What Cost the Supercollider?

For decades, increasingly expensive particle-accelerator projects have been advocated in language almost identical to that now being used to promote the $6 billion superconducting supercoflider (SSC), including promises of "scientific leadership," "spin-offs," of technological and medical "breakthroughs," and so forth. But there is only meager evidence that past promises have been fulfilled and that present promises are any more credible. In a story on the SSC, The New York Times on January 19 s

Written byLawrence Cranberg

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Of course we need to put our best foot forward in the interests of science and technology, as the advocates of the SSC repeatedly state (see "Criteria for Scientific Choices," by Alvin M. Weinberg, Physics Today, March 1964). But that may be just the reason that we should not build the SSC if it will divert scientific manpower—whose supply is severely limited— from tasks with far more promise of making substantial contributions to our scientific and technological development. Japan spends nothing like the vast sums we have spent on particle research. West Germany, which also spends little, is the only country that has an inexpensive, cost-effective in-hospital accelerator facility for the treatment of cancer with fast neutrons—a goal which has thus far eluded our own accelerator establishment.

To many young physicists today, hunting for quarks with a gigantic accelerator may seem much more glamorous than doing materials research with bench-top ...

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