Essays. FSF Columns

"The Dead Collider"

It certainly seemed like a grand idea at the time, the time being 1982, one of the break-the-bank years of the early Reagan Administration.

The Europeans at CERN, possessors of the world's largest particle accelerator, were planning to pave their massive Swiss tunnel with new, superconducting magnets. This would kick the European atom-smasher, already powerful, up to a massive 10 trillion electron volts.

In raw power, this would boost the Europeans decisively past their American rivals. America's most potent accelerator in 1982, Fermilab in Illinois, could manage a meager 2 TeV. And Fermilab's Tevatron, though upgraded several times, was an aging installation.

A more sophisticated machine, ISABELLE at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, had been planned in 1979 as Fermilab's successor at the forefront of American particle physics. But by 1982, it was clear that ISABELLE's ultra-sophisticated superconducting magnets had severe design troubles. The state-of-the-art bungling at Brookhaven was becoming an open embarrassment to the American particle-physics community. And even if the young ISABELLE facility overcame those problems and got their magnets to run, ISABELLE was intended to sacrifice raw power for sophistication; at best, ISABELLE would yield a feeble .8 TeV.

In August 1982, Leon Lederman, then director of Fermilab, made a bold and visionary proposal. In a conference talk to high-energy physicists gathered in Colorado, Lederman proposed cancelling both ISABELLE and the latest Fermilab upgrade, in pursuit of a gigantic American particle accelerator that would utterly dwarf the best the Europeans had to offer, now or in the foreseeable future. He called it "The Machine in the Desert."

The "Desertron" (as Lederman first called it) would be the largest single scientific instrument in the world, employing a staff of more than two thousand people, plus students, teachers and various properly awestruck visiting scholars from overseas. It would be 20 times more powerful than Fermilab, and full sixty times more powerful than CERN circa 1982. The accelerator's 54 miles of deep tunnels, lined with hard- vacuum beamguides and helium- refrigerated giant magnets, would be fully the size of the Washington Beltway.

The cost: perhaps 3 billion dollars. It was thought that the cash- flush Japanese, who had been very envious of CERN for some time, would be willing to help the Americans in exchange for favored status at the complex.

The goal of the Desertron, or at least its target of choice, would be the Higgs scalar boson, a hypothetical subatomic entity theoretically responsible for the fact that other elementary particles have mass. The Higgs played a prominent part at the speculative edges of quantum theory's so-called "Standard Model," but its true nature and real properties were very much in doubt.

The Higgs boson would be a glittering prize indeed, though not so glittering as the gigantic lab itself. After a year of intense debate within the American high- energy-physics community, Lederman's argument won out.

His reasoning was firmly in the tradition of 20th- century particle physics. There seemed little question that massive power and scale of the Desertron was the necessary next step for real progress in the field.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford (who coined the memorable catch-phrase, "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting") discovered the nucleus of the atom with a mere five million electron volts. Rutherford's lab equipment not much more sophisticated than string and sealing-wax. To get directly at neutrons and protons, however, took much more energy -- a billion electron volts and a cyclotron. To get quark effects, some decades later, required ten billion volts and a synchrotron. To make quarks really stand up and dance in their full quantum oddity, required a hundred billion electron volts and a machine that was miles across. And to get at the Higgs boson would need at least ten trillion eV, and given that the fantastically powerful collision would be a very messy affair, a full forty trillion -- two particle beams of twenty TeV each, colliding head-on -- was a much safer bet.

Throughout the century, then, every major new advance in particle studies had required massive new infusions of power. A machine for the 1990s, the end result of decades of development, would require truly titanic amounts of juice. The physics community had hesitated at this step, and had settled for years at niggling around in the low trillions of electron volts. But the field of sub-atomic studies was looking increasingly mined-out, and the quantum Standard Model had not had a good paradigm- shattering kick in the pants in some time. From the perspective of the particle physicist, the Desertron, despite its necessarily colossal scale, made perfect scientific sense.

The Department of Energy, the bureaucratic descendant of the Atomic Energy Commission and the traditional federal patron of high-energy physics, had more or less recovered from its last major money-wasting debacle, the Carter Administration's synthetic fuels program. Under new leadership, the DoE was sympathetic to an ambitious project with some workable and sellable rationale.

