Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was to have been the world's largest and most expensive particle accelerator. In July 1983, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) approved plans to build the collider. Ten years later, after 15 miles of tunnel had been constructed and almost $2 billion spent, Congress cancelled the project, despite extensive lobbying by the high-energy physics community. Escalating costs, charges of mismanagement, a new U.S. president, a failure to attract international partners, and the collapse of the Soviet Union all contributed to the project's demise. However, some scientists interpreted the termination of the project as evidence that the American public and their politicians were hostile to science. The case of the SSC is interesting from a science communication perspective both for its impact on scientists' perceptions of public attitudes to science and as an example of the intensive political lobbying involved in Big Science, the media's role in voicing disagreements within the scientific community, and the actions of public protest groups over the siting of scientific facilities.

The SSC would have used superconducting magnets to accelerate two beams of protons in opposite directions around a tunnel 52 miles in circumference. The size of the ring and strength of the magnets meant that the beams could each reach an energy of 20 tera-electron-volts (TeV) before colliding, giving a collision energy an order of magnitude higher than that of existing accelerators. The energy of the collision would be converted into previously unobserved subatomic particles. In particular, physicists hoped to detect the Higgs boson—a particle required by the theory that unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces—or, failing that, to find new unexpected physics.

The idea that the United States should build a new accelerator capable of probing such high energies was first proposed by the director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman, at a meeting of American particle physicists in Snowmass, Colorado, in 1982. Lederman had earlier contributed to international plans for a similar accelerator known as the Very Big Accelerator, a project to symbolize, as one physicist had put it, “international collaboration across ideological frontiers.” By contrast, the new proposal, dubbed the “Desertron” by Lederman, was for a nationalist project aimed at giving the United States a competitive advantage. Although Lederman still talked of international collaboration, the Desertron was to be located on American [Page 846]soil and would enable the United States to “leapfrog the world” in particle physics.

U.S. resolve to take the lead in high-energy physics crystallized when Europe's CERN facility announced the discovery of the W± and Z vector bosons in January and June 1983. The DOE's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) recommended that work should start on the Desertron, now renamed the Superconducting Super Collider and costed at $2 billion, instead of continuing with a smaller accelerator then under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Although the decision to abandon the smaller Intersecting Storage Accelerator, known as ISABELLE, had split the HEPAP subpanel tasked with drawing up the plans, a survey by the New York Times indicated that physicists were generally in favor of the proposals for the new accelerator.

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