Essays. FSF Columns

As a popular attraction the SSC was a bust; and time was not on the side of its pla

Lederman himself, onetime chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was painfully aware of the sense of malaise 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 wi

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 pi

"THE SIX PHASES OF A PROJECT: I. Enthusiasm. II. Disillusionment. III. Panic. IV. Search for the Guilty. V. Punishment of the I

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 a

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 A

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 tu

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.