Its 60-mile circumference could embrace Manhattan, Barbados or (almost) Bahrain. Its 2 billion ft. of niobium-titanium wire could encircle the world 16 times. The 150 megawatts of power needed to operate it could light up a city of 15,000. And its price tag of as much as $6 billion could purchase half a dozen new space shuttles. All told, the superconducting supercollider (SSC), a gigantic particle accelerator that the Department of Energy may begin constructing somewhere in the U.S. before the end of the decade, would be the biggest, most elaborate and most ambitious physics project ever undertaken.
Yet what the...
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