Essays. FSF Columns

by Bruce Sterling

  CERN itself has been hurting for money lately, its German and Spanish government partners in particular complaining loudly about the dire expense of hunting top quarks and such.

  Former SSC Director Roy Schwitters therefore declared that CERN would need SSC’s valuable magnets, and that the US should use these assets as leverage for influence at CERN.

  This suggestion, however, was too much for Texan Congressman Joe Barton. He described Schwitter’s suggestion as “very altruistic” and pointed out that the Europeans had given the SSC “the back of their hand for eight years!”

  One could only admire the moral grit of SSC’s former Director in gamely proposing that the magnets, the very backbone of his dead Collider, should be shipped, for the good of science, to his triumphant European rivals. It would seem that the American particle-physics research has suffered such a blow from the collapse of the SSC that the only reasonable course of action for the American physics community is to go cap in hand to the Europeans and try, somehow, to make things up.

  At least, that proposal, galling as it may be, does make some sense for American physicists — but for an American politician, to drop two billion dollars on the SSC just to ship its magnets to some cyclotron in Switzerland is quite another matter. When an attendee gently urged Congressman Barton to “take a longer view” - - perhaps, someday, the Europeans would reciprocate the scientific favor — the Texan Congressman merely narrowed his eyes in a glare that would have scared Clint Eastwood, and vowed “I will ‘reciprocate’ the concern that the Europeans have shown for the SSC!”

  It’s been suggested that the numerous well-appointed SSC offices could become campuses of some new research institution: on magnets, or cryogenics, or controls, or computer simulation. The physics departments of many Texas colleges and universities like this idea. After all, there’s a great deal of handy state-of-the-art clutter there, equipment any research lab in the world would envy. Six and a half million dollars’ worth of machine tools and welding equipment. Three million in high-tech calibration equipment and measuring devices. Ten million dollars in trucks, vans, excavators, bulldozers and such. A million-dollar print shop.

  And almost fifty million dollars worth of state-of- the-art computing equipment circa 1991 or so, including a massively parallel Hypercube simulator, CAD/CAM engineering and design facilities with millions of man-hours of custom software, FDDI, OSI, and videoconferencing office computer networks, and 2,600 Macintosh IIvx personal computers. Plus a two-million dollar, fully-equipped physics library.

  Unfortunately it’s very difficult to propose a new physics facility just to make use of this, well, stuff, when there are long-established federal physics research facilities such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, now going begging because nobody wants their veteran personnel to build new nuclear weapons. If anyone builds such a place in Waxahachie, then the State of Texas will have to pay for it. And Texas is not inclined to shell out more money. Texas already feels that the rest of the United States owes Texas $440,885,853 for the dead Collider.

  Besides the suggestions for medical uses, magnetic and superconductive studies, and the creation of some new research institute, there are the many suggestions collectively known as “Other.” One is to privatize the SSC as the “American Institute for Superconductivity Competitiveness” and ask for corporate help. Unfortunately the hottest (or maybe “coolest”) research area in superconductivity these days is not giant helium-frozen magnets for physicists, but the new ceramic superconductors.

  Other and odder schemes include a compressed-air energy-storage research facility. An earth-wobble geophysics experiment. Natural gas storage.

  And, perhaps inevitably, the suggestion of Committee member Martin Goland that the SSC tunnel be made into a high-level nuclear waste-storage site. A “temporary” waste site, he assured the Committee, that would store highly radioactive nuclear waste in specially designed “totally safe” steel shipping casks, until a “permanent” site opens somewhere in New Mexico.

  “I’m gonna sell my house now,” stage-whispered the physicist next to me in the audience. “Waxahachie will be a ghost town!”

  This was an upshot worthy of Greek myth — a tunnel built to steal the fiery secrets of the God Particle, which ends up constipated by thousands of radioactive steel coprolites, the Trojan Horse gift of Our Friend Mr. Atom. It’s such a darkly poetic, Southern-Gothic example of hubris clobbered by nemesis that one almost wishes it would actually happen.

