August 18, 2020 • 44 mins
Americans had the biggest colliders in the world, until they tried to build one that was too big. Hear the super story of the superlative supercollider.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, not that I'm looking, but where can I
find the world's biggest laser? Oh, that's here in the
United States at the National Ignition Facility. To have a
hundred and ninety two beams. Oh man, it sounds awesome.
How about the world's biggest telescope that's actually also an
American project at Mount Graham in Arizona. It's twelve meters
across twelve impressive. And who's got the record for the
(00:32):
biggest particle accelerator. That's actually a European project. That's the
large agar and collider at CERN. What happened? Why don't
Americans have the record for that too? Well, you know
we could have had a super jumbo Texas sized collider. Well,
let's just say there's a super story there. Nice, it's
a Texas size tall tale. I'm guessing it's a true
(00:53):
story of entriguing and politics, super colliding story. I am
more Hammond, cartoonist in the creator of PhD comments, I'm Daniel.
(01:16):
I'm a particle physicist, and I definitely want more government
dollars to build bigger particle colliders. Nice, I think we
both agree on that. I also want more dollars. You
didn't specify what you're gonna do with all that government cash.
Make more podcast episodes and welcome to our podcast, Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
(01:37):
a super podcast in which we super collide your brain
with super crazy ideas. We go all over the universe
to talk about the biggest things, the smallest things, the
weirdest things. But mostly we talk about the most wondrous
and curiosity invoking things, the things we want to understand,
and the things that science is working right now every
day twenty four seven in white lab coats to figure
(02:00):
out for you, tried all the amazing and wonderful things
to discover out there in the universe. But we also
kind of like to talk about the process of discovery
because you know, it's a human endeavor and there are
a lot of interesting stories that happen in our search
for the truth about the universe. That's right, Science is
for people. It's not for just AI bots to digest
(02:21):
and understand. We do it because it's our curiosity about
the universe. It's the things that we want to know,
and so not only is it done for people, is
done by people, and those people have names and jobs
and real lives and ambitions, and they make mistakes, and
sometimes those mistakes are supersized. Yeah, and sometimes the science
has even done on people. I am fortunately not involved
(02:43):
in any of that kind of science. You never had
a particle collide with you, Daniel. I am particles, and
I collide with particles, but I've never intentionally collided particles
with people for science. You know. That's actually one of
the only positive spinoffs of particle physics is that you
can use particle beams to treat answer. That's right. Yeah,
But mostly we build these big particle colliders because we
(03:04):
want to replicate the situation in the early universe. We
want to create a little environment where nature can reveal
to us some of the secrets of how the universe
is put together. But it is a human endeavor, and
as such, there are always a lot of interesting stories
about how discoveries are made or what people were thinking
at the time, and sometimes great stories about big experiments
(03:26):
and why they didn't work, or why they work, or
why some of them weren't even built. That's right. The
history of particle physics is sort of an escalating series
of colliders, bigger and bigger, more and more energy, Probing
higher and higher into the secrets of nature. They got
bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, until one
day they got maybe too big. And so right now,
(03:47):
the Europeans have the biggest particle collider basically as far
as we know in the universe, right, as far as
we know, the biggest collider as far as we know,
although you know, it doesn't create the most energetic particles.
We've seen those come from space, and so it could
be that there are alien particle physicists out there shooting
their particle accelerator acces. So it's the biggest human made
(04:10):
particles that we know of that we know, and so
the Europeans have it at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Right,
that's the biggest one, that's the record holder. And so
the question is why don't the Americans have it? You know,
we have the biggest laser, the biggest telescope, and the
biggest gravitation wave detector at least at the moment. So
there's kind of an interesting story there, and so to
(04:31):
be on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what
happened to the super conducting super collider. It's super mysterious.
It's super fascinating, and it's something that came up briefly
in a podcast episode we did a couple of weeks
ago about the discovery of the Higgs boson and we
(04:53):
mentioned the super conducting super collider, and I remember you
were like, what is that a real name for a
real thing? It sounds like you just made that up.
Why would you put super twice in the title? I mean,
that's that's like an extra superlatives. It's so good they
used it twice, And a lot of listeners were curious
about this and wanted to hear more about this incredibly
named super collider, so we decided to do a whole
(05:14):
episode on why people built it and what it meant
and why it didn't end up getting finished right, And
this is kind of part of the story of particle
physics in the sense that, you know, I guess we
started probably with like small, little particle colliders, and then
they've just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
and bigger over the years. And the question is maybe
(05:36):
one of these gods too big? Yeah, because the only
thing that limits us from building them bigger is money.
The more money you give us, the bigger the collider
that you can build, but also the more seco to
you can reveal from nature. So it's sort of like
you can just buy information, like you want to know
more about the basic way the universe works, spend more money.
It's really very direct. But you know, we live in
(05:58):
practical times, and it's not always infinite cash to fund
your science projects. So these machines operate in a political environment.
They need support, they need funding, they need continued funding
to be finished. And so it's a fascinating story of
sort of how much money you could ask for for
your particle physics toys. Yeah, I guess science is political
and itself, but also it depends on politics, right, that's right. Well,
(06:21):
you know, we try not to be political. We're serving
information that's of course used to make important political and
policy decisions, but we try to be as fact based
as possible. But anytime you're spending money, that's political, right,
And any dollar you're spending on a particle colliders that
dollar you're not spending on poverty programs, or on weapons systems,
or on anything else. And so it's always a political
(06:44):
decision about how much to spend on science and what
kind of science to spend it on? Do you want
the biggest laser, the biggest telescope or the biggest microscope.
And there's another fascinating angle there, and that most of
these experiments end up being pretty international, like the folks
on them like me, I don't really care if it's
a Russian or a Chinese person or a South American
(07:04):
or Canadian who's working with me. But when we sell
these projects to our national governments who fund them, a
lot of times we end up pitching them like, hey,
this is an American national pride project, all right. So,
as usual, Daniel went out there into the Internet to
ask how many people out there knew about the almost
bill superior super conducting super collider superlatively named. And so
(07:29):
before you listen to these answers, think about what comes
to mind when you hear the words super conducting super collider.
Here's what people had to say. It was a particle
accelerator that was planned for the United States. I think
it was meant for Texas, and I believe it was
supposed to be two or three times bigger than what
we have at the LHC at CERN, But I could
be wrong on that. Part and it never happened because
(07:51):
the US government cut funding for it. Actually, I've never
heard the word super conducting super collider. I think it's
similar to the let's see the larger collider, but but
condly colliding the conductive particles. Maybe two things stand out
to me. One is you say it in past tense,
so it's not around anymore. And the second one is
there's a lot of supers being used, So I mean
(08:14):
superconductor makes sense because that means that it's very efficient
and it's not losing any energy as heat or other items.
So the difference between a conductor and a superconductor is understood.
But a super collider, that's so if you've got a
regular collider. I'm wondering what the difference between a large
collider and a super collidery So that sounds like it
(08:34):
is massive or planning on crashing large items together. I
don't know. I'm super anxious to find out if I
have the right one. The super conducting super collider was
the United States attempt to create the biggest super collider
(08:55):
before was created. I believe we try to do it
down in Texas or something like that, and Carn's just
either never approved the funning or cut off the funning.
All Right, I like these answers. They're pretty super I
like the person who broke it down. They're like trying
to figure it out like you used to past tense.
So I know it's not around anymore, and there's a
(09:15):
lot of super so it must be pretty cool. I
was impressed, you have. They made a lot of progress
just based on the name of the thing and how
I read the question. So super job to that person
like asking if super is bigger than large? That sounds
like a Starbucks question. It's venty larger than small. Who knows.
I'd like a venti conducting hyper collider, coffee grande collider.
(09:39):
Al Right, So this was a big experiment that was
almost built. So step us through Daniel. What was the
super conducting SuperCollider? So the super conducting super collider. It's
really a tragedy and it still pains me to this
day that we didn't build this thing because not only
would it have been a huge collider, it would have
been the biggest collider of its time, and even still today,
(10:01):
it would be bigger than any collider we have. Now,
you know, we measure these colliders not just in size, Like,
it doesn't really matter how physically large they are. Yes,
it does, Daniel. If you're gonna put it in Texas,
it has to be the biggest one. We measure these
things in terms of their energy, So it really is
about the energy of the particles. Because remember, the goal
(10:23):
of building a big collider is not just to say,
look upon my works, e mighty. It's because we want
to create a lot of energy in a small space,
because that allows us to probe really massive particles. Remember
e equals mc squared. If you put a lot of
energy into a small space and then as long as
you're above some m that nature has, you can create
(10:45):
that particle. And so it's a great way to just
sort of like search the cosmos for new kinds of
particles without knowing in advance that they are there. Right.
It's it's kind of like having a big telescope and
just having more magnification or having a better microscope and
having better you know, ability to look at smaller things.
It's like the more energy you have, the more you
can probe what happens at the quantum level. Yeah, and
(11:09):
it's very similar to having a more powerful microscope because
the more energy you have, literally the smaller distance scale
you can probe, because there's this anti correlation between sort
of the width of the wave function and the energy
of the particle, and so higher the energy you're probing,
the smaller the feature you can look at, for example,
like inside the proton or inside the cork or whatever.
(11:32):
Oh I see, it's like literally the particles are smaller
the fact where they go sort of you know, it's
like you can probe substructures of the proton or if
there is substructure to the cork, so to the electrons,
you can see them only with higher energy collider that
could break those tight bonds and and sort of resolve
them at those very high energies. And so yeah, we
(11:53):
want to explore the universe, and a one great way
to do that is to create these really high energy collisions.
