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The cost: perhaps 3 billion dollars. It was thought that the cash- flush Japanese, who had been very envious of CERN for some time, would be willing to help the Americans in exchange for favored status at the complex.
The goal of the Desertron, or at least its target of choice, would be the Higgs scalar boson, a hypothetical subatomic entity theoretically responsible for the fact that other elementary particles have mass. The Higgs played a prominent part at the speculative edges of quantum theory's so-called "Standard Model," but its true nature and real properties were very much in doubt.
The Higgs boson would be a glittering prize indeed, though not so glittering as the gigantic lab itself. After a year of intense debate within the American high- energy-physics community, Lederman's argument won out.
His reasoning was firmly in the tradition of 20th- century particle physics. There seemed little question that massive power and scale of the Desertron was the necessary next step for real progress in the field.
At the begi
Throughout the century, then, every major new advance in particle studies had required massive new infusions of power. A machine for the 1990s, the end result of decades of development, would require truly titanic amounts of juice. The physics community had hesitated at this step, and had settled for years at niggling around in the low trillions of electron volts. But the field of sub-atomic studies was looking increasingly mined-out, and the quantum Standard Model had not had a good paradigm- shattering kick in the pants in some time. From the perspective of the particle physicist, the Desertron, despite its necessarily colossal scale, made perfect scientific sense.
The Department of Energy, the bureaucratic descendant of the Atomic Energy Commission and the traditional federal patron of high-energy physics, had more or less recovered from its last major money-wasting debacle, the Carter Administration's synthetic fuels program. Under new leadership, the DoE was sympathetic to an ambitious project with some workable and sellable rationale.
Lederman's tentative scheme was developed, over three years, in great detail, by an expert central design group of federally-sponsored physicists and engineers from Lawrence Berkeley labs, Brookhaven and Fermilab. The "Desertron" was officially renamed the "Superconducting Super Collider." In 1986 the program proposal was carried to Ronald Reagan, then in his second term. While Reagan's cabinet seemed equally split on the merits of the SSC versus a much more modest research program, the Gipper decided the issue with one of his favorite football metaphors: "Throw deep."
Reagan's SSC was a deep throw indeed. The collider ring of Fermilab in Illinois was visible from space, and the grounds of Fermilab were big enough to boast their own herd of captive buffalo. But the ring of the mighty Super Collider made Fermilab's circumference look like a nickel on a di
The real action was to be in the fifty-four-mile, 14- ft-diameter Super Collider ring.
As if this titanic underground circus were not enough, the SSC also boasted two underground halls each over 300 feet long, to be stuffed with ultrasophisticated particle detectors so huge as to make their hard-helmeted minders resemble toy dolls. Along with the fifty-four miles of Collider were sixteen more miles of injection devices: the Linear Accelerator, the modest Low Energy Booster, the large Medium Energy Booster, the monster High Energy Booster, the Boosters acting like a set of gears to drive particles into ever-more frenzied states of relativistic overdrive, before their release into the ferocious grip of the main Super Collider ring.
Along the curves and arcs of these wheels-within- wheels, and along the Super Collider ring itself, were more than forty vertical access shafts, some of them two hundred feet deep. Up on the surface, twelve separate refrigeration plants would pipe tons of ultra-frigid liquid helium to more than ten thousand superconducting magnets, buried deep within the earth. All by itself, the SSC would more than double the amount of helium refrigeration taking place in the entire planet.
The site would have miles of new-paved roads, vast cooling ponds of fresh water, brand-new electrical utilities. Massive new office complexes were to be built for support and research, including two separate East and West campuses at opposite ends of the Collider, and two offsite research labs. With thousands of computers: personal computers, CAD workstations, network servers, routers, massively parallel supercomputing simulators. Office and laboratory networking including Internet and videoconferencing. Assembly buildings, tank farms, archives, libraries, security offices, cafeterias. The works.
There were, of course, dissenters from the dream. Some physicists feared that the project, though workable and probably quite necessary for any real breakthrough in their field, was simply too much to ask. Enemies from outside the field likened the scheme to Reagan's Star Wars -- an utter scientific farce -- and to the Space Station, a political pork-barrel effort with scarcely a shred of real use in research -- and to the hapless Space Shuttle, an overdesigned gobboon.
Within the field of high-energy-physics, though, the logic was too compelling and the traditional arc of development too strong. A few physicists -- Freeman Dyson among them -- quietly suggested that it might be time for a radically new tack; time to abandon the tried-and-true collider technology entirely, to try daringly novel, small-scale particle-acceleration schemes such as free- electron lasers, gyroklystrons, or wake- field accelerators. But that was not Big Thinking; and particle physics was the very exemplar of Big Science.
In the 1920 and 1930s, particle physicist Ernest Lawrence had practically invented "Big Science" with the Berkeley cyclotrons, each of them larger, more expensive, demanding greater resources and entire teams of scientists. Particle physics, in pursuit of ever-more- elusive particles, by its nature built huge, centralized facilities of ever greater complexity and ever greater expense for ever-larger staffs of researchers. There just wasn't any other way to do particle physics, but the big way.
And then there was the competitive angle, the race for international prestige: high-energy physics as the arcane, scholarly equivalent of the nuclear arms race. The nuclear arms race itself was, of course, a direct result of progress in 20th-century high-energy physics. For Cold Warriors, nuclear science, with its firm linkage to military power, was the Big Science par excellence.