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

"This project was an important element of our nation's science program," Clinton said after signing the bill. "And its termination is a serious loss for the field of high-energy physics."

Physics knew no politics. Physics persisted even as regimes fell. That was the cruel irony for Stroynowski. Here was a man who escaped an oppressive Communist government, finding refuge in elegant mathematical theories describing the laws of nature, only to become a casualty of budgetary politics, the very partisan machinations he tried to avoid all his life.

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)
• Peter Higgs
• Ryszard Stroynowski
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• Science and Technology

The cancelation sparked a mass exodus of physicists from North Texas. Some found academic positions. Some joined high-energy labs near Chicago, at Stanford and at CERN. Others left the field entirely. An esoteric specialty like high-energy physics certainly wasn't prepared to absorb hundreds of simultaneously out-of-work researchers. "I had a house in Dallas, and I lost all the equity," said Cas Milner, who had worked on the Super Collider for four years. "I had to take a check on the closing. I think in the modern parlance it's called being underwater."

Academic positions were slow in coming, but Wall Street was ready to put Milner's mathematical talents to work.

Others, like Kaushik De, a Calcutta-born experimentalist, remained at the University of Texas at Arlington, now one of five supercomputing sites in the country crunching data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He would eventually develop a system allowing physicists to access the computing power of thousands of supercomputing sites all over the world.

Stroynowski could not bring himself to leave the researchers he had attracted to SMU, or the grad students who had enrolled. His program went on to design part of the ATLAS detector at CERN. The collider produces astronomical amounts of data. Stroynowski's program created data links capable of transmitting enough information to fill the equivalent of 100 CDs per second, or a stack of them more than 12 miles high in a single day — the fastest anywhere in the world. He was also tasked with managing the design and construction of the liquid argon calorimeter, a fine structure of lead and stainless steel capable of tracking hundreds of millions of proton collisions each second. And out of those numbers beyond counting, they glimpsed the ephemeral conduit of the Higgs field, like a shadow on the wall with no form to cast it.

To an exacting scientific certainty, known as 5 sigma, they announced on July 4, 2012, that where we once believed there was nothing, something, in fact, exists.

Drive west from Waxahachie along a farm-to-market road if you want to see what the dried-out hull of a dream looks like. Follow it out past fields of maize and sunflowers ready for harvest, past grazing cattle and ranchettes set out on cleared pasture, subdivided after the collapse of the Super Collider, when all that land taken through eminent domain was thrown back into the county's lap. Before long, a collection of rectangular, gray buildings, some the length of two football fields, slide into view. Imagine, beneath all this greenery, a 15-mile catacomb light will never again touch slowly filling with water.

The asphalt drive leading into the complex is broken, and weeds grow through the cracks. A faded sign warns trespassers to "KEEP OUT" of a place few have bothered to enter in years. The inevitable march from order to decay has kept its grim pace; Stroynowski would call it entropy.

Just short of four years ago, the first proton beams raced down the 17-mile Large Hadron Collider in Geneva near light speed. It would take as many years to find the key to mass in the universe. It's tempting to imagine what physicists like Stroynowski could have found with the Super Collider, with the 10-year head start it could have given them. Who could possibly predict what else a machine three times more powerful than the accelerator in Geneva would find in those tiny flashes of ancient fire?

"The questions don't go away because the politicians say so," Stroynowski says. "Scientific questions remain, and if not us, somebody else will answer them."

The answers will never come from here, where men sweep stones from the cracked road, and others erect chain-link fencing around the complex's perimeter. MagnaBlend, a custom chemical manufacturer, recently purchased the site to replace its old factory, which burned in an October chemical fire that sent gouts of smoke floating over Ellis County. Here, they won't plumb the mystery of creation. They will mix, among other things, fracking fluids.

It's a fitting Texas ending to a story so unlikely it could have been fiction. Out on this back road, you will find the remains of the Super Collider, a monument to an inconceivable future.