Lederman's tentative scheme was developed, over three years, in great detail, by an expert central design group of federally-sponsored physicists and engineers from Lawrence Berkeley labs, Brookhaven and Fermilab. The "Desertron" was officially renamed the "Superconducting Super Collider." In 1986 the program proposal was carried to Ronald Reagan, then in his second term. While Reagan's cabinet seemed equally split on the merits of the SSC versus a much more modest research program, the Gipper decided the issue with one of his favorite football metaphors: "Throw deep."

Reagan's SSC was a deep throw indeed. The collider ring of Fermilab in Illinois was visible from space, and the grounds of Fermilab were big enough to boast their own herd of captive buffalo. But the ring of the mighty Super Collider made Fermilab's circumference look like a nickel on a dinner plate. One small section of the Super Collider, the High Energy Booster, was the size of Fermilab all by itself, but this Booster was only a humble injection device for the Super Collider.

The real action was to be in the fifty-four-mile, 14- ft-diameter Super Collider ring.

As if this titanic underground circus were not enough, the SSC also boasted two underground halls each over 300 feet long, to be stuffed with ultrasophisticated particle detectors so huge as to make their hard-helmeted minders resemble toy dolls. Along with the fifty-four miles of Collider were sixteen more miles of injection devices: the Linear Accelerator, the modest Low Energy Booster, the large Medium Energy Booster, the monster High Energy Booster, the Boosters acting like a set of gears to drive particles into ever-more frenzied states of relativistic overdrive, before their release into the ferocious grip of the main Super Collider ring.

Along the curves and arcs of these wheels-within- wheels, and along the Super Collider ring itself, were more than forty vertical access shafts, some of them two hundred feet deep. Up on the surface, twelve separate refrigeration plants would pipe tons of ultra-frigid liquid helium to more than ten thousand superconducting magnets, buried deep within the earth. All by itself, the SSC would more than double the amount of helium refrigeration taking place in the entire planet.

The site would have miles of new-paved roads, vast cooling ponds of fresh water, brand-new electrical utilities. Massive new office complexes were to be built for support and research, including two separate East and West campuses at opposite ends of the Collider, and two offsite research labs. With thousands of computers: personal computers, CAD workstations, network servers, routers, massively parallel supercomputing simulators. Office and laboratory networking including Internet and videoconferencing. Assembly buildings, tank farms, archives, libraries, security offices, cafeterias. The works.

There were, of course, dissenters from the dream. Some physicists feared that the project, though workable and probably quite necessary for any real breakthrough in their field, was simply too much to ask. Enemies from outside the field likened the scheme to Reagan's Star Wars -- an utter scientific farce -- and to the Space Station, a political pork-barrel effort with scarcely a shred of real use in research -- and to the hapless Space Shuttle, an overdesigned gobboon.

Within the field of high-energy-physics, though, the logic was too compelling and the traditional arc of development too strong. A few physicists -- Freeman Dyson among them -- quietly suggested that it might be time for a radically new tack; time to abandon the tried-and-true collider technology entirely, to try daringly novel, small-scale particle-acceleration schemes such as free- electron lasers, gyroklystrons, or wake- field accelerators. But that was not Big Thinking; and particle physics was the very exemplar of Big Science.

In the 1920 and 1930s, particle physicist Ernest Lawrence had practically invented "Big Science" with the Berkeley cyclotrons, each of them larger, more expensive, demanding greater resources and entire teams of scientists. Particle physics, in pursuit of ever-more- elusive particles, by its nature built huge, centralized facilities of ever greater complexity and ever greater expense for ever-larger staffs of researchers. There just wasn't any other way to do particle physics, but the big way.

And then there was the competitive angle, the race for international prestige: high-energy physics as the arcane, scholarly equivalent of the nuclear arms race. The nuclear arms race itself was, of course, a direct result of progress in 20th-century high-energy physics. For Cold Warriors, nuclear science, with its firm linkage to military power, was the Big Science par excellence.

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 tunneling techniques, industrial demand-pull in superconductivity. In meeting "all but insuperable technical obstacles," they declared, American industries would learn better to compete. (There was no mention of what might happen to American "national pride and technological self- confidence" if American industries simply failed to meet those "insuperable obstacles" -- as had already happened in ISABELLE.)

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 winner of the SSC had a great deal to gain: a nucleus of high-tech development, scientific prestige, and billions in federally-subsidized infrastructure investment. The Congressperson carrying the SSC home to the district would have a prize beyond mere water-project pork; that lucky politician would have trapped a mastodon.

