Nor did the LHC project face annual congressional appropriations battles and threats of termination, as did major US projects like the SSC and the space station.
Unlike in the US, the director general or project manager could not be subpoenaed to appear before a parliamentary investigations subcommittee or be required to testify under oath about its management lapses or cost overruns-as SSC director Roy Schwitters had to do before Congress. Having faced problems similar to, though not as severe as, what the SSC project experienced, the LHC’s completion raises an obvious question: Why did CERN and its partner nations succeed where the US had failed?ĬERN also enjoys an enviable internal structure, overseen by its governing council, that largely insulates its leaders and scientists from the inevitable political infighting and machinations of member nations. 7 (The SSC, by comparison, was designed for 40 TeV collision energy.) When labor costs and in-kind contributions from participating nations are included, the total LHC price tag approached $10 billion, a figure often given in the press. Although the LHC project also experienced trying growth problems and cost overruns-its cost increased from an estimated 2.8 billion Swiss francs ($2.3 billion at the time) in 1996 to more than 4.3 billion Swiss francs in 2009-it managed to survive and become the machine that allowed the Higgs-boson discovery using only about half of its originally designed 14 TeV energy. Serious design efforts begun during the late 1980s and early 1990s ramped up after the SSC’s termination. It’s like trying to find out the fundamental origin of reality – and I really like the rigor of it,” she said.In contrast, CERN followed a genuinely international approach in the design and construction of its successful Large Hadron Collider (LHC), albeit at a much more leisurely pace than had been the case for the SSC. “On some level, it’s really a search for the truth. But she says that she initially lacked the confidence to think that she could excel in the field. “I’ve just always been interested in science, and I got interested in physics when I was in high school,” said Burt. She recalls how she and her brother acted like “mad scientists,” combining household products to see what kind of reaction it might cause. “I had a chemistry set from when I was 6 or 7 years old,” said Burt on a recent visit to the Cheney campus. Burt was destined to be a scientist, running home experiments from an early age.
SUPERCOLLIDER EUROPE SERIES
Yet that’s where she found herself the past couple of years, living in France and working in neighboring Switzerland on a series of cutting-edge experiments in the field of particle physics as part of an international team inside the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) underground “supercollider.”īurt’s path has been an outlier, but it was put into motion by a chain reaction that played out much like the forces she now studies. Physicist Kira Burt ’11, BS physics, only dreamed that one day she’d be working at the largest, longest-running collaborative science experiment in the world.
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