So again it's not about the eyes of the colliders,
about the energy stored. And we measured that in terms
of electron volts. But there's so many electron volts in
these collisions that we have a crazy unit called tera
electron volts trillion electron volts and to orient you, a
(12:16):
billion electron volts is about how much energy they're stored
in a proton, So a terra electron volts is like
a thousand times the energy of a proton. Take me
back in history, So we're talking about the eighties, right,
So the super conducting super collider was going to be
built in the eighties, and it was actually conceived by
Ronald Reagan, the president. Yeah, and so we're back in
(12:36):
the Cold War, you know, and back then a lot
of science was closely linked to national pride and to
national security. People felt like as long as we were
on the cutting edge of science, including space and including
particle physics and weapons physics, that we were secure and
we were beating the Russians or the Soviets at the
(12:57):
time in all these technologies, which you know, contributed to
our national defense dot dot dog. But it's literally like
bragging rights, like the moonshot, like getting to the moon,
you know, didn't directly improve our national security, but just
being able to say that we didn't and they didn't
just it was just kind of a a national pride thing. Yeah.
I think it motivates the population and makes us feel
(13:19):
secure and all that stuff. And there's also some direct
spin offs, you know, going to the moon helps you
develop rockets, which is important for I. C. B M. S.
For you know, dropping weapons on your enemies, populations, and
all sorts of terrible things. Particle physics is much less direct, right,
maybe if you are understanding the nature of the universe,
eventually you could tap into that energy source or build
(13:41):
new things or whatever. You know. World War two was
a lesson that, like nuclear physics and particle physics could
directly lead to weapons technology, you know, the development of
the atomic bomb and the understanding of the atom. So
there was a lot of ideas wrapped up in there,
like we should be at the forefront, Americans should be
at the leading edge of particle So you tell me
that no politician at that time said the words you mean,
(14:04):
you want to build a giant particle gun, great, can
we aim it? You definitely can't aim this kind of
thing at all. And you know, at the time people
were thinking about particle guns, but mostly in terms of
star wars. This was more for science. And so this
was a project originally conceived by Reagan and they thought, well,
let's build a huge particle collider, bearer than anybody's ever
(14:27):
built one before, and we'll just put American particle physics
on the map. I mean, we're already were sort of
leaders in this area, a lot of Nobel prizes for
developing the technology behind particle colliders and you know, and
Lawrence developed the sincratron technology. So Americans were already leaders,
and this was like, let's hang onto the leadership in
this area. And so it was like three and he
(14:48):
started this project. But these things take, you know, decades
to plan in decades to build, and so you're at
the mercy of the changing political time, right because you
can change government in between a project or at least
support potentially absolutely. And you know, then the Berlin Wall
fell down and the Soviet Union collapsed and we no
longer had the same adversary, which fueled the Cold War,
(15:12):
which made us want to necessarily fight these battles and uh,
you know, beat the Russians, all right. So Reagan was involved,
he championed in and it was aiming pretty high, like
at the time, what was the biggest collider in terms
of energy. The Europeans were planning their own collider, which
was going to be around thirteen or fourteen terror electron
(15:33):
volts that eventually became the LHC. The only C was
on a similar time scale to the super Connecting super Collider.
Of course, it ended up being delayed by ten years, etcetera, etcetera.
But that's sort of the scales like fourteen TV at CERN.
But this one, the super conducting super collider, This thing
was going to be forty t EV. It was three
(15:53):
times almost three times more energetic than the LHC is today.
That's there were swinging for the fences. It really were,
and they were like, let's go really really big. And
you can read the stories of the time and the
discussions among the physicists and some of them were thinking, wow,
that's really big, Like is that maybe too big? Should
we go for thirty five? Should we go for thirties?
And a lot of this internal discussion was like, no,
(16:15):
we gotta hold for forty because if we start sliding
down and they're just gonna dial the knob down and
then we're just gonna get a small one, like the
Europeans are getting start high, Start high. I have a
big starting offer. But there was also there was some
you know, arrogance there. They were like, you know, America's
in the lead. There's no way the government's not gonna
build this thing and fund this thing at a lot
(16:36):
of political support in the beginning, and so they thought,
you know, let's just ask for as much as we
can get. There's no way they're going to cancel this thing.
Famous last words, his last words, they flew a little
too close to the Sun's where they're going to cancel
this podcast. In no way they're going to cancel this podcast,
not until it costs as much as the super connective
super collider, and we're always off from that. But they
(16:58):
had a huge competition to see where this thing should go.
Because it's such a big project. They can't just say, well, look,
firm Lab is the center of particle physics, we'll just
put it there. It was, you know, billions and billions
of dollar projects. So they had to have it politically balanced,
and they had this big competition, and Texas offered a
lot of money to help build the thing. So they
(17:19):
decided to put it south of Dallas in this town
called Waxahatchie, Texas. It was a really little town and
they were gonna build the thing. Was going to be
all the way around the town, like the whole town
was going to be surrounded by this thing, all right, well,
let's get into what happened and what we learned from
this project. But first let's take a quick break. All right,
(17:52):
we're talking about the superlatively superiorly named super condieing super Collider,
which was almost old in a small town outside of
Texas in the eighties, started by Reagan, but it was
never built. And so the question is what happened? What
did they have a name for it? Was it the
super conducting super collider? From the start, there were a
(18:13):
lot of names floated around. You know. Some people wanted
to call it the Desert Tron because it was out there,
the Desert Tron no no, or even worse. Some people
wanted to call it the Gipper Tron for Ronald Reagan,
you know, because he championed the project. Should have called
the Reagan Tron. There were some pretty silly names. He
is used a little robotic himself. That makes me sound
like you're colliding Reagan's and you know we only have
(18:35):
one of them, but Reagans, I guess. You know. So
they actually did start building this thing, I mean they
decided to build it. They started saving the money, they
proved the money, they started spending. The money was the
initial budget for it. The initial budget for this thing,
you know, depends on what you call initial And these
things always start out for, you know, a couple billion dollars,
(18:56):
and in eight seven Congress was told it was going
to be ours and about four billion dollars, four and
a half billion dollars. And then a few years later
the project cost looks like they were rising to eight billion,
ten billion, eventually up to like twelve billion dollars. What
in comparison, the large Hadron Collider was about a ten
billion dollar project. So twelve billion for a collider three
(19:20):
times the size of the Late C is not really
that outrageous, right, you know, they sold it for four
and then it turned out costing twelve so they were
in a bit of a political buying there. And these days,
like a few billion dollars, I feel like we throw
that number around like like nothing. Well, these days, in
the epic of the pandemic, you know, we're spending tons
of money just to dig ourselves out of this economic hole.
(19:41):
But you're right in in the scale of like government projects,
a few billion dollars is not a lot of money.
It's a it's an aircraft carrier, it's half an aircraft carrier,
it's a few fighter jets. It's it's not that much
money for secrets of the universe, but it's a lot
of money for science. You know. The only other project
that had ever been at this scale was like the
(20:01):
International Space Station, which also ballooned in cost and went
up from ten billion to a hundred billion dollars. All right,
So it balloons and couts. And what happened like did
they start digging and suddenly they hit rock or something?
Why did they underestimate or why did cause go up? Well,
costs always go up. You know, these are physicists, they're
not financial planners. You just gave me so much pressure
(20:26):
us here Daniel as their business partner. One problem was
that we expected, or we hoped for international cooperation. We
were hoping other countries were gonna be like, hey, that
sounds like a great project. Will pitch in a billion,
or here's here for this piece. And that's commonplace these
days for the big international projects. For example, the US
contributed huge amounts of money hundreds of millions, if not
(20:48):
billions of dollars towards the LHC. And it's like it's
like you're buying a place at the table or at
the science table kind of right, Like Japan can be like, hey,
here's a few billion dollars, but we get DIBs on
and having a certain number of scientists or is it
like office space, what do you negotiate? Well, that's a
great question. Really what you get is just access to
the data that you get to use the data to
(21:08):
do science. But it's a little thickier. It's also it's
just national pride. Like you can say this was a
Japanese project, and the Japanese Parliament can say, look, we
have proved this thing, and look the Higgs boson was
discovered using Japanese technology and Japanese scientists, and there's a
lot of national pride involved, like we're awesome. Yeah, Like
Congress would have preferred if the money they spent to
(21:30):
build the LHC had been spent on an American collider
to discover the Higgs boson on American soil. I mean,
I don't personally care. I'm happy to work with international scientists.
I think the whole nationalism and science thing is a
red herring. But it's also important to the people who
make the political decisions about money. So you got to
play that game a little bit. Anyway, the Americans, they
(21:52):
hype this thing so much as an American project that
the international community didn't really want to jump on board.
You know, you can't be like, look, this is an
awesome American red, white, blue project. We're going to dominate
this thing. Oh and by the way, can we have
a billion dollars so you can be part of our
American is awesome project. Yeah. And you know, CERN was
building their competing set of colliders, the Large Electron Positron
(22:15):
Collider and also the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, so
they weren't gonna be pitching in and so, um, we
were going to ask the Japanese for a bunch of money.
But then we actually got really unlucky with that one.
