Bill Clinton & the Day Physics Died

Hi! Wondering why you're seeing this again? It's because the original was taken down for an absurd reason. See the description for the twitter thread explaining what happened. But just so we're absolutely clear here, please do not seek out the graph guy or contact him. That is not helpful whatsoever. The video is back up and he should be left alone. If you've made it this far, thank you. I knew this project would be a huge undertaking (6 months of work, and 6 months before that just brainstorming), but I still didn't expect it to get done so soon. If you want to support the channel even further I have a Patreon and a twitter (check the description). FOOTNOTES CONTAIN SPOILERS, READ AFTER WATCHING. ********************************************************* FOOTNOTES CONTAIN SPOILERS, READ AFTER WATCHING. 1. The clip where Dale Bumpers is shouting out cost estimates would have been in 1993 US dollars, so basically double what he was saying there to get a rough idea. 2. I’ve seen two slightly different vote counts on the Slattery amendment listed on the official US government website. The first one was 280 to 150 and the second was 280 to 140. The limited information on the government website implies that the Slattery amendment was first voted on in conjunction with some other amendments and that someone requested a dedicated vote on it. The vote totals are basically the same, except with some pro SSC votes simply abstaining the 2nd time. 3. In 1990 there was an amendment attached to the SSC authorization bill that would have guaranteed Texas a full refund if the SSC was cancelled. This amendment did not pass. The matter of Texas getting a refund was contentious for years and it’s miraculous it eventually did get one. 4. I call Johnnnie Bryan Hunt comically Texan, but he was in fact from Arkansas. 5. The luminosity design target for the SSC varies depending on who you ask, anywhere from 10^33 cm^-2 s^-1 to 10^34 (a range with a factor of 10). Either estimate was considered very optimistic, as it would be difficult to actually meet this target because of how the SSC was designed. The magnets in the injection sequence would have had to been optimized individually. The LHC was designed with high luminosity in mind, and even then struggled for may years to reach its target. I think it’s fair to assume the SSC would have struggled even more to meet its target. 6. In the video I show a total of 1232 magnets for the LHC, this is in fact just the number of dipole magnets, i.e. the super strong ones used to bend the particle beams). There are also around 474 quadrupole magnets used to squeeze the beams. In total (counting both superconducting and non-superconducting magnets) the LHC has around 9000 magnets in use. 7. The LHC concept may date as far back as 1977, when former CERN director Sir John Adams discussed the possibility a high energy underground collider. 8. Adjusted for inflation and cost overruns the LHC cost about 8 billion in 2021 US dollars. This is roughly double the money that was actually spent on the SSC. 9. The LHC’s first collisions were on November 23rd 2009 at a paltry 0.9 TeV. In early 2010 they had cranked this up to 7 TeV, over three times higher than the record set by the TeVatron. However because the luminosity of the LHC was still so low the TeVatron had a fighting chance because its luminosity had been carefully calibrated for many years. 10. The max collision energy of hadron colliders are often much much higher than the mass/energy of the particles that are being created, as only a small portion of the total collision actually gets turned into the new particle. So although the LHC was designed to go up to 14 TeV, the detected Higgs mass was only 0.125 TeV, you have to overshoot your target.

The fact that an elderly Nobel prize winner had to sell his medal to pay off medical debt is frustrating and heartbreaking. Rest in peace Mr. Lederman.

idk a lot about physics, but i do know that manually claiming a graph and destroying piles of work is very cringe

I've seen multi-million dollar netflix documentaries that don't even have 10% the quality of this series. PLEASE never stop doing these, they're some of the best content on Youtube.

“They announced it on the 4th of July” was the perfect way to end this series. Succinct, comedic, and a little tragic. This is one of the best things on YouTube, and I really hope you’re proud of it, because you absolutely should be.

When BobbyBroccoli found out he had been unlawfully struck, and I quote, “He became non-linear.”

[Guess im typing this again? lol] 43:05 I love how this whole Series ends with a man being crushed by medical debt, truly a touching American story😭

Schwitters passed away two weeks ago. Reading through interviews with him from 2021, it's hard not to feel just how strongly he wanted the SSC to succeed, how sure he was that they'd find the Higgs. May he and everyone else rest in peace.

It would be very interesting to see a similar behind the scenes narration of the James Webb telescope. It too had a history of cost over-runs and launch delays. Amazing it wasn’t killed as well!

Wow the ending of this series hit me so much harder emotionally than I was expecting. Imagine working for decades of your life towards some goal, have ground broken on it, then just have to shut it down. Brutal.

I'm a CS PhD student and an animation industry professional. I'm absolutely floored at the quality of the research, visuals, and storytelling. Thank you so much for making videos!

