"Sir Ernest Rutherford is battering the atom by an electric attack under staggering voltage; and the negative electrons thus violently expelled from the domain of the positive nucleus are realizing the speculative guess made, centuries ago, by Hipparchus, that atoms could lose portions of themselves and thereby change their essence." — from a 1928 lecture given by the Scottish mathematician Andrew Russell Forsyth.
By David Trulock
(published in the Austin Chronicle on 13 January 1989)
Just after 6 p.m. on November 10th I was waiting for my personal particle accelerator to warm up, so I could find out if Texas had been selected as the site for the much-ballyhooed Super Conducting Supercollider.
I was having a synchronization problem. My radiation detectors refused to synchronize with the target scanning rate of my accelerator. In other words, I was trying to watch the news on TV, but the stupid vertical hold wouldn’t hold.
Or maybe it’s the horizontal hold—I keep getting vertical and horizontal adjustments mixed up. I guess that’s one reason I majored in physics instead of becoming a TV repairman, although I did start studying physics while I was enrolled in a Vo-Tech electronics course. Anyway, when I saw the craggy features of Governor Bill Clements’ face flipping vertically across the screen (aha—vertical hold!), and heard him say how everyone pulled together to win the Super Collider, I knew: Waxahachie, Texas is the place.
Ooo coo coo. Golden cities. Golden towns
And great big signs and they all say:
Hallelujah. Yodel-lay hee hoo.Every man for himself.
—Laurie Anderson, Big Science
A pretty accurate description of the real estate speculation going on in Waxahachie, wouldn’t you say? New shopping malls, a sports center, a freeway, and numerous drive-in banks—they’re all in the picture for the golden town. But beyond enriching landowners, real estate agents and construction contractors, is the Super Collider really worth building? What will it do that’s worth doing?
What it will do is convert energy into matter. The energy will come from accelerating protons to high speeds in opposite directions, then allowing them to smash into each other. For a very brief time after the collision, some of the energy of motion of the protons will be converted into unstable forms of matter. It is these unstable states of matter that coalesced into stable matter soon after the universe began—if the universe began as physicists and astronomers think it did. That “if” is by far the most compelling reason to collide particles at an energy 20 times greater than is now available.
It also points to something that is being left out of the Super Collider discussion. From the way Texas politicians are talking, the Super Collider is the be-all and end-all of elementary particle physics. But particle physics, high-energy physics, will not end with the Super Collider, which will very likely generate more questions than answers. And then what? A higher energy machine will be needed.
So the Super Collider is a step up the high-energy physics ladder, not a complete stairway to heaven. The question therefore is simply this: Is it the right step?
In July 1983, the High Energy Advisory Panel at the Department of Energy decided the Super Collider was the right step. According to a 1985 article in Physics Today, the debate that led to that decision was “long and agonizing,” partly because the decision meant that proposals to expand existing accelerator facilities would not be approved. The Advisory Panel envisioned the Super Collider as a monolithic move forward for high-energy physics in the United States, a move that would “reassert American scientific supremacy.” President Reagan gave his enthusiastic stamp of approval to the project, and presumably President Bush will continue to support it when push comes to shove over funding in the upcoming session of Congress.
Some physicists, however, would prefer federal research money to be spread around a bit rather than concentrated in one project. A report last May in Physics Today noted that the Super Collider project “deeply divides the physics community, largely because of its cost and emphasis.” But the division seems to be more of a philosophical one rather than a technical one. “The polarization,” says the report, is mainly over priorities: big science or little science, crisis response or attention to long-term needs, national pre-eminence or international cooperation.” Every physicist for himself, in other words. What, then, is Congress going to think when it is faced with finding the funds to pay for the Super Collider? If the physicists aren’t sure about the project—well, hell, how are congressmen supposed to know what to do without solid support from a large block of lobbyists?
But let’s leave the quark-barrel politics behind, and get back to the central issue—whether the Super Collider is the best thing for elementary particle physics. Particle physics is necessarily big science, but particle physicists need not put all their ergs in one 53-mile in circumference basket. (An erg is a unit of energy, and energy in physics is the payment for doing work, so energy is a lot like money. And just as there are different units of money—dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies—there are different units of energy—joules, ergs, kilowatt-hours, calories and electron volts, for instance. Protons in the Super Collider will each have 32 ergs of energy when they collide. That’s equivalent to 20 trillion electron volts, or 20 TeV, each—meager when compared with the 251,000 TeV contained in a can of light beer. And they call it high-energy physics!)
While most particle physicists agree with the advisory panel’s decision, there are some supporters of particle physics who do not. One of them is Freeman Dyson, who has earned respect as both a physicist and a writer, or, more generally, as a thinker. Dyson, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, expressed his viewpoint in a recent opinion column in Physics Today.
“Every new machine is a gamble,” says Dyson. “If we build the SSC, it might turn out to be a glorious success or it might turn out to a flop. In either case, we will want to build other machines to carry on from where the SSC stops. Unfortunately, the SSC is an end rather than a beginning.”