What happened so that by then it was a Bush
Bush Senior, that's where it was. President Bush was president,
and there was a bit of a political delicate moment
there in the Japanese government and where they going to
(22:37):
support this thing. And so the Americans got Bush to
agree to raise this issue with the Japanese Prime Minister
in person. And you know he doesn't get that much time.
You gotta really happy, like an important issue to get
all the way up to like the presidential negotiation level.
So everybody was primed for Bush to like press this
issue with the Japanese Prime minister. But I don't know
if you remember there was this one trip where Bush
(22:58):
went to Japan and they were having a Nancy dinner
and he actually fainted and puked on the Prime minister
as he was about to ask about the collider. Yeah,
that was the night he was supposed to ask for
money for the super conducting super collider, but instead, you know,
rolfed on his lap, and so it's like, hey, can
you give us a big and so that didn't work out,
(23:22):
you know, so we didn't end up getting money from Japan. Really,
do you think that Japanese based that decision on the puking. No.
I think it just never really got discussed. You know,
if this is a priority for Americans, they're going to
bring it up. This is our opportunity just sort of
didn't happen, and then other things came up that were
more important, and so the Japanese didn't contribute. So it
(23:42):
was going to be an all American project, and you know,
costs start going up and nobody else is helping out.
And then the political support started to dwindle, but they
did start digging and they started spending money. They spent
like billions of dollars. They dug kilometers and kilometers of tunnels. Well,
maybe to take a step back here and paint a
picture for us. So this was going to be three
(24:04):
times more powerful than the LHC. And it's a collider.
So what are we talking about like a tunnel, a
ring building? What what was this collider going to look like? Well,
you got to build a whole new laboratory, right, the
consequences of not building it at Firmi Lab where you
already have a laboratory and a community and land. Is
it gonna buy new land and build a whole new
laboratory and build the collider itself. The collider itself is
(24:27):
a huge tunnel and it was going to be ninety
kilometers around. So you have to dig this tunnel underground
that's nine kilometers in circumbent, and then in it you've
got to build the instrument, the actual collider itself, which
is you know a series of vacuum tubes and little
accelerator cavities and magnets to bend the thing. So it's
a lot of work. It's a huge piece of infrastructure.
(24:49):
You're talking about a ring like a tunnel in the
shape of a circle, kind of like the large Hadron collider,
but bigger. I imagine, much bigger, Like if you looked
at a map, you could fit like you know, eight
l ah c's inside the super conducting super collider. I
mean the large hadron colliders like thirty kilometers around. This
thing's ninety kilometers around. So it's much bigger. And it
(25:11):
was so big. In fact, they were going to make
it not a perfectly a circle. They were gonna have
some straight shot parts of it, like stretch out the
circle light into more of like an oblong Well, you
don't need to bend it all the time. You can
have linear sections where you just accelerating like a running track,
like a running track exactly. But then they had to
build experimental halls where they were going to surround the
(25:31):
collider with the detectors to see the collisions. And you
have to build a whole place for the scientists to live.
And you know, one problem was just like getting scientists
out there. You know, you're working at firmula, you're living
in Chicago, and now your next job opportunity is like
waxa hatchie Texas. It was not always that attractive. You know,
nothing against small town Texas, but not everybody wanted to
(25:52):
move there. So there were a lot of obstacles to
get into this thing off the ground. Had to convince
Starbucks to open a branch there. It was a man.
And you need a bigger circle because the more energy
that you have in your beam and your particles that
you're accelerating, it's harder to kind of make them go
in a circle when they're they're going faster. That's right,
That's what the magnets are for. They're there to curve
(26:13):
it into a circle. So you either need a larger
tunnel if they're going faster, or you need stronger magnets.
And so the Large Hadron Collider made a different choice.
They were like, we're going to build our collider inside
an existing tunnel. We're just gonna work really really hard
on the magnet technology to make them bend even harder.
So the LEDC went for smaller tunnel, bigger magnets, and
(26:36):
the super Conducting super Collider were like, hey, we're in Texas,
let's just make it huge, and that worries so much
about the magnets, I see, because it's tricky, right, I mean,
those magnets are really tricky. These magnets are really tricky.
And that's the super conducting part. Even though the magnets
at the SSC weren't going to be as powerful as
the LHC, they still have to be really really cold
because remember these are electro magnets, and the way you
(26:58):
generate those magnets, you have loops of wire and a coil.
You turned on the current and you get a magnet
through the center of it, and the stronger the current,
the stronger the magnet. And if you have super conducting coils,
then you have really high currents and you have really
strong magnets. So these things are cooled down to super
cool temperatures to be super conducting for super strong magnets.
(27:20):
All right, So they planned it. They actually drew up
the plants and they actually started building it. Like they
dug up the tunnel. Yeah, there's twenty three kilometers of
tunnel that they dug and are still there. They spent
two billion dollars building buildings and digging this tunnel. But
then they started to lose support in Congress. So now
it's like or so enthusiasm is weighing a little bit,
(27:43):
because not only does it seem like the Cold War
is sort of over, there was a huge amount of
money being spent on the International Space Station, and people
didn't have the appetite for like two of these massive projects.
And also I think we started going into a recession
or something, didn't we Yeah, exactly, and so we weren't
just like spending money out the wazoo anymore. And so
(28:04):
it was the U. S. House of Representatives actually voted
to kill this project. You know, it needed authorization every
single year. It's not like you know, some centrally planned
government where you can say, here's twenty years where the
funding the government is not going to change. The House
changes every two years, and you know, they had to
reauthorize funding because they get the bill every year. Every
(28:25):
year they look at the budget and the build they're like,
what is now six billion dollars? Yeah, and so if
you're a project that's going to take twenty years to fund,
you need to be approved twenty times basically in order
to be completed. So in ninety two the House killed it,
but then the Senate saved it. The Senate was like, no,
this is a big deal. It is still important. You know,
the Senate sort of slower moving than the House. Those
(28:47):
guys a six year terms, etcetera. So he was saved.
And you know, Carlo Rubia, the guy who has ended
up being the director of CERN, he came over and
testified to Congress and he said, you guys are wasting
your money because we're building a collider at CERN and
it's going to be just as good and it's gonna
be turned on before yours, and you're wasting your time
and your money. But it was three times smaller. It
(29:10):
was smaller, and his collider was ten years behind schedule.
But you know, it was in competition. He wanted the
Europeans to discover the Higgs boson or what lay beyond it,
and so he didn't want the American competition. We totally
got bamboozl we did, we got ruby, we got faked out,
we did get packed out. And you know, at that point,
(29:31):
it was well over its budget. It looked like it
was going to cost like twelve billion dollars. And now
Clinton was president and Clinton was not terribly excited to
spend a lot of money on a project that seemed
like Ronald Reagan's pet project. I said, he didn't want
to spend the money on the kipper Tron kimber Tron exactly.
If we had named it the Clintron, you know, then
(29:51):
maybe it would have succeeded. He yeah, there you go. Yeah,
you guys should have played that game a little better.
And you know, it hadicism not just from politicians but
also from other scientists. Scientists and other field felt like, hey,
this is too much money. Particle physicists been hogging the
budget for years. This is unfair. Even other particle physicists.
(30:13):
We're thinking, look, this one massive project is just sort
of like pulling all the oxygen out of the room.
You can't get funding from any other kind of particle
physics experiment. Some people thought, instead of having one megaproject,
we should have like a healthy ecosystem of smaller ones, right,
because if this project is taking the twelve billion dollars,
that's twelve billion dollars that it's not going to other
(30:33):
science projects. Yeah, and it's not necessarily a zero sum game, right, Like,
there is a lot more money than twelve billion dollars
in the US government, if they decided to spend this much,
they might not necessarily cut it from other projects. Right,
And when people talk about is ten billion dollars worth
it to build another collider, you know, you don't necessarily
have to assume that ten billion is coming from other
(30:54):
science projects. Maybe it's coming from the defense budget, or
maybe it's just an investment. You borrow the money from
their future, you know, by bonds, and then invest in
basic research and in education. In my view, it's always
good to spend money on basic research, particle physics or
otherwise because it pays for itself. You get that money
back in terms of educating your population or understanding the
(31:15):
universe or whatever. Me So it's a complicated political question,
but preferably particle physics. You the top of particle physics,
then cartoonists, then podcasts. All right, let's get into what
we could have learned from this project and what happened
when it was canceled. But first let's take another quick break.
(31:48):
All right, Daniels, So the super conducting super collider, biggest
collider ever to be built in Texas, just got killed
by the House. And what was the reaction. Well, and
it was finally killed, and you know, in particle physics,
people felt like the world it ended, you know, they
couldn't believe it. They thought, look, we built this big thing,
We've already gotten funding, we started building a tunnel. We're
(32:11):
the most important kind of physics there is. There's a
lot of arrogance and particle of physics, I will admit.
And so they were just totally shocked. They were totally shocked,
and a lot of people lost their jobs and left
the field, you know, because suddenly the field shrank all
of a sudden, there aren't these two thousand positions at
the Superconnecting super Collider Laboratory to support people. People had
(32:32):
left their jobs at universities to move down there and
work full time at this lab, which was now you know,
become a ghost town. So the whole field just contracted,
like the number of particle physicists shrink, not just the
number of colliders and the amount of money spent on stuff,
but the number of people involved. And a lot of
those people went into finance to make money, to make money,
(32:54):
and you know what's partially to cause for the financial
collapse in the two thousand seven and two thousand and
eight was a lot of physicists not really want, not
really understanding what they're doing. What you're drawing in line
directly from physicists leaving to field the nineties three to
the economic collapse of two eight. I'm not drawing the line.
