Do you think there were sufficient justification for the cancellation of the SSC project.?

Question

A project to build a huge machine called the 'Super Conducting Super Collider' that would have explored the nature of matter and energy, was cancelled in 1993. What do you think it would have explored if it had been built. The advancement of human knowledge requires that investments should be made in projects like these. It sure was expensive but it would have cost a fraction of the money that nations invest in weapon systems. What were the reasons for its cancellation.

Some of the arguments against it may have had some validity but others not. If the know how or expertise needed to build SSC was not there, then that could have been an argument against it. But I think that even that challenge could have been surmounted.
But the argument of utility was not valid. Many great projects or ideas in science may not have immediate utility. The Hubble Space telescope does not have immediate utility for people on Earth, either. But if Hubble had not been built, we would not have known that there were planets around other stars and that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. In the same way, if we think that SSC was unjustified because its discoveries would not have been useful, the same can be said about the accelerator at CERN. The discoveries that these things make may not seem useful in the short term but they may revolutionize things in fifty or a hundred years time. When electricity was first discovered, it may also have seemed us

When electricity was first discovered, it may also have seemed a useless discovery at the time, from the point of view of utility. But decades later, it revolutionized human life. The same can be said of many other discoveries.

Answer 1

no

Answer 2

This is a fun question because you can look at it from so many different directions.

Q. Could the SSC have produced important scientific advances?
A. Certainly!

Q. Given the price tag of $12B (at cancelation) would it have given more scientific advances than any other way to spend $12B?
A. Probably not. The scientific community did not as a group believe this was the most important place to spend $12B.

Q. How much do you want to pay for a Superconducting Super Collider that doesn't work?
A. Not $12B, that is for sure. Big government projects don't necessarily produce the result you want. Remember the messed up Hubble Space Telescope's main telescope? From 1987 to 1993 the cost of the SSC escalated from $4.4B to $12B. So that might have been a good sign of a project in trouble.

Q. How do we decide the right place to spend $12B?
A. Politically.

Key reason why it was canceled:
Congress wanted to reduce spending (on stuff that didn't help them get re-elected). Texas Governor Ann Richards and President Bill Clinton, both Democrats, did not support a project begun during the administrations of Richards's Republican predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton's Republican predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

You may not like politics, but it is a simple fact of life: If the person or organization doesn't *want* to pay for something any more, that is all the justification you need to cancel it.

In fact, I don't think the project was started because there was popular support for spending billions on quark research. It was started because there was political support for spending billions on construction in Texas. So, you could say the project died because it was not that great an idea (in scientific research terms) in the first place.