Leon Lederman and his colleague Sheldon Glashow played the patriotic card very strongly in their influential article of March 1985, “The SSC: A Machine for the Nineties.” There they wrote: “Of course, as scientists, we must rejoice in the brilliant achievements of our colleagues overseas. Our concern is that if we forgo the opportunity that SSC offers for the 1990s, the loss will not only be to our science but also to the broader issue of national pride and technological self-confidence. When we were children, America did most things best. So it should again.”
Lederman and Glashow also argued for the SSC on the grounds of potential spinoffs for American industry: energy storage, power transmission, new tunneling techniques, industrial demand-pull in superconductivity. In meeting “all but insuperable technical obstacles,” they declared, American industries would learn better to compete. (There was no mention of what might happen to American “national pride and technological self-confidence” if American industries simply failed to meet those “insuperable obstacles” — as had already happened in ISABELLE.)
Glashow and Lederman also declared, with perhaps pardonable professional pride, that it was simply a good idea for America to create and employ large armies of particle physicists, pretty much for their own sake. “(P)article physics yields highly trained scientists accustomed to solving the unsolvable. They often go on to play vital roles in the rest of the world…. Many of us have become important contributors in the world of energy resources, neurophysiology, arms control and disarmament, high finance, defense technology and molecular biology…. High energy physics continues to attract and recruit into science its share of the best and brightest. If we were deprived of all those who began their careers with the lure and the dream of participating in this intellectual adventure, the nation would be considerably worse off than it is. Without the SSC, this is exactly what would come to pass.”
Funding a gigantic physics lab may seem a peculiarly roundabout way to create, say, molecular biologists, especially when America’s actual molecular biologists, no slouches at “solving the unsolvable” themselves, were getting none of the funding for the Super Collider.
When it came to creating experts in “high finance,” however, the SSC was on much firmer ground. Financiers worked overtime as the SSC’s cost estimates rose again and again, in leaps of billions. The Japanese were quite interested in basic research in superconductive technology; but when they learned they were expected to pay a great deal, but enjoy little of the actual technical development in superconductivity, they naturally balked. So did the Taiwanese, when an increasingly desperate SSC finally got around to asking them to help. The Europeans, recognizing a direct attempt to trump their treasured CERN collider, were superconductively chilly about the idea of investing in any Yankee dream-machine. Estimated cost of the project to the American taxpayer — or rather, the American deficit borrower — quickly jumped from 3.9 billion dollars to 4.9 billion, then 6.6 billion, then 8.25 billion, then 10 billion. Then, finally and fatally, to twelve.
Time and again the physicists went to the Congressional crap table, shot the dice for higher stakes, and somehow survived. Scientists outside the high-energy- physics community were livid with envy, but the powerful charisma of physics — that very well-advanced field that had given America the atomic bomb and a raft of Nobels — held firm against the jealous, increasingly bitter gaggle of “little science” advocates.
At the start of the project, the Congress was highly enthusiastic. The lucky winner of the SSC had a great deal to gain: a nucleus of high-tech development, scientific prestige, and billions in federally-subsidized infrastructure investment. The Congressperson carrying the SSC home to the district would have a prize beyond mere water-project pork; that lucky politician would have trapped a mastodon.
At length the lucky winner of the elaborate site-selection process was announced: Waxahachie, Texas. Texas Congresspeople were, of course, ecstatic; but other competitors wondered what on earth Waxahachie had to offer that they couldn’t.
Waxahachie’s main appeal was simple: lots of Texas-sized room for a Texas-sized machine. The Super Collider would, in fact, entirely encircle the historic town of Waxahachie, some 18,000 easy-going folks in a rural county previously best known for desultory cotton-farming. The word “Waxahachie” originally meant “buffalo creek.” Waxahachie was well-watered, wooded, farming country built on a bedrock of soft, chalky, easily-excavated limestone.
Lederman, author of the Desertron proposal, rudely referred to Waxahachie as being “in Texas, in the desert” in his SSC promotional pop-science book THE GOD PARTICLE. There was no desert anywhere near Waxahachie, and worse yet, Lederman had serious problems correctly pronouncing the town’s name.