(33:16):
I'm just saying one thing and then I'm saying the
other thing. There's a correlation, you're saying I didn't even
say there's a correlation. I just said the one thing
and then the other thing happened. But I will not
pretty sure you said that was to cause Daniel. We
can let's rewind the tape. But I will note that
I think it's always a mistake to not invest in
keep keep physicists away from the actual money, and just
(33:37):
give them the money. I do think that's smart. I
do not think it's a good idea to have physicist anyway. Um,
there was sort of a celebration in other fields, condensed
matter physics that always felt like particle physics got too
much of the pie. You know, they thought this come
up in for high energy physics was long overwhelmed. They
were dancing in your grave. They're in the streets celebrating. Yeah,
(34:00):
they sort of were. The sort of were and of course,
it left an opening for the Europeans to build their
collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and they did, and
they did, I mean a few twenty years later, twenty
years later exactly, but it's you know, it was sent
shock waves into particle physics that I still felt a
few years later. I didn't join the field until like
(34:22):
nine when I graduated from college and started grad school,
and people were still reeling from this. You know. It
was like the thing that happened that nobody wanted to
talk about, but it left a huge mark on the field.
The project that shall not be named, that shall not
be finished, that should have been named the Bilotron, the Clintron,
(34:42):
but now we don't talk about it about it anymore. Yeah,
all right, Well that's a shame and sort of I
guess a tragedy and a victim of politics and changing,
you know, political landscapes. So maybe it step us through.
Let's rubbit in, Daniel, what could we have learned from
this from the different on what that's potentially what? What
(35:02):
what amazing discoveries do we miss out on? Well, we
don't know. But maybe that's the most painful part for
me personally, because I feel like we could have purchased knowledge,
We could have pulled back the curtain and seeing what
nature has and we still don't know the answer to
those questions, but we could have those today, you know.
So Number one, we would have found the Higgs boson,
(35:23):
and we would have found it ten or fifteen years earlier.
You know, if the super conducting super collider had been
built and turned on like expected, you know, around the
year two thousand, then it would have been so powerful
it would have found the Higgs boson very quickly. You
know that's a ten year Yeah. Absolutely, it was definitely equipped.
You don't think there would have been delays or like
you would have looked in the wrong place by accident. No,
(35:46):
it's powerful enough to definitely discover it. Of course, there
could always be delays. That certainly happens in a lot
of these big experiments. But you know, they started building
this thing in the eighties, they started digging the tunnel
in the eighties. It seemed pretty likely it was going
to turn on two thousand, two thousand one, that kind
of time scale. And so the sooner you build these things,
the earlier you learn this stuff, and the further down
the road you are to answering some mysteries of the universe. Right,
(36:09):
I don't really care if Americans or Europeans discover the
Higgs boson, but we would have found it sooner, would
I had the answer to these questions. And there's a
whole decade there where we didn't know the Higgs Boson existed,
if it was real or not, and we could have
been in the know. And so to me that's sort
of tension, like that we could have known this sooner.
That's really worth the luck, right, because we ain't getting younger,
(36:29):
so the sooner we get answers to the better. Right. Yeah,
you don't wanted to discover the secrets of the universe
after you're dead, that's right. But the really painful part
is just the missed opportunity for future exploration. I mean,
we're really limited by the energy of these machines. The
more energy is in the machine, the easier it is
to create these new, really heavy particles. And the thing
(36:50):
that we don't know is where are the new particles
after the Higgs boson? What else is there to discover?
People have ideas, but they're just really ideas, and we
can talk about some of those in the moment. But
the point is that this is untapped territory. We don't
know what to expect. You just have to go look.
It's sort of like landing on a new alien planet,
right opening up the hatch and walking around. You don't
(37:10):
know if it's going to be dust and rubble and nothingness,
or if it's going to be like filled with crazy
things that blow your mind. And so we could have
turned this thing on, We could have pulled back the curtain.
There could be things waiting for us to discover that
we might have found. Now the late c it found
the Higgs boson, but so far it's found nothing else,
(37:31):
and that tells us that maybe it needed more energy.
Maybe we needed a bigger collider in order to find
those secrets or to unravel some of the mysteries that
we're struggling with today. Right, it could be like like
the mysteries of the universe, the pink unicorns are just
above what the l can do. It could be, right,
it could also be that there's nothing there and we'd
build a forty TV collider and found nothing, but you
(37:55):
can't tell, or just like found the Higgs boson and
that's it. Yeah, but you can't tell them if you
don't look. And the amount of money we're talking about,
you know, a few billion dollars, it just it pales
in comparison to like the amount of just money wasted
on toilets by the military. So it pains me to
think that we almost pulled back the curtain and could
have seen these things if they are there, but didn't
(38:16):
you know. It's like if somebody told you, oh, you
could have landed a spaceship on this exo planet and
we could have had pictures of it right now, Like, wow,
that would be exciting. How much would you pay for
pictures of the surface of exo planets? I would pay
billions of dollars of government money. Personally, I would write
the check from the U. S. Treasury for billions of dollars,
(38:37):
like I would spend billions of dollars of other people's money.
It's our money. It's our money, man, we are we
earned that money, we gave it to the government. We
want them to do good stuff with it. Right Well,
is the door closed? Like just because this collider didn't
take off or was built, isn't the l a C
upgrading itself? And are their plans for a bigger collider. Now, yeah,
(38:59):
there are plans conversations about building a one hundred TV collider,
which would dwarf even the super conducting super collider super
duper but you know, super super duper collider conducting super
duper collider. What we gotta do is figure out who's
going to be president in fifteen years and name it
after that or just keep changing the name. Why not? No,
(39:24):
but the SEC still overshadows these conversations. Every time somebody's like,
let's build a really big one. People like, yeah, but
remember that time we asked for too much money. Traumatized,
we crashed and burned. Yeah, we're traumatized. We've got PTSD
particle traumatic stress science syndrome. Yeah, nobody really knows, like
(39:46):
how much money will the political system tolerate? Like, hundred
billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on
a collider, Fifty billion is a lot of money, twenty
billion is a lot of money. How much can we
afford to spend on these things? So we're talking about
new colliders to maybe discover what dark matter is, maybe
figure out what the graviton is. Is there a particle
that media is gravity? Is there a whole spectrum of
(40:07):
crazy particles out there we haven't even anticipated. We're talking
about spending that kind of money, maybe building one in China,
maybe building one in Europe. The v LHC, they call
it the Very Large Hadron Collider. But overshadowing all these
conversations is a memory of the SSC, why it fail,
and how to avoid that kind of scenario in the future. Well,
(40:27):
I think I have the solution, Daniel. I think it's
pretty clear to me what needs to happen with that.
You need to run for president. Man is never gonna happen.
I want to build a hundred billion dollar white c atron.
Do we get about two votes? Yeah, I'm a one
issue candidate. I'm gonna slash the US spending except for
particle physics. You know. Frankly, I'm I'm frustrated. I don't
(40:51):
understand why spending money on basic research isn't the bipartisan issue.
You know, if your goal is to understand the universe,
it's definitely worth the money. If your goal is to
prove education, it's definitely worth the money. If your goal
is to improve technology or economics or anything, even you know,
potential military applications spend money on basic research. Republicans, Democrats, centrists, liberals, conservatives,
(41:14):
everybody should agree that money for basic research improve society.
It's a good investment in ourselves. So I don't understand
why we don't have a trillion dollar science. But because
you're not running for office, Daniel, I think you need
to do it. That was my pitch right there. All right,
let's go viral then. But you know, people also tend
to view science is a zero sum game. So if
(41:36):
you're asking for money for your big collider, then probably
it's going to squeeze the budget of other projects. And
then you get into this question like what's more important,
you know, researching potential vaccines for future viral pandemics or
studying some crazy particles and nobody's ever seen before. And
those are really hard conversations to happen. Well at the moment,
At the moment, it's not that hard, Daniel, I think.
(41:57):
I think right now, are you saying you're not voting
for me? For presidents? What I'm here, I'm saying that
sixty years to think about it, that's right, you know,
let's see how that your platform involves. So it's a
it's a delicate balance. You know, you've got to have
good project management skills to your project doesn't go four
or eight billion dollars over budget. But you also have
to understand the political landscape and how it's changing, and
(42:20):
how the various national governments are involved, want to be
involved or don't want to be involved. It's really complex
to manage such a big international project. You're saying the
problem is people getting people to agree. Yeah, that's right.
But science is by people and for people, and so
it's important that people are invested. And hey, that's one
reason why we do this podcast is that people understand
(42:42):
why these projects are so fascinating, why they're important, the
secrets we could learn about the universe, and why they're
important not just for a few thousand people in lab
coats around the world, but for everybody, because everybody wants
to know the answer to the questions what's the universe
made out of it? How did it start? And those
answers could lie at the heart of the next big
particle collector. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that,
(43:03):
and and it makes you think of what could have
been or what we could know but currently don't know.
If only we explored. That's right. There is some element
of the multiverse out there in which they did build
the super connecting super collider, and they have the secrets
of the universe, and they are laughing at us because
we are so clueless. Oh man, Now I have FuMO
(43:23):
mode exactly fear of missing out to a multiverse observer geez.
