'It's at the core of our current theories of what matter is and how it works. 'This is the discovery everyone planned around,' Schwitters said. He believes it could have been discovered even a decade earlier. Roy Schwitters, former director of the SSC laboratory who is now a physics professor at the University of Texas, has no doubt that the SSC would have led to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Weinberg served on the site-selection committee shortly after coming to the University of Texas in 1982. 'I couldn’t believe it at first,” he said of the cancellation. 'It came as quite a shock in 1993 when the thing was cancelled,' Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an interview with KUT News. But after nearly $2 billion had been spent on the project, Congress pulled the plug in 1993. If completed, it would have been larger in circumference and capable of producing higher energy than the LHC, according to experts who worked on it. The SSC was first proposed in 1983, and construction began in 1991. Today, the site is being turned into a chemical blending facility. But the project stalled, and so did Texas' hopes for the Higgs boson. Decades ago, a similar machine called the Superconducting Super Collider, was nearly built in Waxahachie, 30 miles south of Dallas.

On Wednesday, they announced, that they have found a new particle that matches the description of the Higgs boson, though confirmation is still needed. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland have been searching for the Higgs boson, a fundamental, yet to-date elusive, subatomic particle, for years. It's a breakthrough Texas lost its chance to try for almost two decades ago, when Congress defunded the costly project. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have unveiled the discovery of a tiny particle Wednesday that may help them understand the nature and even the origin of the universe.

Abandoned supercollider in texas