I am saddened and disturbed by the recent termination of the superconducting super collider (SSC) project. This facility would have collided two beams of high energy protons to recreate the conditions a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. It promised to unlock many puzzles of physics including the origin of mass. Now it will not be built.
We have spent more than $2 billion and invested the careers of more than 1,000 of our finest scientists and engineers and are left with a 20 percent complete project, a 14.7 mile underground tunnel and perhaps another billion dollars of shutdown costs that may result in $3 billion being spent of the $8.3 billion planned to finish the project.
The opponents of the SSC claimed they were achieving deficit reduction. The shutdown costs will ensure there are no savings next year. We may have eventually saved the average taxpayer the cost of a pizza and we have given up U.S. leadership in a fundamental field of physics pioneered by this country.
We will spend more than four times the president’s request for the SSC next year on the supposedly canceled Star Wars research program and more than 12 times on nuclear weapons development in this post Cold War era.
In an age of hundreds of billions of dollars of yearly budget deficits caused by entitlement programs, efforts to cut small pieces of discretionary spending provide little relief for the American taxpayer.
One can ask how one can ever pursue a major science research project when it has to survive a new vote every year in both the Senate and House. For the SSC to have been built would have required a record of 14 wins and no losses in an arena where political deal-making and competing special interests easily overwhelm the scientific community.
The U.S. high-energy physics community must accept the political reality, join together with our colleagues in the international high-energy physics community and pool our resources. We must devise projects that are acceptable to Congress as affordable. The fundamental questions will still be pursued, but the answers may lie overseas.