And it's infinite too, so it's infinite fomo. That's exactly
what I have. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for joining us,
see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that
(43:47):
Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcast For my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. No
Hey, Daniel, not that I'm looking, but where can I
find the world's biggest laser? Oh, that's here in the
United States at the National Ignition Facility. To have a
hundred and ninety two beams. Oh man, it sounds awesome.
How about the world's biggest telescope that's actually also an
American project at Mount Graham in Arizona. It's twelve meters
across twelve impressive. And who's got the record for the
(00:32):
biggest particle accelerator. That's actually a European project. That's the
large agar and collider at CERN. What happened? Why don't
Americans have the record for that too? Well, you know
we could have had a super jumbo Texas sized collider. Well,
let's just say there's a super story there. Nice, it's
a Texas size tall tale. I'm guessing it's a true
(00:53):
story of entriguing and politics, super colliding story. I am
more Hammond, cartoonist in the creator of PhD comments, I'm Daniel.
(01:16):
I'm a particle physicist, and I definitely want more government
dollars to build bigger particle colliders. Nice, I think we
both agree on that. I also want more dollars. You
didn't specify what you're gonna do with all that government cash.
Make more podcast episodes and welcome to our podcast, Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio,
(01:37):
a super podcast in which we super collide your brain
with super crazy ideas. We go all over the universe
to talk about the biggest things, the smallest things, the
weirdest things. But mostly we talk about the most wondrous
and curiosity invoking things, the things we want to understand,
and the things that science is working right now every
day twenty four seven in white lab coats to figure
(02:00):
out for you, tried all the amazing and wonderful things
to discover out there in the universe. But we also
kind of like to talk about the process of discovery
because you know, it's a human endeavor and there are
a lot of interesting stories that happen in our search
for the truth about the universe. That's right, Science is
for people. It's not for just AI bots to digest
(02:21):
and understand. We do it because it's our curiosity about
the universe. It's the things that we want to know,
and so not only is it done for people, is
done by people, and those people have names and jobs
and real lives and ambitions, and they make mistakes, and
sometimes those mistakes are supersized. Yeah, and sometimes the science
has even done on people. I am fortunately not involved
(02:43):
in any of that kind of science. You never had
a particle collide with you, Daniel. I am particles, and
I collide with particles, but I've never intentionally collided particles
with people for science. You know. That's actually one of
the only positive spinoffs of particle physics is that you
can use particle beams to treat answer. That's right. Yeah,
But mostly we build these big particle colliders because we
(03:04):
want to replicate the situation in the early universe. We
want to create a little environment where nature can reveal
to us some of the secrets of how the universe
is put together. But it is a human endeavor, and
as such, there are always a lot of interesting stories
about how discoveries are made or what people were thinking
at the time, and sometimes great stories about big experiments
(03:26):
and why they didn't work, or why they work, or
why some of them weren't even built. That's right. The
history of particle physics is sort of an escalating series
of colliders, bigger and bigger, more and more energy, Probing
higher and higher into the secrets of nature. They got
bigger and bigger and more and more expensive, until one
day they got maybe too big. And so right now,
(03:47):
the Europeans have the biggest particle collider basically as far
as we know in the universe, right, as far as
we know, the biggest collider as far as we know,
although you know, it doesn't create the most energetic particles.
We've seen those come from space, and so it could
be that there are alien particle physicists out there shooting
their particle accelerator acces. So it's the biggest human made
(04:10):
particles that we know of that we know, and so
the Europeans have it at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Right,
that's the biggest one, that's the record holder. And so
the question is why don't the Americans have it? You know,
we have the biggest laser, the biggest telescope, and the
biggest gravitation wave detector at least at the moment. So
there's kind of an interesting story there, and so to
(04:31):
be on the podcast, we'll be asking the question what
happened to the super conducting super collider. It's super mysterious.
It's super fascinating, and it's something that came up briefly
in a podcast episode we did a couple of weeks
ago about the discovery of the Higgs boson and we
(04:53):
mentioned the super conducting super collider, and I remember you
were like, what is that a real name for a
real thing? It sounds like you just made that up.
Why would you put super twice in the title? I mean,
that's that's like an extra superlatives. It's so good they
used it twice, And a lot of listeners were curious
about this and wanted to hear more about this incredibly
named super collider, so we decided to do a whole
(05:14):
episode on why people built it and what it meant
and why it didn't end up getting finished right, And
this is kind of part of the story of particle
physics in the sense that, you know, I guess we
started probably with like small, little particle colliders, and then
they've just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
and bigger over the years. And the question is maybe
(05:36):
one of these gods too big? Yeah, because the only
thing that limits us from building them bigger is money.
The more money you give us, the bigger the collider
that you can build, but also the more seco to
you can reveal from nature. So it's sort of like
you can just buy information, like you want to know
more about the basic way the universe works, spend more money.
It's really very direct. But you know, we live in
(05:58):
practical times, and it's not always infinite cash to fund
your science projects. So these machines operate in a political environment.
They need support, they need funding, they need continued funding
to be finished. And so it's a fascinating story of
sort of how much money you could ask for for
your particle physics toys. Yeah, I guess science is political
and itself, but also it depends on politics, right, that's right. Well,
(06:21):
you know, we try not to be political. We're serving
information that's of course used to make important political and
policy decisions, but we try to be as fact based
as possible. But anytime you're spending money, that's political, right,
And any dollar you're spending on a particle colliders that
dollar you're not spending on poverty programs, or on weapons systems,
or on anything else. And so it's always a political
(06:44):
decision about how much to spend on science and what
kind of science to spend it on? Do you want
the biggest laser, the biggest telescope or the biggest microscope.
And there's another fascinating angle there, and that most of
these experiments end up being pretty international, like the folks
on them like me, I don't really care if it's
a Russian or a Chinese person or a South American
(07:04):
or Canadian who's working with me. But when we sell
these projects to our national governments who fund them, a
lot of times we end up pitching them like, hey,
this is an American national pride project, all right. So,
as usual, Daniel went out there into the Internet to
ask how many people out there knew about the almost
bill superior super conducting super collider superlatively named. And so
(07:29):
before you listen to these answers, think about what comes
to mind when you hear the words super conducting super collider.
Here's what people had to say. It was a particle
accelerator that was planned for the United States. I think
it was meant for Texas, and I believe it was
supposed to be two or three times bigger than what
we have at the LHC at CERN, But I could
be wrong on that. Part and it never happened because
(07:51):
the US government cut funding for it. Actually, I've never
heard the word super conducting super collider. I think it's
similar to the let's see the larger collider, but but
condly colliding the conductive particles. Maybe two things stand out
to me. One is you say it in past tense,
so it's not around anymore. And the second one is
there's a lot of supers being used, So I mean
(08:14):
superconductor makes sense because that means that it's very efficient
and it's not losing any energy as heat or other items.
So the difference between a conductor and a superconductor is understood.
But a super collider, that's so if you've got a
regular collider. I'm wondering what the difference between a large
collider and a super collidery So that sounds like it
(08:34):
is massive or planning on crashing large items together. I
don't know. I'm super anxious to find out if I
have the right one. The super conducting super collider was
the United States attempt to create the biggest super collider
(08:55):
before was created. I believe we try to do it
down in Texas or something like that, and Carn's just
either never approved the funning or cut off the funning.
All Right, I like these answers. They're pretty super I
like the person who broke it down. They're like trying
to figure it out like you used to past tense.
So I know it's not around anymore, and there's a
(09:15):
lot of super so it must be pretty cool. I
was impressed, you have. They made a lot of progress
just based on the name of the thing and how
I read the question. So super job to that person
like asking if super is bigger than large? That sounds
like a Starbucks question. It's venty larger than small. Who knows.
I'd like a venti conducting hyper collider, coffee grande collider.
(09:39):
Al Right, So this was a big experiment that was
almost built. So step us through Daniel. What was the
super conducting SuperCollider? So the super conducting super collider. It's
really a tragedy and it still pains me to this
day that we didn't build this thing because not only
would it have been a huge collider, it would have
been the biggest collider of its time, and even still today,
(10:01):
it would be bigger than any collider we have. Now,
you know, we measure these colliders not just in size, Like,
it doesn't really matter how physically large they are. Yes,
it does, Daniel. If you're gonna put it in Texas,
it has to be the biggest one. We measure these
things in terms of their energy, So it really is
about the energy of the particles. Because remember, the goal
(10:23):
of building a big collider is not just to say,
look upon my works, e mighty. It's because we want
to create a lot of energy in a small space,
because that allows us to probe really massive particles. Remember
e equals mc squared. If you put a lot of
energy into a small space and then as long as
you're above some m that nature has, you can create
(10:45):
that particle. And so it's a great way to just
sort of like search the cosmos for new kinds of
particles without knowing in advance that they are there. Right.
It's it's kind of like having a big telescope and
just having more magnification or having a better microscope and
having better you know, ability to look at smaller things.
It's like the more energy you have, the more you
can probe what happens at the quantum level. Yeah, and
(11:09):
it's very similar to having a more powerful microscope because
the more energy you have, literally the smaller distance scale
you can probe, because there's this anti correlation between sort
of the width of the wave function and the energy
of the particle, and so higher the energy you're probing,
the smaller the feature you can look at, for example,
like inside the proton or inside the cork or whatever.
(11:32):
Oh I see, it's like literally the particles are smaller
the fact where they go sort of you know, it's
like you can probe substructures of the proton or if
there is substructure to the cork, so to the electrons,
you can see them only with higher energy collider that
could break those tight bonds and and sort of resolve
them at those very high energies. And so yeah, we
(11:53):
want to explore the universe, and a one great way
to do that is to create these really high energy collisions.
