Supercollider Suffering Birth Pangs

DE SOTO, TEXAS-How do you attract scientists to a project that won’t yield its first results for 10 years? How do you build a research facility on a physical scale that has never before been attempted? How do you spend billions of federal dollars without incuning suffocating oversight and bureaucratic red tape? The task of answering those and hundreds of other questions over the next decade will fall on the scientists who have signed on to build the Su perconducting Supercollider (SSC). They’re putting their professional reputations on the line for a project that is viewed by many people not just as a scientific challenge, but also as a test of the country’s ability to remain a preeminent technological power. And, given the size of those outside forces at work, they're not positive that they can succeed. “Once in a while you think about how big this project is,” says physicist Thomas Toohig, construction coordinator for the supercollider, a scientist whose 27- year career as an accelerator builder includes the new Tevatron at Fermilab. “But you put that away like a dirty thought. It’s scary, that’s for sure. You have to think about the pieces, because the whole project is too large to grasp.” What Toohig is talking about is a $6 billion, 53-mile-long attempt to understand the origins of matter by generating particles that only existed during the first flicker of time. In technical terms, the goal is simple. As physicist Richard Briggs, deputy director and project manager for the SSC, explains, “we’ve signed a contract with the government to generate two beams of protons, whose energy will be 20 teravolts [trillion electron volts], that will collide and have a low-enough emittance and focusing system consistent with luminosities of 10^33.” But the supercollider is about more than colliding beams, of course. As physicist Raphael Kasper, the project’s associate director at large, notes, “Support for the SSC includes the notion that tackling frontier science is important, both internationally and to the kids in this country who might become enthused about such a large and exciting project. Saying no to something like the SSC is a sign, one that most politicians don’t want to give, about the direction in which this country is headed.” Where It’s At The supercollider’s main campus will be built near Waxahachie, a sleepy town 35 miles south of downtown Dallas along Interstate 35E. The town’s landmark is a turn-of-the-century stone courthouse, featured iv the movie The Last Picture Show. On its front lawn stands a monument, erected in 1912 by the Daughters of the Confederacy, which pays tribute to “the dead and living of Ellis County who wore the gray” and which proclaims, “Banners may be furled. But heroism lives forever.” Across the street stands the Plaza Theater, which shows first-run movies for $2, but only on weekends. Waxahachie is a relic of a small-town Southern way of life that is rapidly vanishing, and which may be eradicated once the SSC arrives. But that’s the future. The present home of the supercollider, for at least the next couple of years, sits some 20 miles to the north, in De Soto. A 1980s Everytown, USA, on the outskirts of south Dallas, De Soto offers Pizza Huts, McDonalds, and Holiday Inns that are indistinguishable from those in any other region of the country. Only the flat, man-made green landscapes of its new, sprawling housing developments and the stifling summer heat place it somewhere in the Southwest. The laboratory staff, which numbered some 230 people at the end of August, is stuffed into a squat, two-story office building located in a brand-new industrial park. This month the laboratory will spill over into a 300,000-sq. ft. warehouse to accommodate the 50 to 60 new employees that come aboard each month. Befitting a project of the SSC’s magnitude, the industrial park is owned by Trammell Crow Co., one of the nation’s largest developers and one of thousands of commercial and industrial companies that will receive a share of the money that the federal government plans to spend on the project. This week, many scientists will get their first view of the eventual home of the laboratory. The occasion is a four-day Conference on Supercollider Physics and Experiments, being held in Dallas, at which up to 1,000 high-energy physicists will hear about the lab’s progress and discuss its experimental program. Apart from its scientific content, the conference is seen by laboratory officials as a way to remove any negative stereotypes that scientists may hold about Texas and get them thinking about how they can contribute to building the supercollider. “We’ve found it important to get people to come down here, because Texas is not a state with which everyone is familiar,” says physicist Don Edwards, head of the collider program within the accelerator division who arrived last spring after a 20-year career at Fermilab. “And I think that their reaction to the area, by and large, is favorable. It’s not an arid expanse, although that’s a common image.” Pounding The Pavement For most of the senior managers at the laboratory, the biggest challenge they face is hiring enough of the right people. Although the scientific and technical challenges are daunting in themselves, the first priority is having sufficient numbers of staff to take them on. And it won’t be easy. The sheer pace of the expected hiring is impressive: The accelerator division, for example, hopes to grow within two to three years to 500 staffers from its current size of 30. The magnet division, with 60 staffers now on hand, expects to number 320 in two years. But their task is more than just filling slots. In accelerator physics, for example, the demand exceeds the supply. In other areas, such as the division that is responsible for developing and overseeing the research programs that will actually be carried out, the problem is hooking high-energy physicists into a project that won’t yield experimental results until the next century. In both cases, the result is a continuous campaign to bring people on board. “The single biggest thing that Helen [Edwards, head of the accelerator division] and the rest of us spend our time on is not the technical design of the accelerator,” says Don Edwards. “It’s trying to build up staff. Accelerator physicists are not easy to move from one place to another. They are all busy, and they are very much attached to what they’re doing. It has to be a matter of timing, of catching somebody right when they’re done with something and are interested in a move.” Helen and Don Edwards know about the importance of timing. They met