In some sense the surprising part of the story is that the project got as far as it did before being terminated by an overwhelming Congressional vote. The conclusions drawn are similar to ones I remember often hearing back then in the wake of the disaster: the SSC was a juicy target for a Congress intent on budget-cutting, easily portrayed as out of control (its budget kept increasing from $3 billion early on, to maybe $12 billion at the end), with little support from non-Texas representatives.
A central concern of any book of this kind has to be the “what went wrong?” question. The cancellation of the SSC had a disastrous effect on the US experimental HEP program, moving the center of research conclusively to CERN and its LHC project.
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I’ve been hearing about the book for quite a while, glad to see that it has finally appeared. This book has been in the works for a long time, with the authors starting to gather material back in the 80s, before the project was cancelled in 1993. Just after finishing the Nadis-Yau book, I got a copy of a new history of the SSC project, Tunnel Visions, by Riordan, Hoddeson and Kolb. I was interested to see (page 32) that the previous description by one of the authors of the current situation as leading to only two possibilities (“natural” SUSY or some such, or the multiverse and the end of hope for explaining things) has been expanded to now include a more interesting third possibility: “correlation between the physics of the deep UV and IR”. There’s still quite a ways to go before that happens, with a final conceptual design not due until next year, and even if there is a go-ahead, construction only starting in 2020-25.įor a detailed look at the physics to be done by such a collider, see this new review article. This gave rise to some mistaken reports like this one that the Chinese government had given its approval to the project. The current state of affairs is that an initial conceptual design has been completed recently, which was reported here. The Chinese government and people in coming years will be deciding whether to go ahead with this, and this book is the perfect place for them to read a serious account of what this proposal is and why it deserves to be taken seriously. It functions well in explaining the case for a large new collider to anyone interested, but has a distinct focus on arguments for the proposal to do this in China. This is a short, rather than encyclopedic, book, with about 130 pages of text. I’ve read many histories of HEP, but learned a lot of new things from this one, with its very different emphasis. There is a great deal of information in the book about the history and current state of experimental HEP, but from an unusual angle, that of the many Chinese contributions to the subject. Yau is a great geometer, but a main concern of the book is something completely different, the question of how one might construct such a huge physics and engineering project. The Nadis-Yau book is an unusual document in many ways.
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This energy would also allow study of Higgs self-interactions. This would be designed to explore the energy range above a TeV, in much the same way as the LHC, but with seven times the energy, thus a much higher energy reach. In a second stage the same tunnel would be used for a proton-proton machine with collision energies up to 100 TeV. This is a proposed machine of up to 100km in circumference, that would operate first as an electron-positron collider, designed to be a “Higgs factory”, allowing precision study of the Higgs. It’s a very well-informed and topical book, a bit of a political document, designed to make the case for a Chinese “Great Collider”. The first is From the Great Wall to the Great Collider, by Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau. I’ve recently finished reading two new books on huge collider projects, which make an interesting contrast.