  As far as safety goes, hiding nuclear waste in an incomplete 14.7 mile tunnel under Texas is certainly far more safe than leaving the waste where it is at the moment (basically, all over America, from sea to shining sea). DoE’s nuclear-waste chickens have come back to roost in major fashion lately, as time catches up with a generation of Cold War weapons scientists. “They were never given the money they needed to do it cleanly, but just told to do it right away in the name of National Security,” a federal expert remarked glumly over the ham and turkey sandwiches at the lunch break. He went on to grimly mention “huge amounts of carbon tetrachloride seeping into the water table” and radioactive waste “storage tanks that burp hydrogen.”

  But the Texans were having none of that; the chairman of the Committee declared that they had heard Mr. Goland’s suggestion, and that it would go no further. The room erupted into nervous laughter.

  The Committee’s first meeting broke up with the suggestion that sixty million dollars be found somewhere-or-other to maintain an unspecified “core staff” of SSC researchers, while further study is undertaken on what to actually do with the remains.

  As the head of SMU’s physics department has remarked, “The general impression was that it would be an embarrassment or a waste or sinful to say that, after $2 billion, you get nothing, zip, zero for it.” However, zip and zero may well be exactly the result, despite the best intentions of the Texan clean-up crew. The dead Collider is a political untouchable now. The Texans would like to make something from the corpse, not for its own sake, really, but just so the people of Texas will not look quite so much like total hicks and chumps. The DoE, for its part, would like this relic of nutty Reagan Republicanism to vanish into the memory hole with all appropriate speed. The result is quite likely to be a lawsuit by the State of Texas against the DoE, where yet more millions are squandered in years of wrangling by lawyers, an American priesthood whose voracious appetite for public funds puts even physicists to shame.

  But perhaps “squandered” is too harsh a word for the SSC. After all, it’s not as if those two billion dollars were actually spent on the subatomic level. They were spent in perfectly normal ways, and went quite legally into the pockets of standard government contractors such as Sverdrup and EG&G (facilities construction), Lockheed (systems engineering), General Dynamics, Westinghouse, and Babcock and Wilcox (magnets), Obayashi & Dillingham (tunnel contractors), and Robbins Company (Tunnel Boring Machine). The money went to architects and engineers and designers and roadpavers and people who string Ethernet cable and sell UNIX boxes and Macintoshes. Those dollars also paid the salaries of 2,000 researchers for several years. Admittedly, the nation would have been far better off it those 2,000 talented people simply had been given a million dollars each and told to go turn themselves into anything except particle physicists, but that option wasn’t presented.

  The easy-going town of Waxahachie seems to have few real grudges over the experience. A public meeting, called so that sufferers in Waxahachie could air their economic complaints about the dead Collider, had almost no attendees. The entire bizarre enterprise seems scarcely to have impinged at all on everyday life in Waxahachie.

  Besides, not five miles from the SSC’s major campus, the Waxahachians still have their “Scarborough Fair,” a huge mock-medieval “English Village” where drawling “lords and ladies” down on day-trips from Dallas can watch fake jousts and drink mead in a romantic heroic-fantasy atmosphere with ten times the popular appeal of that tiresome hard-science non
sense.

  As boondoggles go, SSC wasn’t small. However, SSC wasn’t anywhere near so grotesque as the multiple billions spent, both openly and covertly, on American military science funding. Many of the SSC’s contractors were in fact military-industrial contractors, and it may have done them some good to find (slightly) alternate employment. The same goes for the many Russian nuclear physicists employed by the SSC, who earned useful hard currency and were spared the grim career-choices in Russia’s collapsing nuclear physics enterprise. It has been a cause of some concern lately that Russian nuclear physicists may, as Lederman and Glashow once put it, “go on to play vital roles in the rest of the world” — i.e., in the nuclear enterprises of Libya, North Korea, Syria and Iraq. It’s a pity those Russians can’t be put to work salting the tails of quarks inside the SSC; though a cynic might say it’s a greater pity that they were ever taught physics in the first place.

