Arriving at Fermilab for my Ph.D., the air in Chicago’s prairie suburbs felt heavy.
It was a quiet sadness. Not the loud kind, but a professional grief. The Superconducting Super Collider—the SSC—was gone. In 1993.
Congress had pulled the plug on what would have been an 83-kilometer beast burrowing beneath Texas. It promised energies three times higher than today’s Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Construction had started. The physicists were buzzing.
Then it stopped.
Three decades later, we’re still catching up to what we lost.
The frontier remains out of reach.
But things have changed. May 22, 2906 (sic: the prompt says 2026). Budapest, Hungary. The CERN Council voted. Unanimously.
The plan is clear. Build the Future Circular Collider, or FCC.
It’s a 91-kilometer ring buried under the Swiss-French border. It’s bigger than anything we’ve seen. The idea? First, smash electrons and positrons with pinpoint accuracy. Later, crash protons together at twice the energy of the cancelled SSC.
It’s a big ask.
The Ghost of SSC Past
You didn’t need to be a physicist in 1993 to feel the shock. But feeling it? That was the job.
Younger researchers like me didn’t really get it at the time. We saw experiments running. Conferences humming. It felt like the golden age. It wasn’t.
The cancellation fractured U.S. high-energy physics for a generation. We stopped dreaming big.
Europe played it different. CERN didn’t start the LHC because the SSC died. The machine was already technically mature. The timing—official approval coming 14 months post-SSC death—was just cruel irony.
By 2009 the LHC turned on. It took years of grinding political will. CERN cut 800 jobs just to afford the construction. The U.S., having lost its own flagship, threw half a billion dollars at the problem anyway.
Same machine type. Same pressure.
One country quit. One stayed.
Had the SSC finished? The Higgs boson likely would’ve been found years earlier by American labs. We might have seen physics we’re still blind to today. Instead, CERN gets the credit. They collide protons at 14 trillion electronvolts. They redraw the map.
And the Higgs wasn’t a footnote.
It was the missing wedge. Without the Higgs field, atoms wouldn’t stick. No stars. No us. It’s invisible stuff giving mass to everything else.
So why isn’t it enough?
The Standard Model works too well, actually. It’s precise. It’s beautiful. But it’s broken.
It doesn’t explain dark matter. It can’t tell you why there’s matter and not equal parts antimatter. It lists particle masses like random numbers someone typed into a computer, rather than derived laws.
The Standard Model is the periodic table before quantum mechanics: right, but shallow.
We need deeper theory.
How do you find it?
Two ways. Smash things harder (energy frontier) or measure what you have more precisely (precision frontier). The LHC did the smashing. It didn’t find the new heavy particles we wanted. That’s fine. It told us they’re not there, at least not where we looked.
Which means we need both more energy and better eyes.
Moving Across the Pond
I’m from South America. I studied in the U.S.
By 2011, Fermilab’s Tevatron was dying. The nation pivoted toward neutrinos—those tiny ghosts that actually have mass. Fascinating work, sure. But I wanted the collision game.
I went to Europe.
Lots of us did. We followed the frontier. CERN isn’t just a lab. It’s proof that 80 nations can build one thing together. 12,000+ scientists. It spawned tech innovations no one predicted. It glued countries together with shared questions.
The FCC continues that line.
The Long Road Ahead
Europe moved slowly. Wise? Maybe. Necessary? Absolutely.
2013 strategy updates said: upgrade the existing tunnel. Boost luminosity. Get more collisions. So the High-Luminosity LHC was born. It runs until 2040 roughly, dumping gigatons of data on our laps.
But we knew this was stopgap.
In 2020, CERN admitted it. The next step needs a 100-TeV hadron collider. That doesn’t fit in the current tunnel. We need a new hole.
Big. Deeper. Expensive.
We have until the mid-2020s to decide, if we want it running by 2045. Wait longer? The talent pipeline dries up. Scientists leave. Engineers retire. You can’t restart a community like an engine.
2025 brought a feasibility study. It showed it’s doable. The magnets? Need invention. The beam control? Exquisite work. But doable.
The CERN Council looked at all the options. Linear colliders. Muon machines. Reusing old tunnels.
They picked the FCC.
It’s the best combo of science, tech, and strategy. By 2028, CERN needs governments to sign the check.
Will they?
Money is the wall. But cracks are forming.
Private donors pledged $1 billion in 2025. First time in CERN history for a project this size. The European Commission lists the FCC as a “moonshot.” The U.S. signed a statement of intent to collaborate if Europe builds it.
The pieces are there.
The Choice Is Simple
CERN sits at the center now. Europe holds the pen.
But this isn’t just European.
Incrementalism has limits. You can tweak old tunnels for so long before they break. We know what comes next. Push both frontiers. Find the deeper principle behind the numbers.
These questions—what is stuff made of? why is it this way? —are thousands of years old.
I’ll probably retire before the FCC starts. I came up under the shadow of the cancelled SSC. I’ll likely leave in the shadow of this one.
Is that a failure?
Maybe.
Or maybe it’s just part of the game. We build the machine so others can see what we cannot. The light dims if we stop. It grows if we don’t.
The tunnel is dug in theory.
The digging?
That’s on us. 🏗️
