Sean Carroll

The answer is your brain is not fundamental physics.

Your brain is a very coarse-grained description of certain fundamental physics, and that changes everything.

That changes the space of possibilities and implications very strongly.

So for Mike, I don't even think Mike's asking a question here.

I think that Mike is just talking through his process of becoming, accepting of the picture of many levels.

I think that's a good process to talk yourself through.

Okay.

Thomas S. says, I'm reading The Particle at the End of the Universe, and it got me wondering, do you feel that the SSC, the Superconducting Supercollider, would still be a worthy undertaking today, assuming funding was secured, or was its merit predominantly predicated on goals that were since made redundant by the LHC?

I don't think it would be a good idea now.

It was a better machine.

So the superconducting supercollider that was planned during the Clinton administration before they canceled it to be built in Waxahachie, Texas, would have reached higher energies than the Large Hadron Collider would have.

It sort of would have leapfrogged what the LHC is able to do.

But not by a lot, okay?

By a noticeable amount, but not by a huge amount.

So you always have to do a cost-benefit analysis in these things.

You know, by the way, why did the LHC even get built?

There were absolutely discussions at CERN and in Europe, should we even bother building a Large Hadron Collider because it's on a similar timescale to the SSC and it's not as good.

And some very smart people in the European physics community said, don't worry, the Americans won't do it.

They're going to falter and not do it.

And we have to be ready to leap on the opportunities.