Einstein's Bridge
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(g) Telepresence and virtual reality -- My column in the November 1990 issue of Analog on virtual reality (VR) was one of the first popular accounts of this emerging technology, but since that time VR has been the subject of so much media hype that it should not require any explanation here. On the other hand the related technology of telepresence, as used in the present novel, has not received much media attention. Telepresence was the subject of my July 1990 Analog column. I believe that in the long run, telepresence will have a much greater impact on our lives than VR.
While no high energy physics laboratory has yet invested in telepresence in the way described in this novel, I am confident that this development is inevitable. A precursor, video conferencing over the Internet, is already widely used in the field. The basic point here is that machine pattern recognition is intrinsically very difficult but human pattern recognition is easy; robotic manipulation of arms and bodies is difficult but human control of “robot” arms and bodies is easy; computer generation of a VR environment is difficult but “real” reality is already here to be used, locally or remotely. It’s just a matter of getting the cost of suitable remote units down to a reasonable level and paying for the bandwidth needed to use them.
I teach physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, and I do physics research at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. I look forward to the time when I can use telepresence to do both things on the same day.
(h) Intelligence enhancement -- The development of the drug synaptine in the novel is pure make-believe. The objections of Francis Crick to the name used for neural networks is real, but I somewhat distorted his arguments for my own purposes.
There has been a group within the mega-vitamin and life-extension movement that has been experimenting with various over-the-counter and prescription drugs as a way of boosting intelligence. There is already an emerging folklore centering on which drugs, vitamins, and dietary supplements do and don’t work in achieving the goals of boosted intelligence and memory improvement.
I am confident that in the next decade or so developments in molecular biology and protein synthesis will produce real and effective intelligence-enhancing drugs, with or without the unpleasant side-effects described in the novel. When this happens, the impact on theoretical physics will be somewhat like the impact of metabolic steroids on athletic records. It is quite true, as Roger observed, that even a small gain in human intelligence will go a very long way when one is working at the cutting edge of a field which uses intelligence as its principal tool. And the impact on society in general will also be very profound. The present world desperately needs more intelligence and needs to have the available intelligence used more effectively.
(i) READING and WRITING DNA -- In studying the history of technology, one finds that the first use of an emerging technology is to make tools to use that technology better. Lathes and milling machines are used to make better lathes and milling machines. Electronic circuits are used to make oscilloscopes and voltmeters for making better electronic circuits. This should be no different with genetic engineering and nanotechnology.
In this novel, the fully mature biotechnology of the Makers has given individuals the fully realized capabilities for decoding, simulating, and interpreting DNA, RNA and nanomachines, and for synthesizing DNA, RNA and nanomachines for their own purposes. This seems to me to be an inevitable long-term product of this technology.
The “fountain of youth” enzyme that restores the end-segments of DNA strands and allows them to continue to participate in cell division processes is real. The DNA end-segments that may be acting as count-down timers to limit cell division are called “telomeres” and the enzyme that restores them is called “telomerace”. Intensive research now in progress focuses on this enzyme and its real biological effects. I hope they get it sorted out soon. I could use some.
(j) Reynald Toroids, Axions, and Space Drives -- The Reynald toroid is a strictly fictional solution to the frustrating problem of energy storage. In principle, magnetic fields are an excellent way of storing energy since the energy storage increases as the square of the field strength. A 10 Tesla magnetic field has the same energy density as gasoline (and converts to electrical energy much more cleanly and efficiently). However, we are presently limited to relatively small magnetic fields by the limited mechanical strengths and low electrical conductivity of presently available materials.
The Reynald toroid is supposed to be made of a “magic” alloy that supports a closed loop of magnetic flux in its interior and simultaneously grows in mechanical strength to sustain it. I wish I knew how to make one.
The axion is a could-be particle which is a side-effect of a theory that explains the CP violation in the decays of K0 mesons. If axions exist at all, they would have been produced in large numbers in the early Big Bang. Therefore, invisible axions might be the source of “cold dark matter” that seems to form most of the mass present in our universe. It was shown theoretically in 1983 by Sikivie from symmetry arguments that axions could be converted to photons in a strong magnetic or electric field. However, experiments attempting to convert axions to detectable microwave photons using this effect have so far failed.
The hypothesis in the present novel is that (a) axions exist and are the principal source of dark matter, (b) that they can be converted to unspecified speed-of-light particles (not photons) using the intense fields present in Reynald toroids, and (c) that the momentum kick from the conversion permits their detection and also has potential use as a “space drive”. All of these hypotheses are physically possible, but none is supported by any presently available evidence.
The Political Background
of Einstein’s Bridge
(a) Presidential appointments -- Dan Quayle’s selection as George H. W. Bush’s running mate at the 1988 Republican Convention was a great surprise at the time and has never been adequately explained. The choice appears to have been an impulsive act on Bush’s part, which in the long run seriously damaged his presidency.