So again it's not about the eyes of the colliders,
about the energy stored. And we measured that in terms
of electron volts. But there's so many electron volts in
these collisions that we have a crazy unit called tera
electron volts trillion electron volts and to orient you, a
(12:16):
billion electron volts is about how much energy they're stored
in a proton, So a terra electron volts is like
a thousand times the energy of a proton. Take me
back in history, So we're talking about the eighties, right,
So the super conducting super collider was going to be
built in the eighties, and it was actually conceived by
Ronald Reagan, the president. Yeah, and so we're back in
(12:36):
the Cold War, you know, and back then a lot
of science was closely linked to national pride and to
national security. People felt like as long as we were
on the cutting edge of science, including space and including
particle physics and weapons physics, that we were secure and
we were beating the Russians or the Soviets at the
(12:57):
time in all these technologies, which you know, contributed to
our national defense dot dot dog. But it's literally like
bragging rights, like the moonshot, like getting to the moon,
you know, didn't directly improve our national security, but just
being able to say that we didn't and they didn't
just it was just kind of a a national pride thing. Yeah.
I think it motivates the population and makes us feel
(13:19):
secure and all that stuff. And there's also some direct
spin offs, you know, going to the moon helps you
develop rockets, which is important for I. C. B M. S.
For you know, dropping weapons on your enemies, populations, and
all sorts of terrible things. Particle physics is much less direct, right,
maybe if you are understanding the nature of the universe,
eventually you could tap into that energy source or build
(13:41):
new things or whatever. You know. World War two was
a lesson that, like nuclear physics and particle physics could
directly lead to weapons technology, you know, the development of
the atomic bomb and the understanding of the atom. So
there was a lot of ideas wrapped up in there,
like we should be at the forefront, Americans should be
at the leading edge of particle So you tell me
that no politician at that time said the words you mean,
(14:04):
you want to build a giant particle gun, great, can
we aim it? You definitely can't aim this kind of
thing at all. And you know, at the time people
were thinking about particle guns, but mostly in terms of
star wars. This was more for science. And so this
was a project originally conceived by Reagan and they thought, well,
let's build a huge particle collider, bearer than anybody's ever
(14:27):
built one before, and we'll just put American particle physics
on the map. I mean, we're already were sort of
leaders in this area, a lot of Nobel prizes for
developing the technology behind particle colliders and you know, and
Lawrence developed the sincratron technology. So Americans were already leaders,
and this was like, let's hang onto the leadership in
this area. And so it was like three and he
(14:48):
started this project. But these things take, you know, decades
to plan in decades to build, and so you're at
the mercy of the changing political time, right because you
can change government in between a project or at least
support potentially absolutely. And you know, then the Berlin Wall
fell down and the Soviet Union collapsed and we no
longer had the same adversary, which fueled the Cold War,
(15:12):
which made us want to necessarily fight these battles and uh,
you know, beat the Russians, all right. So Reagan was involved,
he championed in and it was aiming pretty high, like
at the time, what was the biggest collider in terms
of energy. The Europeans were planning their own collider, which
was going to be around thirteen or fourteen terror electron
(15:33):
volts that eventually became the LHC. The only C was
on a similar time scale to the super Connecting super Collider.
Of course, it ended up being delayed by ten years, etcetera, etcetera.
But that's sort of the scales like fourteen TV at CERN.
But this one, the super conducting super collider, This thing
was going to be forty t EV. It was three
(15:53):
times almost three times more energetic than the LHC is today.
That's there were swinging for the fences. It really were,
and they were like, let's go really really big. And
you can read the stories of the time and the
discussions among the physicists and some of them were thinking, wow,
that's really big, Like is that maybe too big? Should
we go for thirty five? Should we go for thirties?
And a lot of this internal discussion was like, no,
(16:15):
we gotta hold for forty because if we start sliding
down and they're just gonna dial the knob down and
then we're just gonna get a small one, like the
Europeans are getting start high, Start high. I have a
big starting offer. But there was also there was some
you know, arrogance there. They were like, you know, America's
in the lead. There's no way the government's not gonna
build this thing and fund this thing at a lot
(16:36):
of political support in the beginning, and so they thought,
you know, let's just ask for as much as we
can get. There's no way they're going to cancel this thing.
Famous last words, his last words, they flew a little
too close to the Sun's where they're going to cancel
this podcast. In no way they're going to cancel this podcast,
not until it costs as much as the super connective
super collider, and we're always off from that. But they
(16:58):
had a huge competition to see where this thing should go.
Because it's such a big project. They can't just say, well, look,
firm Lab is the center of particle physics, we'll just
put it there. It was, you know, billions and billions
of dollar projects. So they had to have it politically balanced,
and they had this big competition, and Texas offered a
lot of money to help build the thing. So they
(17:19):
decided to put it south of Dallas in this town
called Waxahatchie, Texas. It was a really little town and
they were gonna build the thing. Was going to be
all the way around the town, like the whole town
was going to be surrounded by this thing, all right, well,
let's get into what happened and what we learned from
this project. But first let's take a quick break. All right,
(17:52):
we're talking about the superlatively superiorly named super condieing super Collider,
which was almost old in a small town outside of
Texas in the eighties, started by Reagan, but it was
never built. And so the question is what happened? What
did they have a name for it? Was it the
super conducting super collider? From the start, there were a
(18:13):
lot of names floated around. You know. Some people wanted
to call it the Desert Tron because it was out there,
the Desert Tron no no, or even worse. Some people
wanted to call it the Gipper Tron for Ronald Reagan,
you know, because he championed the project. Should have called
the Reagan Tron. There were some pretty silly names. He
is used a little robotic himself. That makes me sound
like you're colliding Reagan's and you know we only have
(18:35):
one of them, but Reagans, I guess. You know. So
they actually did start building this thing, I mean they
decided to build it. They started saving the money, they
proved the money, they started spending. The money was the
initial budget for it. The initial budget for this thing,
you know, depends on what you call initial And these
things always start out for, you know, a couple billion dollars,
(18:56):
and in eight seven Congress was told it was going
to be ours and about four billion dollars, four and
a half billion dollars. And then a few years later
the project cost looks like they were rising to eight billion,
ten billion, eventually up to like twelve billion dollars. What
in comparison, the large Hadron Collider was about a ten
billion dollar project. So twelve billion for a collider three
(19:20):
times the size of the Late C is not really
that outrageous, right, you know, they sold it for four
and then it turned out costing twelve so they were
in a bit of a political buying there. And these days,
like a few billion dollars, I feel like we throw
that number around like like nothing. Well, these days, in
the epic of the pandemic, you know, we're spending tons
of money just to dig ourselves out of this economic hole.
(19:41):
But you're right in in the scale of like government projects,
a few billion dollars is not a lot of money.
It's a it's an aircraft carrier, it's half an aircraft carrier,
it's a few fighter jets. It's it's not that much
money for secrets of the universe, but it's a lot
of money for science. You know. The only other project
that had ever been at this scale was like the
(20:01):
International Space Station, which also ballooned in cost and went
up from ten billion to a hundred billion dollars. All right,
So it balloons and couts. And what happened like did
they start digging and suddenly they hit rock or something?
Why did they underestimate or why did cause go up? Well,
costs always go up. You know, these are physicists, they're
not financial planners. You just gave me so much pressure
(20:26):
us here Daniel as their business partner. One problem was
that we expected, or we hoped for international cooperation. We
were hoping other countries were gonna be like, hey, that
sounds like a great project. Will pitch in a billion,
or here's here for this piece. And that's commonplace these
days for the big international projects. For example, the US
contributed huge amounts of money hundreds of millions, if not
(20:48):
billions of dollars towards the LHC. And it's like it's
like you're buying a place at the table or at
the science table kind of right, Like Japan can be like, hey,
here's a few billion dollars, but we get DIBs on
and having a certain number of scientists or is it
like office space, what do you negotiate? Well, that's a
great question. Really what you get is just access to
the data that you get to use the data to
(21:08):
do science. But it's a little thickier. It's also it's
just national pride. Like you can say this was a
Japanese project, and the Japanese Parliament can say, look, we
have proved this thing, and look the Higgs boson was
discovered using Japanese technology and Japanese scientists, and there's a
lot of national pride involved, like we're awesome. Yeah, Like
Congress would have preferred if the money they spent to
(21:30):
build the LHC had been spent on an American collider
to discover the Higgs boson on American soil. I mean,
I don't personally care. I'm happy to work with international scientists.
I think the whole nationalism and science thing is a
red herring. But it's also important to the people who
make the political decisions about money. So you got to
play that game a little bit. Anyway, the Americans, they
(21:52):
hype this thing so much as an American project that
the international community didn't really want to jump on board.
You know, you can't be like, look, this is an
awesome American red, white, blue project. We're going to dominate
this thing. Oh and by the way, can we have
a billion dollars so you can be part of our
American is awesome project. Yeah. And you know, CERN was
building their competing set of colliders, the Large Electron Positron
(22:15):
Collider and also the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, so
they weren't gonna be pitching in and so, um, we
were going to ask the Japanese for a bunch of money.
But then we actually got really unlucky with that one.
What happened so that by then it was a Bush
Bush Senior, that's where it was. President Bush was president,
and there was a bit of a political delicate moment
there in the Japanese government and where they going to
(22:37):
support this thing. And so the Americans got Bush to
agree to raise this issue with the Japanese Prime Minister
in person. And you know he doesn't get that much time.
