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Fascinating reading in the Wednesday morning Tribune. The quest for the Higgs boson at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago has reached its end game. With just a few more months to bag the elusive boson, the Fermi lab is in what the Tribune called a “flat-out sprint.” because next year the Large Hadron Collider comes on line outside Geneva, Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator 17 miles in circumference, some four times that of Fermi’s, and it will bring seven times the subatomic-particle-smashing power to the Higgs campaign. From then on, all the action will be over there.
Politics intervened. Soon after George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, the decision was made to locate the supercollider south of Dallas. Then more politics intervened. In 1993 Congress pulled the plug on the $13 billion project. With $2 billion already spent and nearly 15 miles of tunnel built, Congress allocated just enough new money to the project to shut it down. Scientists wept.
