64th United States Congress

Breaking up atomic nuclei, however, requires quite a lot of money and a generous supply of electricity. Getting down to the level of quarks-the particles that make up particles-requires still more: trillions of volts of electricity and the budget of a small Central American nation. CERNБЂ™s new Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operations in 2005, will achieve fourteen trillion volts of energy and cost something over $1.5 billion to construct.[25] But these numbers are as nothing compared with what could have been achieved by, and spent upon, the vast and now unfortunately never-to-be Superconducting Supercollider, which began being constructed near Waxahachie, Texas, in the 1980s, before experiencing a supercollision of its own with the United States Congress. The intention of the collider was to let scientists probe БЂњthe ultimate nature of matter,БЂ«as it is always put, by re-creating as nearly as possible the conditions in the universe during its first ten thousand billionths of a second. The plan was to fling particles through a tunnel fifty-two miles long, achieving a truly staggering ninety-nine trillion volts of energy ...»