Essays. FSF Columns

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 tu

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 wi

At length the lucky wi

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 begi

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 Tu

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.