Essays. FSF Columns

It's an open question whether a 40TeV collider like the SSC will ever be built, by anyone, anywhere, ever. The Europeans, in their low-key, suave, yet subtly menacing fashion, seem confident that they can snag the Higgs scalar boson with their upgraded CERN collider at a mere tenth of the cost of Reagan's SSC. If so, corks will pop in Zurich and there will be gnashing of teeth in Brookhaven and Berkeley. American scientific competitors will taste some of the agony of intellectual defeat in the realm of physics that European scientists have been swallowing yearly since 1945. That won't mean the end of the world.

On the other hand, the collapse of SSC may well suck CERN down in the backdraft. It may be that the global prestige of particle physics has now collapsed so utterly that European governments will also stop signing the checks, and CERN itself will fail to build its upgrade.

Or even if they do build it, they may be simply unlucky, and at 10 TeV the CERN people may get little to show.

In which case, it may be that the entire pursuit of particle physics, stymied by energy limits, will simply go out of intellectual fashion. If the global revulsion against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power increases and intensifies, it is not beyond imagination to imagine nuclear research simply dwindling away entirely. The whole kit-and-caboodle of pions, mesons, gluinos, antineutrinos, that whole strange charm of quarkiness, may come to seem a very twentieth-century enthusiasm. Something like the medieval scholastic enthusiasm for numbering the angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Nowadays that's a byword for a silly waste of intellectual effort, but in medieval times that was actually the very same inquiry as modern particle physics: a question about the absolute limits of space and material being.

Or the SSC may never be built for entirely different reasons. It may be that accelerating particles in the next century will not require the massive Rube Goldberg apparatus of a fifty-four-mile tu

In the end, it is hard to wax wroth at the dead Collider, its authors, or those who pulled the plug. The SSC was both sleazy and noble: at one level a "quark- barrel" commercialized morass of contractors scrambling at the federal trough, while Congressmen eye-gouged one another in the cloakroom, scientists angled for the main chance and a steady paycheck, and supposedly dignified scholars ground their teeth in public and backbit like a bunch of jealous prima do

The Machine in the Desert was a transcendant scheme to steal cosmic secrets, an enterprise whose unashamed raison d'etre was to enable wild and glorious flights of imagination and comprehension. It was sense-of-wonder and utter sleaze at one and the same time. Rather like science fiction, actually. Not that the SSC itself was science fictional, although it certainly was (and is). I mean, rather, that the SSC was very like the actual writing and publishing of science fiction, an enterprise where bright but surprisingly naive people smash galaxies for seven cents a word and a chance at a plastic brick.

It would take a hard-hearted science fiction writer indeed to stand at the massive lip of that 240-foot hole in the ground at N15 -- as I did late one evening in January, with the sun at my back and tons of hardware gently rusting all around me and not a human being in sight -- and not feel a deep sense of wonder and pity.

In another of his determined attempts to enlighten the ignorant public, in his book THE GOD PARTICLE, Leon Lederman may have said it best.

In a parody of the Bible called "The Very New Testament," he wrote:

"And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Waxahachie, and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, Go to, let us build a Giant Collider, whose collisions may reach back to the begi

"And the Lord came down to see the accelerator, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold the people are unconfounding my confounding. And the Lord sighed and said, Go to, let us go down, and there give them the God Particle so that they may see how beautiful is the universe I have made."

A man who justifies his own dreams in terms of frustrating God and rebuilding the Tower of Babel -- only this time in Texas, and this time done right -- has got to be utterly tone-deaf to his own intellectual arrogance. Worse yet, the Biblical parody is openly blasphemous, u

Nevertheless, I rather like the sound of that rhetoric; I admire its sheer cosmic chutzpah. I scarcely see what real harm has been done. (Especially compared to the harm attendant on the works of Lederman's colleagues such as Oppenheimer and Sakharov.) It's true that a man was crushed to death building the SSC, but he was a miner by profession, and mining is very hazardous work under any circumstances. Two billion dollars was, it's true, almost entirely wasted, but governments always waste money, and after all, it was only money.

Give it a decade or two, to erase the extreme humiliation naturally and healthfully attendant on this utter scientific debacle. Then, if the United States manages to work its way free of its fantastic burden of fiscal irresponsibility without destroying the entire global economy in the process, then I, for one, as an American and Texan citizen, despite everything, would be perfectly happy to see the next generation of particle physicists voted another three billion dollars, and told to get digging again.

Or even four billion dollars.

Okay, maybe five billion tops; but that's my final offer.

"Bitter Resistance"

Two hundred thousand bacteria could easily lurk under the top half of this semicolon; but for the sake of focussing on a subject that's too often out of sight and out of mind, let's pretend otherwise. Let's pretend that a bacterium is about the size of a railway tank car.

Now that our fellow creature the bacterium is no longer three microns long, but big enough to crush us, we can get a firmer mental grip on the problem at hand. The first thing we notice is that the bacterium is wielding long, powerful whips that are corkscrewing at a blistering 12,000 RPM. When it's got room and a reason to move, the bacterium can swim ten body-lengths every second. The human equivalent would be sprinting at forty miles an hour.

The butt-ends of these spi

The bacterium, constantly chugging away with powerful interior metabolic factories, is surrounded by a cloud of its own greasy spew. The rotating spines, known as flagella, are firmly embedded in the bacterium's outer hide, a slimy, lumpy, armored bark. Studying it closely (we evade the whips and the cloud of mucus), we find the outer cell wall to be a double-sided network of interlocking polymers, two regular, almost crystalline layers of macromolecular chainmail, something like a tough plastic wiffleball.