What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the scale of the thing being sought and the scale of the facilities required to do the searching. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear research is like a little city. Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, it employs three thousand people and occupies a site that is measured in square kilometers. CERN boasts a string of magnets that weigh more than the Eiffel Tower and an underground tunnel some 26 kilometres round.

Bryson, Bill (2005) A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition. Broadway Books, New York.

Bill Bryson (2005: 202) describes the SSC Project as "the finest example in history of pouring money into a hole in the ground":

Congress spent $2 billion on the project then cancelled it in 1993 after 22 km of tunnel had been dug. So Texas now boasts the most expensive hole in the Universe. The site is… essentially a vast, cleared field dotted along the circumference by a series of disappointed small towns.

According to Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg (1992: 269-270) who provided expert testimony in favor of the project at a Senate hearing, the SSC project infrastructure would have consisted of a

ten foot wide underground tunnel forming an 83-kilometer long oval ring… containing two slender beams of protons traveling in opposite directions… kept on their tracks by 3,840 bending magnets (each 17 meters long)… 19,400 kilometers of superconducting cable and kept cool by 2 million liters of liquid helium.

Bryson, Bill (2005) A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition. Broadway Books, New York.

Weinberg, Steven (1992) Dreams of a Final Theory. Vintage Books, Random House, New York.