From CFACT
“She’s got a superconducting super collider inside of her and I’m a billion-dollar hole in the ground”
– Bill Davis, Waxahachie
Fifteen years ago, award-winning journalist Timothy Noah observed that the excitement over the prospect of isolating the Higgs boson (the subatomic “God particle”) at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva could have happened in Waxahachie, Texas.
The Superconducting Super Collider project was the world’s first attempt to use powerful superconducting magnets to create magnetic fields necessary for confining fusion plasma. Completing the SSC, according to laboratory director Roy Schwitters, a University of Texas at Austin physicist, would have led to discovery of the Higgs boson (“God”) particle 10 years earlier and attracted 120,000 visitors a year to north Texas.
President Clinton’s Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary, under whose watch the project was canceled, lamented in 1993, “The superconducting super collider held the promise of taking humanity to the next level of understanding about the origins of the universe and the fundamental dynamics of matter.”
As stated by Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis, this colossal embarrassment – the cancellation of the project – provides a classic example of the incompetency of the Washington swamp that can likely be traced to unaccountable bureaucrats spending taxpayers’ money in ways no drunken sailor would ever consider.
Staffers proposed projects with lowball budgets, then bureaucrats write regulations that triple real-world costs, and finally (Congress having funneled millions to donors and friends) the project is mothballed. From healthcare to war to nuclear energy, Congress (the authors of the $38 trillion official national debt plus untold trillions in unfunded mandates) is a proven spendthrift.
For decades, nuclear energy research was dependent on government funding. Since the Eisenhower years, lowball budgets, bureaucratic overkill, and a lack of commitment to the best science made it virtually impossible to design and build new nuclear power plants – and the ones completed were way over budget.
Proponents of the superconducting super collider made several mistakes, most notably not convincing the public of long-term benefits beyond satisfying scientific curiosity. They sold the SCSC as a $4.4 billion project, yet people saw the cost balloon to $12 billion with no end in sight. That was enough to embarrass the Capitol Hill crowd that their reelection was far more important than discovering the secrets of the universe.
Science writer David Appell laments that the death of the SSC opened the door for the glory of particle physics to move to Europe — the older, broadly collaborative CERN project. CERN was born out of UNESCO in 1951 and formally established as French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire in 1953, though many call it the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. At its outset, 12 nations signed on.
CERN’s own website explains that, since the 1950s, its Directorates have been subdivided into departments and in turn into groups and sections. In short, a typical European bureaucratic labyrinth. They further boast that the massive organization has “more than fulfilled” scientists’ dreams of “stretch(ing) the limits of our technology and imaginations.”
But here’s the rub. Many blame the death of the SSC on an obstinate Congress that did not seek international support, yet it was not until 2010 – 55 years into its existence – that CERN finally discovered the Higgs boson. CERN’s particle accelerator is far less powerful than the one Americans had begun to build before Congress backed out.
What was missing from the American project was the spirit of the Eisenhower Age coupled with the vision of public-private partnerships to provide funding not dependent on short-term political calculations.
The spirit that says Americans can do anything because we have the freedom to explore.
Some young Americans still have that spirit.
Take Gitanjali Rao, from a small town in Colorado, who at age 13 invented the Tethys device that detects lead levels in drinking water. Time’s first Kid of the Year got a scholarship to MIT.
Or Ethiopian-born teenager Heman Bekele, named America’s Top Young Scientist for inventing – at age 14 – a skin-cancer-treating soap that uses lipid-based nanoparticles to activate immune cells at a price competitive with ordinary soaps.
The first proposal for building CERN’s Large Hadron Collider came in 1984, but not until 2010 did its experiments yield first collisions. That approval only came after the U.S. began planning the SSC. As CERN accelerator physicist says, “The SSC cancellation helped the LHC get approved, and then the U.S. joined the LHC.”
But Zimmermann also said, “We need a minimum of competition between projects, because it’s not good to only have one idea. The competing projects are stimulating and challenging each other, pushing colliders to maximum performance.”
Today, the U.S. remains out of, or rather on the periphery of, the loop in particle physics. CERN talks of building the Future Circular Collider to succeed the LHC, with operations starting in stages in the 2040s.
Stage 1 (FCC-ee), an electron-positron collider to function as a Higgs factory, would operate for about 15 years. Stage 2, (FCC-hh), a proton-proton collider capable of reaching 100 TeV collision energies (5 times that of the SSC), would not be completed until the 2070s.
Meanwhile, China just announced plans to have its Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) with a circumference of 62 miles (larger than the SSC’s 54 miles) completed by 2037. The Chinese envision the CEPC as a “Higgs factory” generating millions of Higgs bosons through electron-positron collisions.
A little over a year after the death of the SSC, Carl Sagan wrote of his “foreboding” of a future America as “a service and information economy when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.”
When a few Americans begin to speak of a revival of American industry, maybe it is not too late.
Maybe we can avoid Sagan’s nightmare of a people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true” who “slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness” that looms today over our horizons.
Isn’t it time for America to be “super” again?
This article originally appeared at RealClear Energy
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Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, “Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.”
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