The 1999 film Universal Soldier: The Return, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, was filmed there the SSC became (according to Dallas Morning News reviewer Tom Maurstad) "a high-tech secret lab" wherein Luc Devereaux ("killing machine by day, loving widower-father by night") does battle with an "evil computer. If you think the place has never been used, you're wrong. The state of Texas unloaded the property years ago and now it's up for sale again ("on an 'as-is, where-is' basis") at the low, low price of $6.5 million. Physics nerds periodically trek to the site and take depressing photographs of weeds engulfing the facility. The SSC, meanwhile, has suffered the fate of Ozymandias.
Two decades later, it appears that they have. Construction began near Waxahachie, Texas, in 1991, but two years, $2 billion, eight buildings, and 14 tunnel miles later Congress decided that, given the project's escalating costs and a $255 billion budget deficit (in those days, that seemed like a lot), perhaps we ought to let the Swiss score this scientific breakthrough. It could have happened here if the United States had completed the Superconducting Super Collider, a $12 billion particle collider conceived in the early 1980s that was going to be bigger and faster than the Geneva facility. (I'm a little hazy on the details.) Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva reported today that they think they glimpsed the elusive (and heretofore theoretical) particle, but they can't be sure. The scientific world is in a state of high excitement over the prospect of finally isolating the Higgs boson, the subatomic "God particle" that gives, or conveys, or accounts for the existence of, mass.
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