Professor John Deutsch of the MIT Department of Chemistry, former Director of the Office of Energy Research at the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and present Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was mentioned as a top candidate for Bush’s Secretary of Energy in early 1989 before Admiral James D. Watkins was selected. Had Deutsch been appointed Energy Secretary, the SSC project would have been handled very differently by the DOE and might never have been brought to the point of cancellation.
Professor D. Alan Bromley of Yale University was named Presidential Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy by Bush in mid-1989, but not until a number of industrial scientists had turned down the job because of its relatively low salary. Bromley proved to be perhaps the most effective Science Advisor in the history of that office. In early 1992 he came very close to succeeding in arranging a Japanese contribution of $1 billion to the SSC, but, according to his own memoirs, was frustrated in this attempt by Sam Skinner, at the time when Skinner was briefly Bush’s Chief of Staff. Skinner deleted discussion of the SSC contribution from the agenda of Bush’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa in January, 1992. If there had been a second Bush Administration, Bromley would undoubtedly have been more effective than his successor, Dr. John H. Gibbons, in justifying the SSC to the 1993 Congress.
(b) DOE Oversight of the SSC project -- The U. S. Department of Energy and its predecessors, the Energy Research and Development Agency (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) have had a long history of successful management and oversight of large and expensive construction projects designed and built by physicists: nuclear research reactors, plasma physics machines, and nuclear and high energy particle accelerators. The DOE had developed excellent oversight procedures for physics construction project management that have struck a careful balance between responsible oversight, good physics, and good technical decisions.
The DOE management under Reagan decided that the SSC project needed to be watched much more carefully than previous DOE physics construction projects and insisted on much more direct DOE control. The freedom and prerogatives of the SSC laboratory director were therefore severely restricted, with much more direct DOE oversight and participation inserted in the chain of decision making processes. From the start of the SSC project, a morass of new bureaucracy, paperwork, and micromanagement was created. The SSC designers and builders, most with years of experience from other DOE construction projects, found the new procedures obstructive and offensive.
Then with the Bush Administration, Admiral James D. Watkins became Secretary of Energy. This appointment had very unfortunate consequences for the SSC project. Watkins’ desire for personal control caused him to increase the bureaucracy and paperwork associated with SSC oversight by another order of magnitude. He also extensively revised the SSC management structure, installing people that he trusted in key positions while displacing physicists and experienced accelerator builders from the decision chains.
This reorganization was very detrimental to the SSC project. According to an article in Physics Today, Congress developed “a sense that the project was not being handled well. In fact, the physicists at the SSC had been cut out of the administrative loop by a management group brought in by Watkins. This created a perplexing paradox: SSC and Universities Research Association (URA, the contracting organization responsible for management of Brookhaven and Fermilab as well as the SSC) leaders criticized the DOE for too much oversight and authority, but (Clinton’s Energy Secretary Hazel) O’Leary told Congress that the Department had exercised too little oversight and authority.” Roy Schwitters, SSC Director, characterized the DOE’s massive oversight efforts in an interview with the New York Times as “the revenge of the C students.”
The safety Tiger Teams described in the novel were one of Watkins’ most controversial and morale-destroying innovations. The “Siciliano memo” scenario of the novel bears some resemblance to events involving one Joseph Cipriano, the head of the SSC Program Office in Dallas, who was ordered by Watkins to report directly to him. Cipriano’s office grew to sixty permanent staffers, with forty more staff on temporary assignment from elsewhere in the DOE. O’Leary, when she took over from Watkins, did indeed assign yet another thirty DOE staff to Cipriano’s office for SSC oversight in the year before the project was terminated.
The existence of Cipriano’s secret memos to Watkins, apparently highly critical of many aspects of the SSC project, became known to Congress in 1991, and they became a bone of contention between the DOE and Congressman Howard Wolpe, an SSC opponent and Chairman of House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations. The DOE at first denied that the memoranda existed and then attempted to claim “Executive Privilege” to avoid producing them. Finally, in response to great pressure, the DOE permitted Wolpe’s subcommittee staff members to come to Watkins’ office to read the Cipriano memos but would not allow copies of them to be made.
In 1993, in the aftermath of the 280-150 House vote to kill the SSC, another Cipriano memo surfaced, this time the draft of a letter to Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. A group called “Project on Government Oversight” somehow obtained the document directly from the word processor in Cipriano’s own office and delivered it to the Washington Post. According to Physics Today, the letter suggested that the immediate removal of SSC Director Roy Schwitters “may be the only way to keep the lab from falling apart before the Senate vote.” It claimed that morale at the SSC lab was low and that “confidence in the existing management is practically nonexistent and costs and schedule trends are worsening at an alarming rate.” Cipriano reportedly suggested putting the project on hold for a year to resolve the management problems and to provide time for the preparation of “reduced scope or phased implementation alternatives” for the SSC’s construction. Cipriano proposed that the SSC’s 1994 budget be cut from $640 million to $400 million to honor existing contracts but not to start new ones. The memo appears to have been a last-ditch attempt to preserve the DOE bureaucracy associated with the SSC by sacrificing the physics goals of the project.
