Renewed SSC Funding Fails To Eliminate Physicists' Concerns

Although funding has been restored for the superconducting supercollider, the skies have not cleared over the Dallas-based project, as well-founded fears of another budget wrangle next year persist, say SSC officials. The Senate voted on August 3 in favor of continued SSC funding after the House voted the project down on June 17, but physicists associated with the SSC say they are still wary. They are concerned over a Congress that will have as many as 130 new members after this fall's election and of a possible new president, Bill Clinton, whose vice presidential running mate, Sen. Al Gore, has in the past voted against the SSC. This wariness has already resulted in reduced morale and in difficulties in attracting foreign money and collaborations, as well as new scientists for the SSC lab itself, scientists say. "It was a rough summer on people," says SSC director Roy Schwitters. And despite the relief provided by the agreement between the House and Senate to continue funding the project at about $500 million for fiscal year 1993, he is certain that angst continues among physicists at SSC and at other collaborating universities. "I'm a little concerned [the funding battle] may have more lasting scars than we see," he says. Schwitters spent his summer trying to keep SSC employees informed, via a series of "all hands" talks with the 2,070 physicists, engineers, and support personnel now on site. "I felt it was my highest priority to try to communicate with the troops, to soothe their concerns and give them as accurate a picture as I could--and not let them get too high or too low with what they read in the press," he says. The message he delivered was also about continuing to work diligently in order to stay on schedule and on budget. Physicists associated with SSC--generally passionate devotees of their field who work long hours--were thrown off course by the devastating House vote, says one of them, Kate Morgan, who is collaborating on a detector called GEM (named for three particles: gammas, electrons, muons). "We all kept trying to do our work, but you can't concentrate on your little list of things to get done this week when the very future of the project is in jeopardy. The amazing thing is that any work got done at all," she says. "For many of us, for the first time in our careers, we had a motivational problem." Morgan also says that the continued funding uncertainties will hamper the project. "If we have too many of these things too often, we will not be on budget or on schedule." Had the Senate failed to come to the SSC's rescue, though, her career would not have been over. "I would not have jumped off the nearest tall building," she says. Morgan speculates that she would have sold her land, her longhorn cattle, and her horses, and would have probably moved to Fermilab or the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center or moved with her Dutch physicist husband back to Europe, perhaps even back to CERN, where she had spent 12 years before coming to the SSC in 1990. Sydney Meshkov is one of the few theoretical physicists--out of almost 200 mostly high-energy experimental physicists in all--to make his move to the SSC. He chose to come to Dallas after 28 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology because "SSC is where the action is and is going to be for the next 30 years." Like many physicists, he was "stunned when the House took its vote and smashed us," he says. "People didn't expect what happened. We in the physics community didn't have the proper political intelligence to understand what was happening," he says. "But the main thing was I was horrified that science policy in the U.S. could be made in such a haphazard way." That is, that an enormous project that will pump life into the U.S. physics community for decades to come can be nixed with limited debate, he says. Despite the restoration of FY 1993 funding, Meshkov agrees with Schwitters that the House vote has left scars. "I would say the morale here is pretty good now," he says. "But I guess everybody's worried about what will happen next year." Unlike Morgan, he sees his career options as limited if the SSC had been or is canceled in the future. "I'm not a young guy--I'm 65 years old." Physicists at the SSC lab weren't the only riders on the summer's funding roller coaster. Among the dispirited was George Trilling, a physicist involved in the solenoidal detector collaboration at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where more than 100 people are involved with the SSC. "The shock in this June 17 vote was just how easily--on the basis of two hours' discussion, much of it not about the SSC--they could blow this thing right out," he says. "Having seen what happened on June 17, almost anything could happen. I'll believe it when I see the [appro- priations are] really locked up for next year," he says. His wariness is shared by foreign collaborators, especially the Japanese, who were rumored to be on the verge of announcing up to $2 billion worth of collaborative efforts on behalf of SSC before the vote took place, he