Super collider explained – courtesy of The West Wing

Hector Elizondo guest-starred in an episode of The West Wing as physicist lobbying to ensure funding remained for the construction of a super collider, pretty much just like the CERN Hadron Collider, which had all waiting for the world to end yesterday.

This edited transcript explains a little what the collider is, and why they’re bothering. The last line is so beautifully West Wing!

SAM SEABORNE
Look, Congress isn’t gonna fund your damn Superconductor, all right?

MILLGATE
Supercollider. Superconducting Supercollider. This is exactly what I’m talking about. A 54-mile tunnel, 150 feet below ground in which protons and antiprotons would be flung …
It’s a machine that reveals the origin of matter.

By smashing protons together at very high speeds and at very high temperatures, we can recreate the Big Bang in a laboratory setting, creating the kinds of particles that only existed in the first trillionth of a second after the universe was created.

SAM
Okay, terrific. I understand that. What kind of practical applications does it have?

MILLGATE
None at all.

SAM
You’re not in any way a helpful person.

MILLGATE
There are no practical applications, Sam. Anybody who says different is lying.

SAM
I need to be able to show him I can paint him against something. Children, baseball, campaign finance. What does it mean to be against the Supercollider?

MILLGATE
I really don’t know where to start.

SENATOR ENLOW
I’m a Democrat, Sam. How’s a 20 billion dollar astronomy lecture gonna help the President get elected?

If only we could only say what benefit this thing has, but no one’s been able to do that.

MILLGATE
That’s because great achievement has no road map. The X-ray’s pretty good. So is penicillin. Neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind. I mean, when the electron was discovered in 1897, it was useless. And now, we have an entire world run by electronics. Haydn and Mozart never studied the classics. They couldn’t. They invented them.