The town of Waxahachie, a minor railroad boomtown in the 1870s and 1880s, had changed little during the twentieth century. In later years, Waxahachie had made a virtue of its fossilization. Downtown Waxahachie had a striking Victorian granite county courthouse and a brick-and- gingerbread historical district of downtown shops, mostly frequented by antique-hunting yuppies on day-trips from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, twenty miles to the north. There was a certain amount of suburban sprawl on the north edge of town, at the edge of commuting range to south Dallas, but it hadn’t affected the pace of local life much. Quiet, almost sepulchral Waxahachie was the most favored place in Texas for period moviemaking. Its lovely oak-shadowed graveyard was one of the most-photographed cemeteries in the entire USA.
This, then, was to become the new capital of the high-energy physics community, the home of a global scientific community better known for Mozart and chablis than catfish and C&W. It seemed unbelievable. And it was unbelievable. Scientifically, Waxahachie made sense. Politically, Waxahachie could be sold. Culturally, Waxahachie made no sense whatsoever. A gesture by the federal government and a giant machine could not, in fact, transform good ol’ Waxahachie into Berkeley or Chicago or Long Island. A mass migration of physicists might have worked for Los Alamos when hundreds of A-Bomb scientists had been smuggled there in top secrecy at the height of World War II, but there was no atomic war on at the moment. A persistent sense of culture shock and unreality haunted the SSC project from the beginning.
In his 1993 popular-science book THE GOD PARTICLE, Lederman made many glowing comparisons for the SSC: the cathedrals of Europe, the Pyramids, Stonehenge. But those things could all be seen. They all made instant sense even to illiterates. The SSC, unlike the Pyramids, was almost entirely invisible — a fifty-mile subterranean wormhole stuffed with deep-frozen magnets.
A trip out to the SSC revealed construction cranes, vast junkyards of wooden crating and metal piping, with a few drab, rectangular, hopelessly unromantic assembly buildings, buildings with all the architectural vibrancy of slab-sided machine-shops (which is what they were). Here and there were giant weedy talus-heaps of limestone drill-cuttings from the subterranean “TBM,” or Tunnel Boring Machine. The Boring Machine was a state-of-the-art Boring Machine, but its workings were invisible to all but the hard-hats, and the machine itself was, well, boring.
Here and there along the SSC’s fifty-four mile circumference, inexplicable white vents rose from the middle of muddy cottonfields. These were the SSC’s ventilation and access shafts, all of them neatly padlocked in case some mischievous soul should attempt to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing at the SSC was anything like the heart-lifting spires of Notre Dame, or even the neat-o high-tech blast of an overpriced and rickety Space Shuttle. The place didn’t look big or mystical or uplifting; it just looked dirty and flat and rather woebegone.
As a popular attraction the SSC was a bust; and time was not on the side of its planners and builders. As the Cold War waned, the basic prestige of nuclear physics was also wearing rather thin. Hard times had hit America, and hard times had come for American science.
Lederman himself, onetime chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was painfully aware of the sense of malais
e and decline. In 1990 and 1991, Lederman, as chairman of AAAS, polled his colleagues in universities across America about the basic state of Science in America. He heard, and published, a great outpouring of discontent. There was a litany of complaint from American scholars. Pernickety government oversight. Endless paperwork for grants, consuming up to thirty percent of a scientist’s valuable research time. A general aging of the academic populace, with graying American scientists more inclined to look back to vanished glories than to anticipate new breakthroughs. Meanspirited insistence by both government and industry that basic research show immediate and tangible economic benefits. A loss of zest and interest in the future, replaced by a smallminded struggle to keep making daily ends meet.
