Final Report The Decline And Fall Of The Superconducting Super Collider

In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider -- at the time the largest pure-science project ever attempted, with a total cost estimated to exceed $10 billion. It was a stunning loss for the US highenergy physics community, which until that moment had perched for decades at the pinnacle of American science. Ever since 1993, this once-dominant scientific community has been in gradual decline. With the 2010 startup of research on the CERN Large Hadron Collider and the 2011 shutdown of the Fermilab Tevatron, world leadership in elementary-particle physics has crossed the Atlantic and returned to Europe.