You gotta really happy, like an important issue to get
all the way up to like the presidential negotiation level.
So everybody was primed for Bush to like press this
issue with the Japanese Prime minister. But I don't know
if you remember there was this one trip where Bush
(22:58):
went to Japan and they were having a Nancy dinner
and he actually fainted and puked on the Prime minister
as he was about to ask about the collider. Yeah,
that was the night he was supposed to ask for
money for the super conducting super collider, but instead, you know,
rolfed on his lap, and so it's like, hey, can
you give us a big and so that didn't work out,
(23:22):
you know, so we didn't end up getting money from Japan. Really,
do you think that Japanese based that decision on the puking. No.
I think it just never really got discussed. You know,
if this is a priority for Americans, they're going to
bring it up. This is our opportunity just sort of
didn't happen, and then other things came up that were
more important, and so the Japanese didn't contribute. So it
(23:42):
was going to be an all American project, and you know,
costs start going up and nobody else is helping out.
And then the political support started to dwindle, but they
did start digging and they started spending money. They spent
like billions of dollars. They dug kilometers and kilometers of tunnels. Well,
maybe to take a step back here and paint a
picture for us. So this was going to be three
(24:04):
times more powerful than the LHC. And it's a collider.
So what are we talking about like a tunnel, a
ring building? What what was this collider going to look like? Well,
you got to build a whole new laboratory, right, the
consequences of not building it at Firmi Lab where you
already have a laboratory and a community and land. Is
it gonna buy new land and build a whole new
laboratory and build the collider itself. The collider itself is
(24:27):
a huge tunnel and it was going to be ninety
kilometers around. So you have to dig this tunnel underground
that's nine kilometers in circumbent, and then in it you've
got to build the instrument, the actual collider itself, which
is you know a series of vacuum tubes and little
accelerator cavities and magnets to bend the thing. So it's
a lot of work. It's a huge piece of infrastructure.
(24:49):
You're talking about a ring like a tunnel in the
shape of a circle, kind of like the large Hadron collider,
but bigger. I imagine, much bigger, Like if you looked
at a map, you could fit like you know, eight
l ah c's inside the super conducting super collider. I
mean the large hadron colliders like thirty kilometers around. This
thing's ninety kilometers around. So it's much bigger. And it
(25:11):
was so big. In fact, they were going to make
it not a perfectly a circle. They were gonna have
some straight shot parts of it, like stretch out the
circle light into more of like an oblong Well, you
don't need to bend it all the time. You can
have linear sections where you just accelerating like a running track,
like a running track exactly. But then they had to
build experimental halls where they were going to surround the
(25:31):
collider with the detectors to see the collisions. And you
have to build a whole place for the scientists to live.
And you know, one problem was just like getting scientists
out there. You know, you're working at firmula, you're living
in Chicago, and now your next job opportunity is like
waxa hatchie Texas. It was not always that attractive. You know,
nothing against small town Texas, but not everybody wanted to
(25:52):
move there. So there were a lot of obstacles to
get into this thing off the ground. Had to convince
Starbucks to open a branch there. It was a man.
And you need a bigger circle because the more energy
that you have in your beam and your particles that
you're accelerating, it's harder to kind of make them go
in a circle when they're they're going faster. That's right,
That's what the magnets are for. They're there to curve
(26:13):
it into a circle. So you either need a larger
tunnel if they're going faster, or you need stronger magnets.
And so the Large Hadron Collider made a different choice.
They were like, we're going to build our collider inside
an existing tunnel. We're just gonna work really really hard
on the magnet technology to make them bend even harder.
So the LEDC went for smaller tunnel, bigger magnets, and
(26:36):
the super Conducting super Collider were like, hey, we're in Texas,
let's just make it huge, and that worries so much
about the magnets, I see, because it's tricky, right, I mean,
those magnets are really tricky. These magnets are really tricky.
And that's the super conducting part. Even though the magnets
at the SSC weren't going to be as powerful as
the LHC, they still have to be really really cold
because remember these are electro magnets, and the way you
(26:58):
generate those magnets, you have loops of wire and a coil.
You turned on the current and you get a magnet
through the center of it, and the stronger the current,
the stronger the magnet. And if you have super conducting coils,
then you have really high currents and you have really
strong magnets. So these things are cooled down to super
cool temperatures to be super conducting for super strong magnets.
(27:20):
All right, So they planned it. They actually drew up
the plants and they actually started building it. Like they
dug up the tunnel. Yeah, there's twenty three kilometers of
tunnel that they dug and are still there. They spent
two billion dollars building buildings and digging this tunnel. But
then they started to lose support in Congress. So now
it's like or so enthusiasm is weighing a little bit,
(27:43):
because not only does it seem like the Cold War
is sort of over, there was a huge amount of
money being spent on the International Space Station, and people
didn't have the appetite for like two of these massive projects.
And also I think we started going into a recession
or something, didn't we Yeah, exactly, and so we weren't
just like spending money out the wazoo anymore. And so
(28:04):
it was the U. S. House of Representatives actually voted
to kill this project. You know, it needed authorization every
single year. It's not like you know, some centrally planned
government where you can say, here's twenty years where the
funding the government is not going to change. The House
changes every two years, and you know, they had to
reauthorize funding because they get the bill every year. Every
(28:25):
year they look at the budget and the build they're like,
what is now six billion dollars? Yeah, and so if
you're a project that's going to take twenty years to fund,
you need to be approved twenty times basically in order
to be completed. So in ninety two the House killed it,
but then the Senate saved it. The Senate was like, no,
this is a big deal. It is still important. You know,
the Senate sort of slower moving than the House. Those
(28:47):
guys a six year terms, etcetera. So he was saved.
And you know, Carlo Rubia, the guy who has ended
up being the director of CERN, he came over and
testified to Congress and he said, you guys are wasting
your money because we're building a collider at CERN and
it's going to be just as good and it's gonna
be turned on before yours, and you're wasting your time
and your money. But it was three times smaller. It
(29:10):
was smaller, and his collider was ten years behind schedule.
But you know, it was in competition. He wanted the
Europeans to discover the Higgs boson or what lay beyond it,
and so he didn't want the American competition. We totally
got bamboozl we did, we got ruby, we got faked out,
we did get packed out. And you know, at that point,
(29:31):
it was well over its budget. It looked like it
was going to cost like twelve billion dollars. And now
Clinton was president and Clinton was not terribly excited to
spend a lot of money on a project that seemed
like Ronald Reagan's pet project. I said, he didn't want
to spend the money on the kipper Tron kimber Tron exactly.
If we had named it the Clintron, you know, then
(29:51):
maybe it would have succeeded. He yeah, there you go. Yeah,
you guys should have played that game a little better.
And you know, it hadicism not just from politicians but
also from other scientists. Scientists and other field felt like, hey,
this is too much money. Particle physicists been hogging the
budget for years. This is unfair. Even other particle physicists.
(30:13):
We're thinking, look, this one massive project is just sort
of like pulling all the oxygen out of the room.
You can't get funding from any other kind of particle
physics experiment. Some people thought, instead of having one megaproject,
we should have like a healthy ecosystem of smaller ones, right,
because if this project is taking the twelve billion dollars,
that's twelve billion dollars that it's not going to other
(30:33):
science projects. Yeah, and it's not necessarily a zero sum game, right, Like,
there is a lot more money than twelve billion dollars
in the US government, if they decided to spend this much,
they might not necessarily cut it from other projects. Right,
And when people talk about is ten billion dollars worth
it to build another collider, you know, you don't necessarily
have to assume that ten billion is coming from other
(30:54):
science projects. Maybe it's coming from the defense budget, or
maybe it's just an investment. You borrow the money from
their future, you know, by bonds, and then invest in
basic research and in education. In my view, it's always
good to spend money on basic research, particle physics or
otherwise because it pays for itself. You get that money
back in terms of educating your population or understanding the
(31:15):
universe or whatever. Me So it's a complicated political question,
but preferably particle physics. You the top of particle physics,
then cartoonists, then podcasts. All right, let's get into what
we could have learned from this project and what happened
when it was canceled. But first let's take another quick break.
(31:48):
All right, Daniels, So the super conducting super collider, biggest
collider ever to be built in Texas, just got killed
by the House. And what was the reaction. Well, and
it was finally killed, and you know, in particle physics,
people felt like the world it ended, you know, they
couldn't believe it. They thought, look, we built this big thing,
We've already gotten funding, we started building a tunnel. We're
(32:11):
the most important kind of physics there is. There's a
lot of arrogance and particle of physics, I will admit.
And so they were just totally shocked. They were totally shocked,
and a lot of people lost their jobs and left
the field, you know, because suddenly the field shrank all
of a sudden, there aren't these two thousand positions at
the Superconnecting super Collider Laboratory to support people. People had
(32:32):
left their jobs at universities to move down there and
work full time at this lab, which was now you know,
become a ghost town. So the whole field just contracted,
like the number of particle physicists shrink, not just the
number of colliders and the amount of money spent on stuff,
but the number of people involved. And a lot of
those people went into finance to make money, to make money,
(32:54):
and you know what's partially to cause for the financial
collapse in the two thousand seven and two thousand and
eight was a lot of physicists not really want, not
really understanding what they're doing. What you're drawing in line
directly from physicists leaving to field the nineties three to
the economic collapse of two eight. I'm not drawing the line.