(c) The SSC cost escalation -- When Reagan announced the approval of the SSC project in 1987, the cost widely quoted in the news media was $4.4 billion. This was a cost quoted in 1988 dollars which did not include inflation and did not include the cost of the detectors needed to actually do physics experiments with the machine. Later in 1987 the DOE provided a revised cost estimate including a modest allowance for inflation and an added $0.5 billion for detectors, bringing the total to about $5.3 billion. Even at the time, it was admitted that the inflation rate and detector cost used were rather low. In early 1989 under the new Bush Administration, the SSC cost estimate rose to $5.9 billion when a more realistic inflation rate was used. This disingenuous cost concealment by the DOE, which had been a successful tactic for smaller DOE construction projects in the past, proved disastrous for a project with the visibility of the SSC. It gave the impression, even in its beginning stages, that the cost of the SSC project was out of control.
After intense design work on the SSC project was begun the previous preliminary design of the superconducting magnets with 4 centimeter apertures, done by the Central Design Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, was carefully reexamined. This process was carried out in the highly conservative justify-every-step-with-a-paper-trail bureaucratic environment that had been created by Admiral Watkins. After some agonizing the SSC design team led by Dr. Helen Edwards, previously of Fermilab, decided that to be sure the design would work it would be necessary to increase the dipole magnet aperture from 4 to 5 centimeters. This decision was reviewed by a group of outside accelerator experts. Although there was a minority within the review group that argued for holding to the 4 cm apertures, the majority consensus of the review confirmed the decision to change to 5 cm apertures as a conservative choice that would assure successful operation of the machine.
The Drell Panel, a separate group composed mainly of theoretical physicists, considered the option of reducing the operating energy and scaling back the physics goals of the project in order to hold to the old budget. They rejected this option as unacceptable. The 5 cm magnet design change raised the price of the SSC from $5.9 billion to a hotly debated new cost that stabilized at about $8.6 billion.
When the Clinton Administration replaced the Bush Administration, an early budget-tightening decision was made to stretch out the SSC construction schedule, moving the date of completion from 1999 to 2003. This decision had the effect of increasing the overall cost of the project while reducing its yearly cost. The result was that the total SSC cost rose by about $2 billion, from $8.6 billion to over $10 billion. Later in 1993, a month before the SSC was terminated, the DOE’s Baseline Validation Report advocated another increase in the safety and contingency margins, moving the completion date to 2004 and increasing the cost to $11.5 billion.
The media coverage of the SSC project dealt only superficially with these increasing cost figures. It created the impression of another out-of-control government project with a cost that had almost tripled since its start and might double again before the project was finished.
I can see four separate reasons for the rising SSC cost: (1) the initial deliberate “lowball” attempt by the DOE under the Reagan Administration to conceal the
true cost of the SSC project by ignoring or minimizing inflation and leaving out the approximately $1 billion cost of the detector systems that the accelerator would need; (2) the 1989 redesign of the accelerator, motivated in part by the more conservative SSC management attitude that had its seeds in the escalation of DOE oversight under Admiral Watkins; (3) the decision by the Clinton Administration to delay completion of the project by four years; and (4) loss of confidence in the SSC project by several budget review groups as a result of the previous increases and the evidence of management problems, which caused them to repeatedly add more and more contingencies and safety factors to the estimated cost of the project.
(d) Foreign contributions to the SSC -- Arranging foreign contributions to a large physics project like the SSC is reminiscent of the fairy tale of the Little Red Hen: no one wants to do the work of growing the wheat, milling the flour, and baking the bread, but everyone is eager to eat it. Physicists from every country will want to use the forefront facility once it is completed, but no national government wants to help pay for constructing a big facility in another country. In the case of the SSC, this problem was further complicated by the schizophrenic view asserted in Congress and elsewhere that (a) there had to be major foreign contributions but (b) the cutting-edge technological spin-offs from the SSC should only benefit US industrial firms, not foreign ones. Many members of Congress nevertheless viewed foreign participation in the SSC as a key issue. They took the failure of such contributions to appear as a deal-breaking breach of the agreement between Congress and the DOE.
The memoirs of former Presidential Science and Technology Advisor D. Alan Bromley, as mentioned above, describe his failed attempt to arrange a meeting in late 1991 or early 1992 between President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa, during which Bush was to directly ask Miyazawa for a billion dollar Japanese contribution to the SSC. The request was deleted from Bush’s agenda, never made, and as a result the SSC project suffered an ultimately fatal blow.