How would the Super Collider be a flop? It would be a flop if it didn’t generate new questions—if, for instance, its energy wasn’t high enough to adequately produce new phenomena not seen at presently available energies. It would be a flop if it merely added details to what we already know, although such details could be fodder for hundreds of scientific papers (each co-authored by fifty or so physicists). And it would be a flop if laser acceleration of particles became feasible in the near future, because laser acceleration could probably do the work of the Super Collider at a fraction of its cost.
In fact, one of the alternatives to the Super Collider suggested by Dyson is an investment in laser acceleration research. Right now, nobody knows how to accelerate particles to high energy with laser radiation. But if it could be done, laser accelerators would be a great deal smaller than today’s electromagnet-based accelerators. Being much smaller would presumably make them much cheaper to build.
If the Super Collider does turn out to be a less useful machine than its backers anticipate, there is no practical or inexpensive way to increase its energy. that is why Dyson calls it an end rather than a beginning. For circular accelerators like the Super Collider, an energy increase can be achieved either by having a larger circular path or by increasing the efficiency of the electromagnets used for acceleration. Either case means rebuilding the machine.
Linear colliders, which accelerate particles in opposite directions along a straight line, can be “pursued incrementally,” says Dyson. That is, the available energy can be increased without rebuilding the machine. Since laser acceleration is uniquely suited for use in a linear collider, Dyson suggests that the alternative to the Super Collider is a concurrent investment in laser acceleration research linear collider technology.
In May, three months after Dyson’s opinion column appeared, the letters section of Physics Today was heavily weighted with responses to Dyson’s challenge. The responses brim with practical, hard-headed reasoning. Several letters noted that a subpanel of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel had considered linear colliders and found them to be less scientifically attractive than the Super Collider. Others noted that important particle physics research would be put on hold if laser acceleration research were to be chosen as an alternative to the Super Collider. And one letter said that the Super Collider “cannot be a flop,” citing calculations any interested physicist can follow through.”
Practical, hard-headed reasoning may be a necessary component of physics, but it is not sufficient for making great discoveries. Indeed, the greatest discoveries in physics have generally come from ideas that seemed crazy when subjected to the practical, hardheaded wisdom of a particular era. But such ideas have come from individuals, not from panels or subpanels. Collectively, people are more prone to do whatever is necessary to maintain some kind of status quo, which can lead to such things as bad investments by savings and loan institutions or continued use of an unsafe booster rocket for the space shuttle.
Not that Dyson’s ideas sound crazy. In his letter of rebuttal to his critics, he says that higher-energy particle accelerators are needed, and should be built “when we can do so cost effectively.” But he also says that higher energy is only one of several relevant criteria for continued research in particle physics. Then, after making his technical points, Dyson points to the philosophical ground on which he stands:
“In conclusion, I urge my critics to remember that the universe is, as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. There is no illusion more dangerous than the belief that the progress of science is predictable. If you look for nature’s secrets in only one direction, you are likely to miss the most important secrets—those that you did not have enough imagination to predict.”
It seems, however, that most particle physicists are not as concerned with imagination as they are with insurance: the Super Collider insures that experimental particle physics research will not be interrupted. But maybe it should be interrupted. Although I was hopping around my house in excitement on November 10th when I heard the word on the Waxahachie site, I also know something about the risks of investing huge amounts of money in scientific research—that there is no insurance when it comes to making discoveries. The lack of desirable and expensive laboratory instruments has been the key to some very important discoveries, and the awarding of large research grants has often simply increased the number of unread and uninteresting scientific papers. Lord knows there are too many of those these days.
So, while physicists are still “battering the atom by an electric attack under staggering voltage,” the costs of doing so can be more staggering than the voltages involved, and the number of research papers and journals is battering the budgets of university libraries. I hesitate to complain—an official inquiry into the matter might result in a new scientific journal called The Journal of Particle Physics Economics.
Instead, I’ll celebrate the coming of the Super Collider to Texas with a six pack of Quark, the breakfast of Nobel Prize winners. Or, as Laurie Anderson put it: Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights? Let’s roll the film.
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21st Century Update: the Super Collider project was cancelled by Congress in late 1993, five years after the Texas site was selected. About $2 billion had been spent; physicists who were on the payroll were left without jobs (including some foreign physicists who’d moved to the U.S. to work on the project); and, probably the worst side effect, numerous people had lost houses and family farms in the Waxahachie area that were not recoverable. The only good thing to come out of the project that I’m aware of is the lighthearted 2003 novel “A Hole In Texas,” by Herman Wouk. But, like the whole Super Collider foofaraw, it’s not particularly memorable.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, also collides protons, but has less energy than the Super Collider would have had, only 7 TeV. It nevertheless found the Holy Grail of Standard Model particle physics, the Higgs boson, in 2012. Nothing else of consequence has been discovered since then, but the collider will come back on-line soon, with more power.