(33:16):
I'm just saying one thing and then I'm saying the
other thing. There's a correlation, you're saying I didn't even
say there's a correlation. I just said the one thing
and then the other thing happened. But I will not
pretty sure you said that was to cause Daniel. We
can let's rewind the tape. But I will note that
I think it's always a mistake to not invest in
keep keep physicists away from the actual money, and just
(33:37):
give them the money. I do think that's smart. I
do not think it's a good idea to have physicist anyway. Um,
there was sort of a celebration in other fields, condensed
matter physics that always felt like particle physics got too
much of the pie. You know, they thought this come
up in for high energy physics was long overwhelmed. They
were dancing in your grave. They're in the streets celebrating. Yeah,
(34:00):
they sort of were. The sort of were and of course,
it left an opening for the Europeans to build their
collider and discovered the Higgs boson, and they did, and
they did, I mean a few twenty years later, twenty
years later exactly, but it's you know, it was sent
shock waves into particle physics that I still felt a
few years later. I didn't join the field until like
(34:22):
nine when I graduated from college and started grad school,
and people were still reeling from this. You know. It
was like the thing that happened that nobody wanted to
talk about, but it left a huge mark on the field.
The project that shall not be named, that shall not
be finished, that should have been named the Bilotron, the Clintron,
(34:42):
but now we don't talk about it about it anymore. Yeah,
all right, Well that's a shame and sort of I
guess a tragedy and a victim of politics and changing,
you know, political landscapes. So maybe it step us through.
Let's rubbit in, Daniel, what could we have learned from
this from the different on what that's potentially what? What
(35:02):
what amazing discoveries do we miss out on? Well, we
don't know. But maybe that's the most painful part for
me personally, because I feel like we could have purchased knowledge,
We could have pulled back the curtain and seeing what
nature has and we still don't know the answer to
those questions, but we could have those today, you know.
So Number one, we would have found the Higgs boson,
(35:23):
and we would have found it ten or fifteen years earlier.
You know, if the super conducting super collider had been
built and turned on like expected, you know, around the
year two thousand, then it would have been so powerful
it would have found the Higgs boson very quickly. You
know that's a ten year Yeah. Absolutely, it was definitely equipped.
You don't think there would have been delays or like
you would have looked in the wrong place by accident. No,
(35:46):
it's powerful enough to definitely discover it. Of course, there
could always be delays. That certainly happens in a lot
of these big experiments. But you know, they started building
this thing in the eighties, they started digging the tunnel
in the eighties. It seemed pretty likely it was going
to turn on two thousand, two thousand one, that kind
of time scale. And so the sooner you build these things,
the earlier you learn this stuff, and the further down
the road you are to answering some mysteries of the universe. Right,
(36:09):
I don't really care if Americans or Europeans discover the
Higgs boson, but we would have found it sooner, would
I had the answer to these questions. And there's a
whole decade there where we didn't know the Higgs Boson existed,
if it was real or not, and we could have
been in the know. And so to me that's sort
of tension, like that we could have known this sooner.
That's really worth the luck, right, because we ain't getting younger,
(36:29):
so the sooner we get answers to the better. Right. Yeah,
you don't wanted to discover the secrets of the universe
after you're dead, that's right. But the really painful part
is just the missed opportunity for future exploration. I mean,
we're really limited by the energy of these machines. The
more energy is in the machine, the easier it is
to create these new, really heavy particles. And the thing
(36:50):
that we don't know is where are the new particles
after the Higgs boson? What else is there to discover?
People have ideas, but they're just really ideas, and we
can talk about some of those in the moment. But
the point is that this is untapped territory. We don't
know what to expect. You just have to go look.
It's sort of like landing on a new alien planet,
right opening up the hatch and walking around. You don't
(37:10):
know if it's going to be dust and rubble and nothingness,
or if it's going to be like filled with crazy
things that blow your mind. And so we could have
turned this thing on, We could have pulled back the curtain.
There could be things waiting for us to discover that
we might have found. Now the late c it found
the Higgs boson, but so far it's found nothing else,
(37:31):
and that tells us that maybe it needed more energy.
Maybe we needed a bigger collider in order to find
those secrets or to unravel some of the mysteries that
we're struggling with today. Right, it could be like like
the mysteries of the universe, the pink unicorns are just
above what the l can do. It could be, right,
it could also be that there's nothing there and we'd
build a forty TV collider and found nothing, but you
(37:55):
can't tell, or just like found the Higgs boson and
that's it. Yeah, but you can't tell them if you
don't look. And the amount of money we're talking about,
you know, a few billion dollars, it just it pales
in comparison to like the amount of just money wasted
on toilets by the military. So it pains me to
think that we almost pulled back the curtain and could
have seen these things if they are there, but didn't
(38:16):
you know. It's like if somebody told you, oh, you
could have landed a spaceship on this exo planet and
we could have had pictures of it right now, Like, wow,
that would be exciting. How much would you pay for
pictures of the surface of exo planets? I would pay
billions of dollars of government money. Personally, I would write
the check from the U. S. Treasury for billions of dollars,
(38:37):
like I would spend billions of dollars of other people's money.
It's our money. It's our money, man, we are we
earned that money, we gave it to the government. We
want them to do good stuff with it. Right Well,
is the door closed? Like just because this collider didn't
take off or was built, isn't the l a C
upgrading itself? And are their plans for a bigger collider. Now, yeah,
(38:59):
there are plans conversations about building a one hundred TV collider,
which would dwarf even the super conducting super collider super
duper but you know, super super duper collider conducting super
duper collider. What we gotta do is figure out who's
going to be president in fifteen years and name it
after that or just keep changing the name. Why not? No,
(39:24):
but the SEC still overshadows these conversations. Every time somebody's like,
let's build a really big one. People like, yeah, but
remember that time we asked for too much money. Traumatized,
we crashed and burned. Yeah, we're traumatized. We've got PTSD
particle traumatic stress science syndrome. Yeah, nobody really knows, like
(39:46):
how much money will the political system tolerate? Like, hundred
billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on
a collider, Fifty billion is a lot of money, twenty
billion is a lot of money. How much can we
afford to spend on these things? So we're talking about
new colliders to maybe discover what dark matter is, maybe
figure out what the graviton is. Is there a particle
that media is gravity? Is there a whole spectrum of
(40:07):
crazy particles out there we haven't even anticipated. We're talking
about spending that kind of money, maybe building one in China,
maybe building one in Europe. The v LHC, they call
it the Very Large Hadron Collider. But overshadowing all these
conversations is a memory of the SSC, why it fail,
and how to avoid that kind of scenario in the future. Well,
(40:27):
I think I have the solution, Daniel. I think it's
pretty clear to me what needs to happen with that.
You need to run for president. Man is never gonna happen.
I want to build a hundred billion dollar white c atron.
Do we get about two votes? Yeah, I'm a one
issue candidate. I'm gonna slash the US spending except for
particle physics. You know. Frankly, I'm I'm frustrated. I don't
(40:51):
understand why spending money on basic research isn't the bipartisan issue.
You know, if your goal is to understand the universe,
it's definitely worth the money. If your goal is to
prove education, it's definitely worth the money. If your goal
is to improve technology or economics or anything, even you know,
potential military applications spend money on basic research. Republicans, Democrats, centrists, liberals, conservatives,
(41:14):
everybody should agree that money for basic research improve society.
It's a good investment in ourselves. So I don't understand
why we don't have a trillion dollar science. But because
you're not running for office, Daniel, I think you need
to do it. That was my pitch right there. All right,
let's go viral then. But you know, people also tend
to view science is a zero sum game. So if
(41:36):
you're asking for money for your big collider, then probably
it's going to squeeze the budget of other projects. And
then you get into this question like what's more important,
you know, researching potential vaccines for future viral pandemics or
studying some crazy particles and nobody's ever seen before. And
those are really hard conversations to happen. Well at the moment,
At the moment, it's not that hard, Daniel, I think.
(41:57):
I think right now, are you saying you're not voting
for me? For presidents? What I'm here, I'm saying that
sixty years to think about it, that's right, you know,
let's see how that your platform involves. So it's a
it's a delicate balance. You know, you've got to have
good project management skills to your project doesn't go four
or eight billion dollars over budget. But you also have
to understand the political landscape and how it's changing, and
(42:20):
how the various national governments are involved, want to be
involved or don't want to be involved. It's really complex
to manage such a big international project. You're saying the
problem is people getting people to agree. Yeah, that's right.
But science is by people and for people, and so
it's important that people are invested. And hey, that's one
reason why we do this podcast is that people understand
(42:42):
why these projects are so fascinating, why they're important, the
secrets we could learn about the universe, and why they're
important not just for a few thousand people in lab
coats around the world, but for everybody, because everybody wants
to know the answer to the questions what's the universe
made out of it? How did it start? And those
answers could lie at the heart of the next big
particle collector. All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that,
(43:03):
and and it makes you think of what could have
been or what we could know but currently don't know.
If only we explored. That's right. There is some element
of the multiverse out there in which they did build
the super connecting super collider, and they have the secrets
of the universe, and they are laughing at us because
we are so clueless. Oh man, Now I have FuMO
(43:23):
mode exactly fear of missing out to a multiverse observer geez.
And it's infinite too, so it's infinite fomo. That's exactly
what I have. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for joining us,
see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that
(43:47):
Daniel and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcast For my heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. No
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
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