says. "It is now much more difficult for foreign collaborators to get the support from their governments that they need," Trilling says. The precarious funding situation will also hurt the SSC's attempts to attract new talent. "I believe it's more difficult to bring scientists to the SSC lab now than it was. There's much more of a wait-and-see attitude." Michael Barnett is a theoretical physicist by trade, but for five weeks this summer he was the seat-of-the-pants lobbyist who organized a major assault upon the halls of Congress. Eighty physicists were mobilized in late July, an effort that was made much easier with the help of HEPNET, the high-energy physics computer network. Large numbers of interested scientists could receive almost instantaneous updates of the situation by way of electronic mail. The mob of physicists descended on Washington a week before the August 3 favorable vote in the Senate. Group members spent most of their time speaking with congressional aides, but also spoke with some members of Congress. What Barnett found was that most representatives and senators accepted that the science of the project was on solid ground. But the physicist-lobbyists did have to expend a good deal of effort refuting the claims that had been made about potential SSC spin-offs. Some of these claims were overblown by well-meaning supporters of the SSC, while others were either blown up or invented by opponents, says Barnett. For instance, at one point in the SSC debate it was asserted that high technology--as enhanced by spin-offs from cutting-edge projects like the SSC--played a big role in winning the Gulf War. That was puffed up into a claim that high-energy physics won the war, says Barnett, and that assertion was derided by opponents. And during the June 17 House debate, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said, "Contrary to all the hype, the SSC will not cure cancer, will not provide a solution to the problem of male-pattern baldness, and will not guarantee a World Series victory for the Chicago Cubs." Barnett says the cancer cure aspect is not that far-fetched, given the participation of other accelerators in medical therapy, but the baldness cure claim was sheer invention by Boehlert--as was, of course, the baseball victory lampoon. Not all the lobbyists were directly associated with the SSC. Some, such as physics graduate student Tim Thomas from the University of Minnesota, saw their defense of the project as enlightened self-interest. "If this thing is built and turned on on schedule by 2000, roughly half the people in high-energy experimental physics will be working there," he says. "The chances are quite good that I'd be there." But Thomas believes all the talk about spin-offs from SSC is wrong-headed because the machine itself is based primarily on existing technologies. "I don't think there's going to be as many technological spin-offs as a moon shot," he says. The real point of the project is pure science, the pursuit of basic knowledge of the workings of the universe, he says. That in itself is a triumph--that Congress would actually fund so basic a question. And for that he gives the project high marks. But he and other physics graduate students worry about whether pure science is a very socially relevant pursuit, given all the problems the world faces. "I'm beginning to worry about making a meaningful contribution to society," he says. "When I was in Washington, a certain senator's aide, who I won't name, told me young people like me should be going into genetic engineering. And given what was going on with the SSC and the field, his suggestion didn't go unnoticed." In the office of yet another representative, Thomas says he launched into his prepared speech about how the field of high-energy physics will die off in the U.S. without the SSC, but he was cut short: " `Stop,' the aide said. `What I want to know is what the hell good is this to the man in the street.' " Thomas says he real-ly didn't have a ready answer for that. Although he would like to work on the SSC, he says that most students are like him--they don't have a passion for a single problem and could easily switch gears. Currently, only about half the students finishing a physics doctorate continue in the field of research. The rest take advantage of their general high-technology training by going into industrial electronics and computer work. More may choose this alternative route if the SSC continues on an uncertain course, he says. SSC director Schwitters's forecast is for continued uncertainty for the project, especially with so many new faces coming to Congress: "My assessment is we're in for another tough fight next year. I think we're in for one more. But I don't think we're going to lose in the House next time," he says. And physicist-lobbyist Barnett is also girding his loins. "I'm going to do next year what we did this year," he says.

Renewed SSC Funding Fails To Eliminate Physicists' Concerns

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Scott Veggeberg

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September 1992

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