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Article: Muons and megabucks: super collider - super bust?
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- March 19, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Texas mystique has taken a pretty bad beating in the past few years, what with the bankruptcies of the Hunt brothers and Braniff Airways, the resignation of Speaker of the House Jim Wright and the general malaise of the banking, real estate and oil industries. But the Lone Star State hopes to get a big boost soon - 20 trillion electron volts, to be exact. That's the jolt carried by the Superconducting Super Collider that the Department of Energy wants to construct beneath the rolling farmland some twenty-five miles south of Dallas.
The collider, which is designed to study the nature of matter, is Texas-size in every respect. It would be 18,000 times bigger in ...