Barried under the desert near Waxahatchee, Texas, is a 14-mile scar on the soul of American physics. The large Hadron Collider that runs under Switzerland and France has been getting a lot of good press lately. They've been smashing particles together at greater speeds and energies than has ever been done before. They lead the world in particle physics and they discovered the Higgs boson or god particle, one of the greatest discoveries in modern science. But there was another collider sitting abandoned in the Texas desert is the remnants of the superconducting super collider. It would have been three times as large and three times as powerful as LHC. Today it sits abandoned in the dusty Texas desert and locals call it the desert truck. It was going to be 51 miles in circumference. Currently, the LHC is 17 miles and is able to smash particles together at around 13 or 14 Terra-electron volts. That holds the world record. This thing was going to smash them together at 40 Terra-electron volts or three times the energy. In the US had the jump on this. It was first imagined in the early 1980s and construction began in 1991. Perhaps once in a lifetime something will happen that changes the course of history forever with exotic names like Higgs bosons, squarks and sleptons. I am speaking of course about the superconducting super collider. But two years later, Congress decided that they could only fund one fancy science project at a time. There was one that was a little bit sexier than a big tunnel in the ground, the International Space Station. But it wasn't just about the budget. It was also about power. Democratic Senator Jim Slattery made it his pet project to defund the super collider. Him and his allies in Congress called it luxury science. Funding was totally pulled and the entire project collapsed. They had already invested two billion dollars. Doug 14 miles of tunnels and 2000 scientists had staked their future on the project. Today, the tunnels have been flooded with water to help preserve them. The desert tron has seen better days. The discovery of the Higgs boson is one of the greatest scientific achievements of our modern age. And it could have happened in Texas. And it might have happened 10 years earlier. And with the ability to smash particles together at three times the energy level of LHC, who knows what else we could have found. In the words of a physicist who worked on the project had to help dismantle it and wrote its eulogy. We gathered all the nation's elite to help and build mankind's greatest feet. So come we did pursuing the dream to build a machine that collides proton beams. It's pork barrel, useless garbage they cried, off with its head the house puffed in pride. Little was ventured and little was gained, except filling the nation's physicists with anger and pain. Subscribe here and watch more videos here. Lone Star Rider, this one is for you.