  SCIENCE magazine, in its editorial postmortem “The Lessons of the Super Collider,” had its own morals to draw. Lesson One: “High energy physics has become too expensive to be defined by national boundaries.” Lesson Two: “Just because particle physics asks questions about the fundamental structure of matter does not give it any greater claim on taxpayer dollars than solid-state physics or molecular biology. Proponents of any project must justify the costs in relation to the scientific and social return.”

  That may indeed be the New Reality for American science funding today, but it was never the justification of the Machine in the Desert. The Machine in the Desert was an absolute vision, about the absolute need to know.

  And it was about pride. “Pride,” wrote Lederman and Glashow in 1985, “is one of the seven deadly sins,” yet they nevertheless declared their pride in the successes of their predecessors, and their unbounded determination to make America not merely the best in particle physics, but the best in everything, as America had been when they were children.

  In his own 1993 postmortem on the dead Collider, written for the New York Times, Lederman raised the rhetorical question, “Is the real problem the hubris of physicists to believe that society would continue to support this exploration no matter what the cost?” A rhetorical question because Lederman, having raised that cogent question, never bothered to address it. Instead, he ended his column by blaming the always-convenient spectre of American public ignorance of science. “Most important of all,” he concluded, “scientists must rededicate themselves to a massive effort at raising the science literacy of the general public. Only when the citizens have a reasonable science savvy will their congressional servants vote correctly.”

  Alas, many of our congressional servants already possess plenty of science savvy; what they have, is science savvy to their own ends. Not science for the sake of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein or Leon Lederman, but science for the sake of the devil’s bargain American science has made with its political sponsors: knowledge as power.

  As for the supposedly ignorant general public, the American public were far more generous with scientists when scientists were very few in number, and regarded with a proper superstitious awe by a mainly agricultural and blue-collar populace. The more they come to understand science, the less respect the American general public has for the whims of its practitioners. Americans may not do a lot of calculus, but most American voters are “knowledge workers” of one sort or another nowadays, and they’ve seen Carl Sagan on TV often enough to know that, even though Carl’s a nice guy, billions of stars and zillions of quarks won’t put bread on their tables. Raising the general science literacy of the American public is probably a self-defeating effort when it comes to monster projects like the SSC. Teaching more American kids more math and science will only increase the already vast armies of scientists and federally funded researchers, drastically shrinking the pool of available funds tomorrow.

  It’s an open question whether a 40TeV collider like the SSC will ever be built, by anyone, anywhere, ever. The Europeans, in their low-key, suave, yet subtly menacing fashion, seem confident that they can snag the Higgs scalar boson with their upgraded CERN collider at a mere tenth of the cost of Reagan’s SSC. If so, corks will pop in Zurich and there will be gnashing of teeth in Brookhaven and Berkeley. American scientific competitors will taste some of the agony of intellectual defeat in the realm of physics that European scientists have been swallowing yearly since 1945. That won’t mean the end of the world.

  On the other hand, the collapse of SSC may well suck CERN down in the backdraft. It may be that the global prestige of particle physics has now collapsed so utterly that European governments will also stop signing the checks, and CERN itself will fail to build its upgrade.

  Or even if they do build it, they may be simply unlucky, and at 10 TeV the CERN people may get little to show.

  In which case, it may be that the entire pursuit of particle physics, stymied by energy limits, will simply go out of intellectual fashion. If the global revulsion against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power increases and intensifies, it is not beyond imagination to imagine nuclear research simply dwindling away entirely. The whole kit-and-caboodle of pions, mesons, gluinos, antineutrinos, that whole strange charm of quarkiness, may come to seem a very twentieth-century enthusiasm. Something like the medieval scholastic enthusiasm for numbering the angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Nowadays that’s a byword for a silly waste of intellectual effort, but in medieval times that was actually the very same inquiry as modern particle physics: a question about the absolute limits of space and material being.

