unfortunately it is a sad fact that US science got a major funding cut after the end of the cold war. look it up, there were major slashes to the budget.

my question is: where would science be if this hadn’t happened?

pic related is the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) that would have been completed in the early 2000s and would have had 4x the energy of the LHC and would have discovered the higgs boson a decade+ before its discovery at the LHC in 2012. but politicians cancelled it in 1993 because “nooo taxes bad we can’t spend 20 billion dollars on science noooo *soijak*”