How Texas Came Within an Atom's Breadth of Discovering the God Particle

A sportswriter once asked the Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken "The Snake" Stabler what he thought London had meant, Reagan said. Stabler's reply was as succinct as the president's message: "Throw deep."

Nearly every state in the union bid to be the home of the Super Collider. Nevada Governor Richard Bryan called it "the most significant economic development plum of the last quarter of the 20th century." Locales as far-flung as Hudspeth County in West Texas and the famed King Ranch in South Texas vied for the privilege to host the project. By a resounding 75 percent, voters approved a state bond package for $1 billion to defray the cost of construction. It had the unwavering support of U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright, along with the rest of the state's delegation.

Mark Graham

Kaushik De, a physics professor at UTA, in a room full of computer servers that processed data that helped locate the Higgs boson.

Mark Graham

Ryszard Stroynowski, an SMU physics professor, helped design the massive detector that found Higgs boson.

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• Texas Longhorns (Football)
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• Ryszard Stroynowski
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• Science and Technology

Texas was reeling from falling oil prices, a real estate bubble and the collapse of the savings and loan industry. The Super Collider was the psychological victory the state needed to wrest itself from the economic doldrums. Though the construction would employ some 4,000 only temporarily and 2,500 permanently, the spin-offs in superconducting technology, supercomputing, medical imaging and proton-beam cancer therapy created by a high-tech corridor flanking I-35 were the stuff of daydreams.

That is to say nothing of the quest itself, probing the mysteries of the improbable accident of life and answering a question that had hung awkwardly in the rarefied halls of the world's laboratories and universities for decades. Imagine a knife of infinite sharpness slicing an object into dust, then into vapor, then into molecules, then into atoms, then into protons and neutrons and finally into something so solid, so fundamental that it cannot be halved. The Standard Model of physics predicts this object, the quark, is the irreducible fundament of all matter — at least so far. Yet, in terms of tallying the mass of quarks, which comprise the tactile world, the Standard Model is conspicuously mum. We know that a stone has mass, so how can this possibly be? Was there something else imbuing the stars and planets and all the earthly things we can see and touch with mass? Why do they weigh anything at all?

Peter Higgs, a British theoretical physicist, proposed the answer in 1964 — a field through which all matter passes, like swimmers of varying prowess through water. This field, he proposed, imparted the quality of mass. It was an elegant theory, and if true, it was another step toward realizing Albert Einstein's dream of a variegated cosmos, explained with a single equation. The only way to prove Higgs' proposal would be to locate the field's conduit, the Higgs boson, a particle so short-lived it can barely be said to have existed. And the only way to peer into this ineffable quality of matter was to build a particle accelerator of unprecedented size and power, along with detectors weighing thousands of tons, and a supercomputing system unlike anything the world had ever seen.

Behind all the impenetrable mathematical calculations, finding the Higgs came down to a capital investment of billions of dollars.

The U.S. Department of Energy was prepared to make that investment. If the Higgs boson existed, the Super Collider would find it.

Winnowed down to two site proposals, one near Dallas, in Ellis County, and the second near Amarillo, Texas' bid weighed more than a ton and had to be flown to Washington on separate planes. But it was the Ellis County site, and a proposal from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, that received the most serious consideration. Fermilab already had a laboratory and tunnels that could be repurposed for the Super Collider. The site that would surround Waxahachie like a wheel around a hub would be built from scratch. But it had another advantage: geology. The formation below ground, known as Austin Chalk, was ideal for tunneling, supple yet strong enough to withstand subsurface pressures without wall bracing. What's more, the site had an international airport within striking distance capable of serving the physicists who would stream in and out from universities across the globe. "Even more important than that was the enthusiasm of the state and locality," said Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate and physicist at the University of Texas, who was a member of the site-selection committee.

On November 10, 1988, two days after the election of President George H.W. Bush, state District Judge Gene Knize in Waxahachie was handed a note as he presided over his court. According to an L.A. Times report, he "raised his arms and intoned, 'Super Collider, Super Collider, Super Collider.'" The judge called a recess. As the courtroom emptied onto the courthouse steps, a helicopter with a cameraman leaning out the door banked low. Until now, Ellis County was known for farmland and its soaring nine-story sandstone and pink granite courthouse, above which a Romanesque Revival clock tower rises over dun and red-brick storefronts. And it was known for its well-preserved gingerbread homes and the idyllic sweep of the countryside that provided the setting for Places in the Heart with Sally Fields, Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall, and Bonnie and Clyde.