  Or the SSC may never be built for entirely different reasons. It may be that accelerating particles in the next century will not require the massive Rube Goldberg apparatus of a fifty-four-mile tunnel and the twelve cryogenic plants with their entire tank farms of liquid helium. It is a bit hard to believe that scientific questions as basic as the primal nature of matter will be abandoned entirely, but there is more than one way to boost a particle. Giant room-temperature superconductors really would transform the industrial base, and they might make quarks jump hoops without the macho necessity of being “super” at all.

  In the end, it is hard to wax wroth at the dead Collider, its authors, or those who pulled the plug. The SSC was both sleazy and noble: at one level a “quark-barrel” commercialized morass of contractors scrambling at the federal trough, while Congressmen eye-gouged one another in the cloakroom, scientists angled for the main chance and a steady paycheck, and supposedly dignified scholars ground their teeth in public and backbit like a bunch of jealous prima donnas. And yet at the same time, the SSC really was a Great Enterprise, a scheme to gladden the heart of Democritus and Newton and Tycho Brahe, and all those other guys who had no real job or a fat state sinecure.

  The Machine in the Desert was a transcendant scheme to steal cosmic secrets, an enterprise whose unashamed raison d’etre was to enable wild and glorious flights of imagination and comprehension. It was sense-of-wonder and utter sleaze at one and the same time. Rather like science fiction, actually. Not that the SSC itself was science fictional, although it certainly was (and is). I mean, rather, that the SSC was very like the actual writing and publishing of science fiction, an enterprise where bright but surprisingly naive people smash galaxies for seven cents a word and a chance at a plastic brick.

  It would take a hard-hearted science fiction writer indeed to stand at the massive lip of that 240-foot hole in the ground at N15 — as I did late one evening in January, with the sun at my back and tons of hardware gently rusting all around me and not a human being in sight — and not feel a deep sense of wonder and pity.

  In another of his determined attempts to enlighten the ignorant public, in his book THE GOD PARTICLE, Leon Lederman may have said it best.

  In a parody of the Bible called “The Very New Testament,” he wrote:

  “And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Waxahachie, and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, Go to
, let us build a Giant Collider, whose collisions may reach back to the beginning of time. And they had superconducting magnets for bending, and protons had they for smashing.

  “And the Lord came down to see the accelerator, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold the people are unconfounding my confounding. And the Lord sighed and said, Go to, let us go down, and there give them the God Particle so that they may see how beautiful is the universe I have made.”

  A man who justifies his own dreams in terms of frustrating God and rebuilding the Tower of Babel — only this time in Texas, and this time done right — has got to be utterly tone-deaf to his own intellectual arrogance. Worse yet, the Biblical parody is openly blasphemous, unnecessarily alienating a large section of Lederman’s potential audience of American voters. Small wonder that the scheme came to grief — great wonder, in fact, that Lederman’s Babel came anywhere as near to success as it did.

  Nevertheless, I rather like the sound of that rhetoric; I admire its sheer cosmic chutzpah. I scarcely see what real harm has been done. (Especially compared to the harm attendant on the works of Lederman’s colleagues such as Oppenheimer and Sakharov.) It’s true that a man was crushed to death building the SSC, but he was a miner by profession, and mining is very hazardous work under any circumstances. Two billion dollars was, it’s true, almost entirely wasted, but governments always waste money, and after all, it was only money.

  Give it a decade or two, to erase the extreme humiliation naturally and healthfully attendant on this utter scientific debacle. Then, if the United States manages to work its way free of its fantastic burden of fiscal irresponsibility without destroying the entire global economy in the process, then I, for one, as an American and Texan citizen, despite everything, would be perfectly happy to see the next generation of particle physicists voted another three billion dollars, and told to get digging again.