Congress canceled construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas in 1993. The discussion uses that decision to examine the long-term consequences of research funding and the difficulty of judging fundamental science by immediate applications.
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1:36:05Okay. 1993 we dropped the ball pretty big. Okay. We were planning to create the superconducting super collider in Texas. This was going to be bigger than CERN. It was going to be brighter than CERN. It was going to discover the Higs way before CERN. >> Way before. >> Way before CERN. And it was also going to rule out a bunch of theories that have now been ruled out after like 20 years of CERN. It was going to do it immediately. It was also going to be American, right? it was going to be like this American stamp on particle physics on fundamental physics discovery and the United States Congress cancelled the construction in 1993. Um, Bill Clinton
1:36:46was the president at the time and he did nothing about it. Um, it's it's really it's it's really quite sad because it shifted high energy physics to Europe. Um, we learned our lesson though. >> Yes. >> And this is when scientists came together and they're like, we need to have a comeback. We'll talk about the comeback in a bit. >> It's not going to happen again. And we had a surplus at the time. Yeah. >> We weren't in a deficit. It's crazy. It's crazy. >> But they're like, "What are we going to do with the Higs?" You know, is that going to create jobs? You know what? >> Maybe >> life finds >> maybe in 50 years. >> As you can see, right? One thing that I do want to talk about this timeline is a lot of the stuff that we're discovering,
1:37:27you know, in the 1990s, in the 1950s, it's giving dividends till now. 10, 50, 100xfold. And it's not always clear at the time. Yeah. But just learning about how again the world around us works fundamentally inevitably is going to have commercial applications. We want to make sure those are well distributed. There's a balance of power issue there. But ultimately fundamental curiosity based science which is in our constitution >> uh is meaningful and improves all of our lives. And that's a great example of what happens when we fail to accomplish those tasks and seed ground to the Europeans. They already have us in football. >> We're not going to let them have us in science. No.