The SSSC

[beecee]

Apologies if I have that wrong. [the SSSC I mean] 25 or so years ago, there were plans afoot, in fact I think construction had already begun, of what was to be known as the Stanford, Superconducting Super Collider. It was then shelved/scrapped for obviously short sighted reasons. my questions, [1] How much more powerful and bigger then the LHC was this going to be?  [2] How much further down the standard particle model road would we now be if it was completed to operational standards? [3] Could/would it be possible for construction to begin again? Why not make it an international concern if costs were/was the issue?

[timo]

The facility you are referring to is called the SSC, not SSSC. Or at least I have never heard anyone referring to it as SSSC. The site is not exactly in the vicinity of Stanford University, but about 2500 km away in Texas. Wikipedia has an article about it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider, which answers your first question: About three times the size and energy of the LHC.

Considering the Standard Model of Particle Physics, having had the SSC should have lead to the detection of the Higgs Boson sooner. The next proposed step after the LHC is a lepton collider, which allows more precise measurement on the physics discovered at the hardon collider (both SSC and LHC are hardon colliders). The lstest proposal of a lepton collider is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Linear_Collider (ILC). Given the time such projects take my guess is that having had the SSC ten years sooner than the LHC would simply have put us ten years closer to the ILC-like experiment (I don't expect that we have ILC results within the next ten years). Theoretically, the SSC could have found new physics/particles that the LHC cannot detect. But no one can know that.

As the name suggests, the ILC indeed is an international project - as has been the LHC. I would not expect that these days anyone would plan a national collider experiment of that scope, anymore. While I was not around in science at the time SSC was planned, I imagine that the cold war was a reason why it was even considered as a national project. In fact, the Wikipedia article lists the end of the cold war as one of the reasons for the cancellation of the project.