and were married in the early 1 960s when they were both at Cornell, she as a graduate student and he as a faculty member working with Robert Wilson. In 1967, Wilson left to build a new accelerator laboratory in the farm country of Illinois. But it wasn’t until 1969 that the Edwards followed him there. “When Bob went to Fermilab, we both had commitments to particular jobs,” he recalls. “But two years later the timing became right for me, and within three months Helen finished her task and was able to join me.” The accelerator division, despite its need for trained scientists, engineers, and technicians, has a running start on some of the other portions of the laboratory. Its roots go back to a team of scientists assembled beginning in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, to turn a scientific idea into reality. The team, led by Cornell accelerator physicist Maury Tignor and known as the Central Design Group (CDG), came up with a genetic design for an accelerator of the magnitude of the SSC that was eventually endorsed by President Reagan in January 1987. It became the model for the Department of Energy (DOE) in its two-year search for a site. So, too, for the magnet division. For the past three years DOE has spent millions to conduct research on, and develop prototypes for, the SSC’s 8,000 superconducting dipole magnets. Those magnets (at 16 meters, they are four times the length of those used by Fermilab’s Tevatron) will be used to speed the twin proton beams around the underground tunnel in a fashion that allows them to collide with the precision needed to generate useful scientific results. By contrast, the physics research division, headed by M.C. (“Gil”) Gilchriese, has a much longer way to go before it can accomplish its task. A high-energy physicist and former professor at Cornell, Gilchriese was the only physicist working on the experimental side of the project during the three years he worked with the CDG at Berkeley. That isolation was deliberate: “That group had a mandate to design the accelerator complex of the SSC,” he explains. “It did not include anything about the experimental side.” Even now, he is one of only four experimental physicists at the laboratory, a number that he expects to grow in the coming year to "a couple of dozen.” Gilchriese’s job is to make sure that the right experiments are conceived, designed, and implemented. Much of that work will be done in large collaborations of researchers at universities around the country and, indeed, the world. But ‘the guiding hand must come from the SSC laboratory. And Gilchriese doesn’t know if the high-energy physics community is ready to work together for the greater good of the project. “There are a number of reasons why people might not want to come here and get involved,” he says. “Although the project is clearly going to get construction funds for the next fiscal year [last month the House and Senate agreed to spend $225 million in 1990 on the project, including $135 million for initial construction], it’s obviously not an established laboratory. For experimental physicists, the fact that no results are going to come out for nine or 10 years is a very significant disadvantage. That problem can be alleviated by giving them the opportunity to work part-time on experiments here, but not everybody likes that arrangement. “In addition, the security of working in a laboratory is not as great as a tenured position at a university. And it’s often the case that the amount of freedom for a bright young star to do his own work is certainly less—or at least it’s perceived to be less—in a national laboratory than in a university.” Gilchriese is quick to cite the relative advantages of working at the SSC laboratory. “It’s a new territory,” he says, “and people who come now can have an enormous influence in how the laboratory is shaped, what its policies are, and what will be done. The other attraction is that it’s such a glorious project. This is exciting stuff, and people want to be a part of it.” Still, he admits that it may be hard to induce people to leave secure university positions, especially to fill what he estimates will be the 10% to 20% of jobs held by those who are “relatively senior and capable of holding down a leadership position.” Balancing Two Cultures Gilchriese himself plans to leave the laboratory early next year and return to the Berkeley area to rejoin his wife, a nuclear physicist. He says that his departure, due to personal reasons that have nothing to do with the project itself, should have no effect on the laboratory’s ability to recruit top talent. But he says it is essential that his successor continues his efforts to “involve individuals from the community at large and get them energized about what they can contribute.” Laboratory officials put a heavy emphasis on the need to develop a similar sense of excitement within the laboratory. Such an esprit de corps, they say, is essential to retain the laboratory’s scientific purpose. Without it, they worry, the project might become just another, albeit gigantic, construction project. Ask supercollider scientists what they think about the current atmosphere within the laboratory, and their answers are filled with disdain for what is universally labeled “the corporate culture.” Although their definitions vary, the phrase usually refers to industrial managers whose backgrounds lie in civilian construction projects, not research. Specifically, they are people affiliated with Sverdrup Inc. and EG&G, two industrial management companies that are part of the team led by Universities Research Association (URA) that was awarded the contract to oversee the creation of the laboratory. While URA, a nonprofit academic organization that operates Fermilab, is composed of the leading universities with high-energy physics programs, its for-profit partners are best-known for building and operating large facilities for the De fense Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other government agencies. Physicist Toohig, whose 25-year dual career as a Jesuit priest may have caused him to think more deeply about questions of authority and relationships, offers an apparently trivial example to illustrate the clash of those two cultures. “Our offices were set up without bookcases,” he says, citing the lack of concern about a scientist’s need for reference materials. “And the desk is in the middle of the room, with two chairs facing it. You’ll also notice that those two chairs are lower than the one I’m sitting in.” His point is clear: The business world has imposed its standards on a project that should be run by scientists. Toohig