At length the lucky winner of the elaborate site- selection process was announced: Waxahachie, Texas. Texas Congresspeople were, of course, ecstatic; but other competitors wondered what on earth Waxahachie had to offer that they couldn't.

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 beginning.

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 Tunnel Boring Machine. The Boring Machine was a state-of-the-art Boring Machine, but its workings were invisible to all but the hard-hats, and the machine itself was, well, boring.

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.

As a popular attraction the SSC was a bust; and time was not on the side of its planners and builders. As the Cold War waned, the basic prestige of nuclear physics was also wearing rather thin. Hard times had hit America, and hard times had come for American science.

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 winning Texas was not enough. The party was over. In October 1993 the Super Collider was killed yet again. And this time it stayed dead.

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 pinned up xeroxed office art indicative of their mood. One was a chart called:

"THE SIX PHASES OF A PROJECT: I. Enthusiasm. II. Disillusionment. III. Panic. IV. Search for the Guilty. V. Punishment of the Innocent. VI. Praise & Honor for the Nonparticipants."

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 announcement for Supercollider employees only!! Your job is a test. It is only a test!! Had your job been an actual job, you would have received raises, promotions, and other signs of appreciation!! We now return you to your miserable state of existence."

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 Ann Richards, is not at all happy about it.

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 tunnels. "I hope we can make *something* positive out of all this," muttered US Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tex), Waxahachie's representative and a tireless champion of the original project. A Texas state lawyer told me bitterly that "the Department of Energy treats our wonderful asset like one of their hazardous waste sites!"

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.

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 -- pennies per pound -- without the trained staff, and that the staff is wasting away.

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 tunnel.

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 personnel to build new nuclear weapons. If anyone builds such a place in Waxahachie, then the State of Texas will have to pay for it. And Texas is not inclined to shell out more money. Texas already feels that the rest of the United States owes Texas $440,885,853 for the dead Collider.

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 tunnel be made into a high-level nuclear waste-storage site. A "temporary" waste site, he assured the Committee, that would store highly radioactive nuclear waste in specially designed "totally safe" steel shipping casks, until a "permanent" site opens somewhere in New Mexico.

"I'm gonna sell my house now," stage-whispered the physicist next to me in the audience. "Waxahachie will be a ghost town!"

This was an upshot worthy of Greek myth -- a tunnel built to steal the fiery secrets of the God Particle, which ends up constipated by thousands of radioactive steel coprolites, the Trojan Horse gift of Our Friend Mr. Atom. It's such a darkly poetic, Southern-Gothic example of hubris clobbered by nemesis that one almost wishes it would actually happen.

As far as safety goes, hiding nuclear waste in an incomplete 14.7 mile tunnel under Texas is certainly far more safe than leaving the waste where it is at the moment (basically, all over America, from sea to shining sea). DoE's nuclear-waste chickens have come back to roost in major fashion lately, as time catches up with a generation of Cold War weapons scientists. "They were never given the money they needed to do it cleanly, but just told to do it right away in the name of National Security," a federal expert remarked glumly over the ham and turkey sandwiches at the lunch break. He went on to grimly mention "huge amounts of carbon tetrachloride seeping into the water table" and radioactive waste "storage tanks that burp hydrogen."

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 (tunnel contractors), and Robbins Company (Tunnel Boring Machine). The money went to architects and engineers and designers and roadpavers and people who string Ethernet cable and sell UNIX boxes and Macintoshes. Those dollars also paid the salaries of 2,000 researchers for several years. Admittedly, the nation would have been far better off it those 2,000 talented people simply had been given a million dollars each and told to go turn themselves into anything except particle physicists, but that option wasn't presented.

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.

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 tunnel and the twelve cryogenic plants with their entire tank farms of liquid helium. It is a bit hard to believe that scientific questions as basic as the primal nature of matter will be abandoned entirely, but there is more than one way to boost a particle. Giant *room-temperature* superconductors really would transform the industrial base, and they might make quarks jump hoops without the macho necessity of being "super" at all.

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 donnas. And yet at the same time, the SSC really was a Great Enterprise, a scheme to gladden the heart of Democritus and Newton and Tycho Brahe, and all those other guys who had no real job or a fat state sinecure.

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 beginning of time. And they had superconducting magnets for bending, and protons had they for smashing.

"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, unnecessarily alienating a large section of Lederman's potential audience of American voters. Small wonder that the scheme came to grief -- great wonder, in fact, that Lederman's Babel came anywhere as near to success as it did.

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.