It was getting hard to make a living out there. The competition for money and advancement inside science was getting fierce, downright ungentlemanly. Big wild dreams that led to big wild breakthroughs were being nipped in the bud by a general societal malaise and a failure of imagination. The federal research effort was still vast in scope, and had been growing steadily despite the steadily growing federal deficits. But thanks to decades of generous higher education and the alluring prestige of a life in research, there were now far more mouths to feed in the world of Science. Vastly increased armies of grad students and postdocs found themselves waiting forever for tenure. They were forced to play careerist games over shrinking slices of the grantsmanship pie, rather than leaving money problems to the beancounters and getting mano-a-mano with the Big Questions.
“The 1950s and 1960s were great years for science in America,” Lederman wrote nostalgically. “Compared to the much tougher 1990s, anyone with a good idea and a lot of determination, it seemed, could get his idea funded. Perhaps this is as good a criterion for healthy science as any.” By this criterion, American science in the 90s was critically ill. The SSC seemed to offer a decisive way to break out of the cycle of decline, to return to those good old days. The Superconducting Super Collider would make Big Science really “super” again, not just once but twice.
The death of the project was slow, and agonizing, and painful. Again and again particle physicists went to Congress to put their hard-won prestige on the line, and their supporters used every tactic in the book. As SCIENCE magazine put in a grim postmortem editorial: “The typical hide-and-seek game of ‘it’s not the science, it’s the jobs’ on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and ‘it’s not about jobs, it is very good science’ on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday wears thin after a while.”
The House killed the Collider in June 1992; the Senate resurrected it. The House killed it again in June 1993, the Senate once again puffed the breath of life into the corpse, but Reagan and Bush were out of power now. Reagan had supported SSC because he was, in his own strange way, a visionary; Bush, though usually more prudent, took care to protect his Texan political base. Bush did in fact win Texas in the presidential election of 1992, but winning Texas was not enough. The party was over. In October 1993 the Super Collider was killed yet again. And this time it stayed dead.
In January 1994 I went to Waxahachie to see the dead Collider.
To say that morale is low at the SSC Labs does not begin to capture the sentiment there. Morale is subterranean. There are still almost two thousand people employed at the dead project; not because they have anything much to do there, but because there is still a tad of funding left for them to consume — a meager six hundred million or so. And they also stay because, despite their alleged facility at transforming themselves into neurophysiologists, arms control advocates, et al., there is simply not a whole lot of market demand anywhere for particle physicists, at the moment.
The Dallas offices of the SSC Lab are a giant maze of cubicles, every one of them without exception sporting a networked color Macintosh. Employees have pinned up xeroxed office art indicative of their mood. One was a chart called:
“THE SIX PHASES OF A PROJECT: I. Enthusiasm. II. Disillusionment. III. Panic. IV. Search for the Guilty. V. Punishment of the Innocent. VI. Praise & Honor for the Nonparticipants.”
According to the chart, the SSC is now at Phase Five, and headed for Six.
SSC staffers have a lot of rather dark jokes now. “The Sour Grapes Alert” reads “This is a special announcement for Supercollider employees only!! Your job is a test. It is only a test!! Had your job been an actual job, you would have received raises, promotions, and other signs of appreciation!! We now return you to your miserable state of existence.”
Outside the office building, one of the lab’s monstrous brown trash dumpsters has been renamed “Superconductor.” The giant steel trash-paper compactor does look oddly like one of the SSC’s fifty-foot-long superconducting magnets; but the point, of course, is that trash and the magnet are now roughly equivalent in worth.
The SSC project to date has cost about two billion dollars. Some $440,885,853 of that sum was spent by the State of Texas, and the Governor of the State of Texas, the volatile Ann Richards, is not at all happy about it.
The Governor’s Advisory Committee on the Superconducting Super Collider held its first meeting at the SSC Laboratory in Dallas, on January 14, 1994. The basic assignment of this blue-ribbon panel of Texan scholars and politicians is to figure out how to recoup something for Texas from this massive failed investment.
