Time and again the physicists went to the Congressional crap table, shot the dice for higher stakes, and somehow survived. Scientists outside the high-energy- physics community were livid with envy, but the powerful charisma of physics -- that very well-advanced field that had given America the atomic bomb and a raft of Nobels -- held firm against the jealous, increasingly bitter gaggle of "little science" advocates.
At the start of the project, the Congress was highly enthusiastic. The lucky winner of the SSC had a great deal to gain: a nucleus of high-tech development, scientific prestige, and billions in federally-subsidized infrastructure investment. The Congressperson carrying the SSC home to the district would have a prize beyond mere water-project pork; that lucky politician would have trapped a mastodon.
At length the lucky winner of the elaborate site- selection process was announced: Waxahachie, Texas. Texas Congresspeople were, of course, ecstatic; but other competitors wondered what on earth Waxahachie had to offer that they couldn't.
Waxahachie's main appeal was simple: lots of Texas- sized room for a Texas-sized machine. The Super Collider would, in fact, entirely encircle the historic town of Waxahachie, some 18,000 easy-going folks in a rural county previously best known for desultory cotton-farming. The word "Waxahachie" originally meant "buffalo creek." Waxahachie was well-watered, wooded, farming country built on a bedrock of soft, chalky, easily-excavated limestone.
Lederman, author of the Desertron proposal, rudely referred to Waxahachie as being "in Texas, in the desert" in his SSC promotional pop- science book THE GOD PARTICLE. There was no desert anywhere near Waxahachie, and worse yet, Lederman had serious problems correctly pronouncing the town's name.
The town of Waxahachie, a minor railroad boomtown in the 1870s and 1880s, had changed little during the twentieth century. In later years, Waxahachie had made a virtue of its fossilization. Downtown Waxahachie had a striking Victorian granite county courthouse and a brick- and- gingerbread historical district of downtown shops, mostly frequented by antique-hunting yuppies on day- trips from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, twenty miles to the north. There was a certain amount of suburban sprawl on the north edge of town, at the edge of commuting range to south Dallas, but it hadn't affected the pace of local life much. Quiet, almost sepulchral Waxahachie was the most favored place in Texas for period moviemaking. Its lovely oak-shadowed graveyard was one of the most- photographed cemeteries in the entire USA.
This, then, was to become the new capital of the high-energy physics community, the home of a global scientific community better known for Mozart and chablis than catfish and C&W. It seemed unbelievable. And it was unbelievable. Scientifically, Waxahachie made sense. Politically, Waxahachie could be sold. Culturally, Waxahachie made no sense whatsoever. A gesture by the federal government and a giant machine could not, in fact, transform good ol' Waxahachie into Berkeley or Chicago or Long Island. A mass migration of physicists might have worked for Los Alamos when hundreds of A-Bomb scientists had been smuggled there in top secrecy at the height of World War II, but there was no atomic war on at the moment. A persistent sense of culture shock and unreality haunted the SSC project from the beginning.
In his 1993 popular-science book THE GOD PARTICLE, Lederman made many glowing comparisons for the SSC: the cathedrals of Europe, the Pyramids, Stonehenge. But those things could all be seen. They all made instant sense even to illiterates. The SSC, unlike the Pyramids, was almost entirely invisible -- a fifty-mile subterranean wormhole stuffed with deep-frozen magnets.
A trip out to the SSC revealed construction cranes, vast junkyards of wooden crating and metal piping, with a few drab, rectangular, hopelessly unromantic assembly buildings, buildings with all the architectural vibrancy of slab-sided machine-shops (which is what they were). Here and there were giant weedy talus-heaps of limestone drill-cuttings from the subterranean "TBM," or Tunnel Boring Machine. The Boring Machine was a state-of-the-art Boring Machine, but its workings were invisible to all but the hard-hats, and the machine itself was, well, boring.
Here and there along the SSC's fifty-four mile circumference, inexplicable white vents rose from the middle of muddy cottonfields. These were the SSC's ventilation and access shafts, all of them neatly padlocked in case some mischievous soul should attempt to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing at the SSC was anything like the heart-lifting spires of Notre Dame, or even the neat-o high-tech blast of an overpriced and rickety Space Shuttle. The place didn't look big or mystical or uplifting; it just looked dirty and flat and rather woebegone.
As a popular attraction the SSC was a bust; and time was not on the side of its planners and builders. As the Cold War waned, the basic prestige of nuclear physics was also wearing rather thin. Hard times had hit America, and hard times had come for American science.
Lederman himself, onetime chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was painfully aware of the sense of malaise and decline. In 1990 and 1991, Lederman, as chairman of AAAS, polled his colleagues in universities across America about the basic state of Science in America. He heard, and published, a great outpouring of discontent. There was a litany of complaint from American scholars. Pernickety government oversight. Endless paperwork for grants, consuming up to thirty percent of a scientist's valuable research time. A general aging of the academic populace, with graying American scientists more inclined to look back to vanished glories than to anticipate new breakthroughs. Meanspirited insistence by both government and industry that basic research show immediate and tangible economic benefits. A loss of zest and interest in the future, replaced by a smallminded struggle to keep making daily ends meet.
It was getting hard to make a living out there. The competition for money and advancement inside science was getting fierce, downright ungentlemanly. Big wild dreams that led to big wild breakthroughs were being nipped in the bud by a general societal malaise and a failure of imagination. The federal research effort was still vast in scope, and had been growing steadily despite the steadily growing federal deficits. But thanks to decades of generous higher education and the alluring prestige of a life in research, there were now far more mouths to feed in the world of Science. Vastly increased armies of grad students and postdocs found themselves waiting forever for tenure. They were forced to play careerist games over shrinking slices of the grantsmanship pie, rather than leaving money problems to the beancounters and getting mano-a-mano with the Big Questions.
"The 1950s and 1960s were great years for science in America," Lederman wrote nostalgically. "Compared to the much tougher 1990s, anyone with a good idea and a lot of determination, it seemed, could get his idea funded. Perhaps this is as good a criterion for healthy science as any." By this criterion, American science in the 90s was critically ill. The SSC seemed to offer a decisive way to break out of the cycle of decline, to return to those good old days. The Superconducting Super Collider would make Big Science really "super" again, not just once but twice.