwide? National pride is hardly a convincing argument to spend $11