Naturally I made it my business to attend, and sat in on a day’s worth of presentations by such worthies as Bob White, President of the National Academy of Engineering; John Peoples, the SSC’s current director; Roy Schwitters, the SSC’s original Director, who resigned in anguish after the cancellation; the current, and former, Chancellors of the University of Texas System; the Governor’s Chief of Staff; the Director of the Texas Office of State-Federal Relations; a pair of Texas Congressmen, and various other interested parties, including engineers, physicists, lawyers and one, other, lone journalist, from a Dallas newspaper. Forty-six people in all, counting the Advisory Committee of nine. Lunch was catered.
The mood was as dark as the fresh-drilled yet already-decaying SSC tunnels. “I hope we can make something positive out of all this,” muttered US Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tex), Waxahachie’s representative and a tireless champion of the original project. A Texas state lawyer told me bitterly that “the Department of Energy treats our wonderful asset like one of their hazardous waste sites!”
For his part, the DoE’s official representative, a miserably unhappy flak-catcher from the Office of Energy Research, talked a lot under extensive grilling by the Committee, but said precisely nothing. “I honestly don’t know how the Secretary is going to write her report,” he mourned, wincing. “The policy is to close things down in as cheap a way as possible.”
Nothing about the SSC can be cleared without the nod of the new Energy Secretary, the formidable Hazel O’Leary. At the moment, Ms. O’Leary is very busy, checking the DoE’s back-files on decades of nuclear medical research on uninformed American citizens. Her representative conveyed the vague notion that Ms. O’Leary might be inclined to allow something to be done with the site of the SSC, if the State of Texas were willing to pay for everything, and if it weren’t too much trouble for her agency. In the meantime she would like to cut the SSC’s shut-down budget for 1994 by two-thirds, with no money at all for the SSC in 1995.
Hans Mark, former Chancellor of the University of Texas System, gamely declared that the SSC would in fact be built — someday. Despite anything Congress may say, the scientific need is still there, he told the committee — and Waxahachie is still the best site for such a project. Mr. Mark compared the cancelled SSC to the “cancelled” B-1 Bomber, a project that was built at last despite the best efforts of President Carter to kill it. “Five years down the road,” he predicted, “or ten years.” He urged the State of Texas not to sell the 16,747 acres it has purchased to house the site.
Federal engineering mandarin Bob White grimly called the cancellation “a watershed in American science,” noting that never before had such a large project, of un
disputed scientific worth, been simply killed outright by Congress. He noted that the physical assets of the SSC are worth essentially nothing — pennies per pound — without the trained staff, and that the staff is wasting away.
There remain some 1,983 people in the employ of the SSC (or rather in the employ of the Universities Research Association, a luckless academic bureaucracy that manages the SSC and has taken most of the political blame for the cost overruns). The dead Collider’s technical staff alone numbers over a thousand people: 16 in senior management, 133 scientists, 56 applied physicists, 429 engineers, 159 computer specialists and network people, 159 guest scientists and research associates on grants from other countries and other facilities, and 191 “technical associates.”
“Deadwood,” scoffed one attendee, “three hundred and fifty people in physics research when we don’t even have a machine!” But the truth is that without a brilliantly talented staff in place, all those one-of-a-kind cutting-edge machines are so much junk. Many of those who stay are staying in the forlorn hope of actually using some of the smaller machines they have spent years developing and building.
There have been, so far, about sixty more-or-less serious suggestions for alternate uses of the SSC, its facilities, its machineries, and its incomplete tunnel.
The SSC’s Linear Accelerator was one of the smaller assets of the great machine, but it is almost finished and would be world-class anywhere else. It has been repeatedly suggested that it could be used for medical radiation treatments or for manufacturing medical isotopes. Unfortunately, the Linear Accelerator is in rural Ellis County, miles from Waxahachie and miles from any hospital, and it was designed and optimized for physics research, not for medical treatment or manufacturing.
The former “N-15” site of the Collider, despite its colorless name, is the most advanced manufacturing and testing facility in the world — when it comes to giant superconducting magnets. The N-15 magnet facility is not only well-nigh complete, but was almost entirely financed by funds from the State of Texas. Unfortunately, the only real market remaining for its “products” — brobdingnagian frozen accelerator magnets — is the European CERN accelerator.
Essays. FSF Columns Page 15