and others say that they welcome the straightforward, can-do spirit that comes from people who build bridges and dams. But they worry about what might happen if such attitudes, set the tone for the entire laboratory. “We simply must have a physics environment here to make this thing work right,” he says. “Otherwise, we’re stuck here, off in a backwater. If we don’t have a very good theoretical group, and a lively scientific environment, then we’re going to be building a machine that’s not in touch with the physics of today. We’ll end up with an obsolete machine.” Experimental physicist Roy Schwitters, director of the laboratory, agrees with much of the criticism. But he pleads for time to correct the imbalance. “Yes, I’m concerned [about the possible domination of corporate attitudes]. It’s a serious matter. But right now, given the scale of the project and the job that needs to be done to convince Congress and the administration, I feel we’ve needed a more corporate outlook than has been traditional [in accelerator labs]. I think that they can coexist, but I agree that the pendulum has swung too far. It’s critical that we put together a creative laboratory, and to do that we need more scientists.” Whatever tensions exist among different groups within the laboratory, administrators declare a common displeasure over how DOE has performed. Their criticism is centered around the department’s slow pace in adopting a management plan for the laboratory—how the project is going to be handled within the federal bureaucracy, who’s in charge, and what authority that person will have. The Bureaucratic Jungle Last January the department’s Office of Energy Research, headed by laser physicist Robert Hunter, unofficially created a separate office from within its existing high-energy physics office to handle the supercollider. But the actual management plan describing its duties wasn’t approved by Energy Secretary James Watkins until September 7. And the department has spent months in what has so far been a futile search for someone to run the office, which has been manned on an acting basis since April by Louis Ianniello, on loan from his job as head of the Basic Energy Sciences program. “DOE approval for many of the things that this laboratory needs is either not occurring on time, or not at all. And that holds up the progress of this project,” Gilchriese said shortly before Watkins issued his SSC memo. "At the same time, you have to remember that DOE does not speak with a single voice. The program people would also like to get things moving. But it’s a different story at the upper levels. That’s where the stumbling block is. The problem is that the body exists, but there’s no head.” Lab officials say they realize that such serious and costly problems as cleaning up the nation’s nuclear weapons labs and restarting production facilities have consumed an enormous amount of the department’s time. But they feel that the supercollider may not be receiving sufficient attention from an administration that has declared it to be a priority. DOE’s Ianniello admits that “things are moving more slowly than I’d like. But that’s the way it always is in government.” He says that a government salary of roughly $80,000 is a major impediment to hiring a deputy to run the SSC office. (“We’re looking for somebody with a lot of experience,” he says, “and those people tell us they’re making a couple hundred thousand dollars right now and that they can’t take such a cut.”) But he’s encouraged by Watkins’ recent memo, which approves an increase in the current level of 28 staffers to as many as 30 people at headquarters and 60 people in the Texas field office. A second bone of contention between the lab and DOE is the fate of Briggs as deputy director. DOE has veto authority over the top two laboratory positions, and Hunter is said to have rejected Briggs’ appointment. Although Hunter has made no official announcement and has not explained his reasons, a knowledgeable DOE official says that lab officials “have the information they need, and the answer is no.” Lab officials are prepared to fight to have the decision overturned, although one Washington observer called such a tactic “political suicide.” Schwitters, who says his only source of information is rumors, calls it “a very bad situation for a very dedicated scientist, and something that’s personally very offensive.” For his part, Briggs says that the issue goes beyond whether he’s allowed to remain and touches the heart of a project that he believes “is awfully important for U.S. science to do right. For me, it’s not whether appeals on my behalf are successful, but rather whether the department becomes able to do its part of this job,” Briggs says. “You can be managed into failure, and there’s a very serious danger at this point that this project can be put into a position where it cannot succeed.” Overlooking The Obvious Failure is not a word that laboratory officials like to use when discussing the supercollider. But it’s clear from their answers to questions about its future that the possibility such a gigantic effort could fall short is never far from their thoughts. The threat is almost always linked in some way to money. “Balancing money and schedules,” is the way the magnet division’s Tom Bush puts it in describing the importance of doing everything on time. “Scheduled delays as a result of a reduction in funding” is how physics research’s Gil Gilchriese describes his concerns. For physicist Doug Pewitt, head of the office of management integration, the ability to identify the project’s most vulnerable points is crucial. Relying on his 10 years as a science budget analyst for the federal government, Pewitt suggests that what is obvious to everyone is also most likely to be overlooked. “With a project of this complexity,” he says, “there are a thousand ways to die and very few ways to succeed. There are no simple, global answer to spending $6 billion over a decade. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of hard work, and our Achilles’ heel is to underrate the magnitude of the challenge.” “My biggest fear is that people don’t understand what we’re really into,” he notes. “This is not a seat-of-the-pants, walk-around-with-3-x-5-cards-in-your-pocket type of project. There’s a tunnel 53 miles long that must be built and filled with the most exacting scientific equipment, and that takes real discipline. But to succeed, you have to balance that discipline with scientific creativity. 0therwise, the whole thing’s not worth doing.”

Supercollider Suffering Birth Pangs

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