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
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.
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.
--------------end of
article, published in the Austin Chronicle on January 13,
1989--------------------
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, should be up and running in May 2008. It also collides protons, but has less energy than the Super
Collider would have had, only 7 TeV. It
is nevertheless expected to find the Holy Grail of particle physics, the Higgs
boson, should such a thing actually exist.
Stay tuned.