Essays. FSF Columns

As far as safety goes, hiding nuclear waste in an incomplete 14.7 mile tu

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 (tu

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 nonsense.

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 post-mortem "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 post-mortem 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.