At 17 miles, its not as long as what the Superconducting Super Collider would have been - at 54 miles. Actually before it was the "Large Hadron Collider" in the same facility existed the "Large Electron-Positron Collider". Part of the CERN facility is a natural cavern. But I guess they ran out of experiments to run on it and graduated to smashing Hadrons. The Large Hadron Collider in France/Switzerland sounds like it's less "energetic" in terms of the collisions compared to the planned Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. I think Large Hadron Collider makes a maximum collision of 14 TeV energy, and the SSSC would have had two 20 TeV beams for a total of 40 TeV. Apparently either way, both may have proven or disproven the "standard model" and verify the existence of the Higgs Bozo. ALL THAT for proof of a Quark? I hope they can also invent new materials for kitchen cookware or something. I have to wonder: Had the effort in Waxihatchie been completed - would the CERN LHC have made the SSSC obsolete, or would it have been built, even? -WaV
