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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 undisputed scientific worth, been simply killed outright by Congress. He noted that the physical assets of the SSC are worth essentially nothing -- pe
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 tu
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.
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 perso
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 tu
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This was an upshot worthy of Greek myth -- a tu