Erosion Of Congressional Support For Supercollider Frustrates, Angers Nation's High-Energy Physicists

Many of them argue that, without the SSC, the field of particle physics may lose its vitality--maybe even its future The struggle in Congress over funding for the superconducting supercollider (SSC)--now something of an annual event--is disrupting work at the laboratory and raising frustrations throughout the high-energy physics community, say physicists. Many of them also worry not only about the future of the multibillion-dollar Waxahachie, Texas, project, but also about that of particle physics in the United States. Already, failing support for the SSC in Washington, D.C., threatens recruitment to the project, they say, from student through professional levels. Some top particle physicists in the early to middle stages of their careers, disturbed by the prospect of waiting until the next century to begin experiments, are considering moves to accelerator laboratories outside the U.S., such as CERN in Geneva. "What may be the most disturbing thing of all," says Steven Weinberg, a professor of physics at the University of Texas, Austin, and a 1979 Nobel Prize winner in physics, "is that there's been a kind of bargain between science and society: Scientists pursue their inner-directed goals, and society supports this because, in the long run, it will reap benefits. And Congress seems to be losing interest in keeping up society's end of that bargain." On June 24, the House of Representatives voted by a decisive 280- 150 margin to cut the SSC's $620 million fiscal 1994 funding from a Department of Energy appropriations bill. Now, supporters of the SSC hope that the Senate will back the collider, as it did last year, in a vote likely to take place in mid- to late September. Then, a conference committee may be able to effect a compromise that will fund the project. This would be similar to the sequence of events leading to funding of the project last year. In fiscal 1993, the House voted, 323-181, to cut $450 million in funds from the proposed total of $483.7 million earmarked for the collider, leaving just enough for an orderly shut-down of the project. The Senate then voted, 62-32, to support the project, and a conference committee worked out a compromise that continued funding. The several-months-long battle is distracting to many of the the 2,000 or so SSC employees in Texas, as well as to physicists at universities around the U.S. whose work is tied to the SSC. "If the end result is that we get funded, complete the project, and do the science that we want to do, that would be fantastic," says Benjamin Grinstein, a physicist in the theory group at the SSC. "But, in the meantime, there are two months a year that are incredibly disruptive to the people at the laboratory and, to a lesser extent, to the high-energy physics community." He adds: "It's really wrong that if this country seems to commit itself to do something of this magnitude, it would then put thousands of people through this kind of psychological terror campaign every summer. Unfortunately, this is the way our law works. We have a yearly appropriations process, and we have to put up with it." Some younger physicists are reviewing their career strategies in light of the escalating uncertainty of congressional support for the SSC. "When people choose a career, they balance their degree of dedication and interest in it against the financial rewards and against the riskiness," says Alan Fry, an SSC physicist. "That triangle that we're trying to balance is changing now in high- energy physics. Certainly, at SSC, it's no longer obvious to me I'll have a job next year." The wrangling in Washington also has direct effects on the pace and progress of work at the laboratory, SSC scientists say. "Every year, there's a point where there's a hiring freeze, you can't buy things, and you have to just stop," says Patty McBride, a particle physicist at the lab. "We're continuing what we can, but it's difficult. You just lose a little bit of momentum." Delays associated with the funding struggle, including the suggestion that lower near-term costs might be achieved by pushing the SSC's completion date from the current 1999 projection into the next century, are not generally well-received by younger physicists. "People my age all want to be working on a current experiment, something that's running and taking data in the next few years," says McBride. "We don't want to sit here and let the rest of the field pass us by. People here are worried that with the funding fight every year, things will be delayed even more." Makoto Takashima, another physicist working on-site in Waxahachie, agrees. After nine years in Europe, doing his graduate work at DESY, the accelerator lab in Hamburg, Germany, and then postdoctoral work at CERN, he is anxious to move forward scientifically. "The reason I went to Europe was because I felt they were doing better science in high-energy physics," Takashima says. "It's as simple as that. But with the SSC, I really felt that this country had a big chance of getting back to the top. The scientists in this country, I think, are the best--and I've seen that by direct comparison to the Europeans. But the way the funding is here, it's difficult to get these projects off the ground. And that's unfortunate, because the scientific heritage is here. "There is some sentiment around here that the Congress may say, `We'll keep you limping along, and we'll build this thing in the year 2015,' or something," Takashima adds. "If it comes to that, I would rather just leave. I want to do something within my active lifetime." Many physicists note that backing for the collider laboratories in Europe and Japan is more reliable than in the U.S. This stability, and the resulting continuity in work, is cited by many as one reason the next generation of American physicists may expatriate. S. Peter Rosen, dean of science at the University of Texas, Arlington, is concerned that this may happen. "Europe is much better than us in that, once they make a commitment to a project, they're committed," Rosen says. "There's never, anymore, any question about its future." Prospects for recruitment to the SSC specifically, but also into the field generally, may be damaged by the lack of congressional support for the Texas collider, according to some physicists. Larry Gladney, a professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is developing high-speed parallel computing applications for data acquisition at the SSC. He also has been part of a collaborative arrangement to encourage students at Lincoln University, a historically African-American undergraduate school about 35 miles west of that city, to consider Ph.D.-level science career options. In June, he traveled with some of these students to visit the SSC. "The idea was to introduce the fact that there are science and engineering careers that are going to be built up by having this large project in the country," Gladney says. "And, certainly, it's very undermining, right afterwards, to have the House turn it down and make it look like the rug is going to be pulled out from under it, after getting people enthusiastic about it. It does a lot of damage to say that there's that much uncertainty associated with being a scientist." He adds: "Here is something I have planned to spend a great deal of my future efforts on. Now, it looks as though, if the SSC goes, then you'll have to go out of the country to do high-energy physics research. That's really the end point of this--if the SSC goes, it's very unlikely that we'll get much funding for any of the high-energy physics projects." Concern that particle physics might become a "sterile" field without the SSC has led some professors to counsel graduate students to be wary in their career choices. "In physics, we're interested in mathematical theories that describe nature," says Edward Farhi, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "and those theories must be compared with experiment to see whether, in fact, they accurately describe nature. In roughly 10 or 15 years [without the SSC], there would be little or no experimental data that would help us understand the way nature works beyond what we already know. So, [for young people] to go into a field in which the data flow is going to terminate would just be a mistake." Leon Lederman, director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and a 1988 Nobel Prize winner in physics, also worries about the future of high-energy physics without the "big machine," the SSC. "The big machine was really designed to answer certain questions that we know can't be answered by the current inventory," he says. "For people working in these fields, no matter how fascinated they are in what they're doing, if they know that the big questions are not going to be answered, some starch must go out of the whole system."

Erosion Of Congressional Support For Supercollider Frustrates, Angers Nation's High-Energy Physicists

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