Throughout the century, then, every major new advance in particle studies had required massive new infusions of power. A machine for the 1990s, the end result of decades of development, would require truly titanic amounts of juice. The physics community had hesitated at this step, and had settled for years at niggling around in the low trillions of electron volts. But the field of sub-atomic studies was looking increasingly mined-out, and the quantum Standard Model had not had a good paradigm- shattering kick in the pants in some time. From the perspective of the particle physicist, the Desertron, despite its necessarily colossal scale, made perfect scientific sense.
The Department of Energy, the bureaucratic descendant of the Atomic Energy Commission and the traditional federal patron of high-energy physics, had more or less recovered from its last major money-wasting debacle, the Carter Administration's synthetic fuels program. Under new leadership, the DoE was sympathetic to an ambitious project with some workable and sellable rationale.
Lederman's tentative scheme was developed, over three years, in great detail, by an expert central design group of federally-sponsored physicists and engineers from Lawrence Berkeley labs, Brookhaven and Fermilab. The "Desertron" was officially renamed the "Superconducting Super Collider." In 1986 the program proposal was carried to Ronald Reagan, then in his second term. While Reagan's cabinet seemed equally split on the merits of the SSC versus a much more modest research program, the Gipper decided the issue with one of his favorite football metaphors: "Throw deep."
Reagan's SSC was a deep throw indeed. The collider ring of Fermilab in Illinois was visible from space, and the grounds of Fermilab were big enough to boast their own herd of captive buffalo. But the ring of the mighty Super Collider made Fermilab's circumference look like a nickel on a dinner plate. One small section of the Super Collider, the High Energy Booster, was the size of Fermilab all by itself, but this Booster was only a humble injection device for the Super Collider.
The real action was to be in the fifty-four-mile, 14- ft-diameter Super Collider ring.
As if this titanic underground circus were not enough, the SSC also boasted two underground halls each over 300 feet long, to be stuffed with ultrasophisticated particle detectors so huge as to make their hard-helmeted minders resemble toy dolls. Along with the fifty-four miles of Collider were sixteen more miles of injection devices: the Linear Accelerator, the modest Low Energy Booster, the large Medium Energy Booster, the monster High Energy Booster, the Boosters acting like a set of gears to drive particles into ever-more frenzied states of relativistic overdrive, before their release into the ferocious grip of the main Super Collider ring.
Along the curves and arcs of these wheels-within- wheels, and along the Super Collider ring itself, were more than forty vertical access shafts, some of them two hundred feet deep. Up on the surface, twelve separate refrigeration plants would pipe tons of ultra-frigid liquid helium to more than ten thousand superconducting magnets, buried deep within the earth. All by itself, the SSC would more than double the amount of helium refrigeration taking place in the entire planet.
The site would have miles of new-paved roads, vast cooling ponds of fresh water, brand-new electrical utilities. Massive new office complexes were to be built for support and research, including two separate East and West campuses at opposite ends of the Collider, and two offsite research labs. With thousands of computers: personal computers, CAD workstations, network servers, routers, massively parallel supercomputing simulators. Office and laboratory networking including Internet and videoconferencing. Assembly buildings, tank farms, archives, libraries, security offices, cafeterias. The works.
There were, of course, dissenters from the dream. Some physicists feared that the project, though workable and probably quite necessary for any real breakthrough in their field, was simply too much to ask. Enemies from outside the field likened the scheme to Reagan's Star Wars -- an utter scientific farce -- and to the Space Station, a political pork-barrel effort with scarcely a shred of real use in research -- and to the hapless Space Shuttle, an overdesigned gobboon.
Within the field of high-energy-physics, though, the logic was too compelling and the traditional arc of development too strong. A few physicists -- Freeman Dyson among them -- quietly suggested that it might be time for a radically new tack; time to abandon the tried-and-true collider technology entirely, to try daringly novel, small-scale particle-acceleration schemes such as free- electron lasers, gyroklystrons, or wake- field accelerators. But that was not Big Thinking; and particle physics was the very exemplar of Big Science.
In the 1920 and 1930s, particle physicist Ernest Lawrence had practically invented "Big Science" with the Berkeley cyclotrons, each of them larger, more expensive, demanding greater resources and entire teams of scientists. Particle physics, in pursuit of ever-more- elusive particles, by its nature built huge, centralized facilities of ever greater complexity and ever greater expense for ever-larger staffs of researchers. There just wasn't any other way to do particle physics, but the big way.
And then there was the competitive angle, the race for international prestige: high-energy physics as the arcane, scholarly equivalent of the nuclear arms race. The nuclear arms race itself was, of course, a direct result of progress in 20th-century high-energy physics. For Cold Warriors, nuclear science, with its firm linkage to military power, was the Big Science par excellence.
Leon Lederman and his colleague Sheldon Glashow played the patriotic card very strongly in their influential article of March 1985, "The SSC: A Machine for the Nineties." There they wrote: "Of course, as scientists, we must rejoice in the brilliant achievements of our colleagues overseas. Our concern is that if we forgo the opportunity that SSC offers for the 1990s, the loss will not only be to our science but also to the broader issue of national pride and technological self-confidence. When we were children, America did most things best. So it should again."
Lederman and Glashow also argued for the SSC on the grounds of potential spinoffs for American industry: energy storage, power transmission, new tunneling techniques, industrial demand-pull in superconductivity. In meeting "all but insuperable technical obstacles," they declared, American industries would learn better to compete. (There was no mention of what might happen to American "national pride and technological self- confidence" if American industries simply failed to meet those "insuperable obstacles" -- as had already happened in ISABELLE.)
Glashow and Lederman also declared, with perhaps pardonable professional pride, that it was simply a good idea for America to create and employ large armies of particle physicists, pretty much for their own sake. "(P)article physics yields highly trained scientists accustomed to solving the unsolvable. They often go on to play vital roles in the rest of the world.... Many of us have become important contributors in the world of energy resources, neurophysiology, arms control and disarmament, high finance, defense technology and molecular biology.... High energy physics continues to attract and recruit into science its share of the best and brightest. If we were deprived of all those who began their careers with the lure and the dream of participating in this intellectual adventure, the nation would be considerably worse off than it is. Without the SSC, this is exactly what would come to pass."