I have a PhD in particle physics and spent several years working at CERN. I just wanted to say, you did an amazing job telling this story and explained the physics concepts very well. I had originally learned of the story from other physicists, who naturally painted the picture more as a story of anti-science politicians and cuts in government spending. It's really interesting to learn of all the failures in the project planning and management, not to mention the arrogance of America trying to undertake the project itself instead of collaborating with CERN. I think it's safe to say the failure of the project was largely over-determined. It's a good lesson for how large-scale science collaborations should be done. Thanks for making this series!

This trilogy hit home harder than I thought and it pains me I didn't see it and comment sooner... I first heard of the SSC as a kid years ago in some book of random knowledge where it was mentioned that the tunnels were abandoned and slowly filling with water and, among other proposals, people considered turning it into a mushroom farm or something. About a decade ago, I stumbled on the project again when photos of scientists who'd taken photos in the abandoned magnet lab came out online and I became interested in seeing if any parts of the tunnels were accessible. It was in the comments of one of these sites where someone who had worked on the project mentioned that the only accessible parts of the tunnels was the LINAC facility. I emailed them a bit and after a wild night of Googling, I found where the LINAC was on Google after finding PDFs of site plans and things. And, as with many things in my life, I intended to do something with this knowledge, but didn't. It sat in the "TO DO" pile of my myriad interests to contact the owners and see if I could take a peak someday. Eventually, the SSC project worked itself into a story setting I and some friends were working on where someone had revived the project. And that was kind of how it sat until last year... Last year, we decided to head out of town to avoid a hurricane barreling into Louisiana and I decided we'd spend the weekend in Dallas. A lot of folks asked me why on Earth I was driving all the way there, and a non-trivial part of it was because I could drive out to Waxahachie and take a look at places I'd only seen in images and pinned as places on Google Maps. Call it a nerdy pilgrimage, I suppose. On the second day of the trip, I drove out to Waxahachie and walked to sites I'd found in old site plans and stood on top of the sealed off Magnet Delivery Shaft near the MDL... now Magnablend's facility. It was overgrown with grass, but an oval of crushed rock and a dip in the land said where the tunnel was, 200 or so feet down. Out in Palmer, the roads leading to where the detector halls would have been were gated off, but built to handle heavy trucks and looked old, but still solid. On the final day of the trip, I called the owner of the LINAC and (after an understandably awkward exchange boiling down to "Sorry, I swear I'm not a telemarketer, I'm just a socially awkward nerd") they very graciously invited me over to see the inside of the building. The tunnel, I was told, had flooded in a while before in a series of heavy rains, but it was still there. The image of the long, dimly lit tunnel with a person walking inside at 26:25 in the video is the finished linear accelerator tunnel, taken years ago before it flooded. It was fully completed, with the Low Energy Booster tunnel, 90% completed and sealed off, a little beyond the end of it in the darkness behind what I assume is a concrete wall. A big pit with stairs going down into it where the bottle of hydrogen that would have been used to feed the biggest atom smasher in the world would be behind the photographer leading into it. It was surreal standing there in this enormous, long metal building, next to a one story deep pool of water, with that tunnel RIGHT THERE about 30 feet away. I could cross off a strange bucket list item of getting as close as I could to the tunnels, a wild trip I'd started on years earlier. Herman Wouk published a book in 2004 called "A Hole in Texas" that featured the project in it, and I'd discovered it early on in my deep dive into this topic. The author's note prefacing the book is brief (less than a page), and gives a very short version of the story you told so well in these videos. It ends with a line that was ringing in my head on my trip to Waxahachie and that echoed when I watched this video... "The sole residue of their miscarried quest for the Higgs boson was a hole in Texas, an enormous abandoned Hole. It's still there." It's still there... and thank you for telling the story so well so others can go on their own rides learning about it too. <3

I almost started sobbing at the last line of this story, where the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the LHC was announced on the 4th of July. This was a phenomenal series!

Leaving a comment for engagement, as this was one of the best documentaries I've seen in recent while. You concluded it perfectly, and I was amazed at how interested you got me into failed super collider I had literally never head about before this series. Sorry YT is trash and thanks again for all of your amazing content!

Feel like I’m getting in on the ground floor here with this channel , you deserve far more subscribers

Tragic story, the fact that lederman had to sell his nobel prize had me almost tearing up.

Props to one guy being a clown, and to YouTube for being an entire circus. In the spirit of algorithmically boosting content: Nice vid!

Unfortunate stuff with the stubborn graph-maker! --Your content is top-notch, and deserves far more attention than it gets. Can't wait for your next project!

I am a physics teacher who loves particle physics, so I knew about the science side, or at least as much as possible not having taken field theory or Lie algebra. But 90% of this series was new to me. I don't know how you managed to make budget discussions and org charts so compelling, but you did it and then some. Bravo!