Abstract
Now the visionaries of the high energy physics community are ready to take the next step, the Superconducting Super Collider or SSC. By now you must have heard or read something about this machine. It is being pushed by President Reagan and the Department of Energy. It will have a total cost in 1987 dollars of $4.4 billion and will be built at a location now in the process of selection. It will be a big machine, the largest proton synchrotron ever planned, "the greatest public works project in the history of mankind", as one congressman put it. The tunnel in which it will be constructed does not circle the Earth. It is more modest, with a circumference of "only" 52 miles. Yet the SSC will produce proton-proton collision energies 40 times higher than those of the FermiLab Tevatron or Fermi's dream machine