Einstein's Bridge
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(e) SSC Rhetoric in Congress -- The rising SSC costs and increasing opposition to the SSC produced a tendency towards hyperbole among the supporters of the project, as can be seen from some of the quotations used in the section breaks of this novel. This rhetoric, modeled on similar tactics used by NASA but executed here less effectively, produced a backlash which damaged the credibility of the project and focused Congressional attention on its potential technological spin-offs (or lack thereof) rather than on the intrinsic scientific and intellectual merit of the project.
The sad thing is that many of the outrageous assertions made by the desperate SSC supporters contain a kernel of truth, and phrased more carefully would, in many cases, become accurate statements of the technological benefits that our culture has derived from past support of basic research in science. It is acknowledged in the physics community that active researchers do not spend enough time communicating the excitement and accomplishments of their field to the public in general and the U.S. Congress in particular. Here, however, we see an example of the down-side of such communication when it is provided under pressure.
The exaggerated and counter-productive claims made on the floor of Congress were the carefully phrased statements of scientist SSC advocates, after they had been modified, dumbed-down, filtered, and hyped by receptive and well-meaning congressional staff and Members of Congress. Descriptions of the accomplishments of basic research in science in general became the accomplishments of high energy physics. Statements of how high energy physics had aided in the development of the computer industry, for example, were transmuted into claims that the field had single-handedly invented and developed the computer. And so on. The lesson here is that one-shot communication under the time pressure and the information vacuum that are characteristic of a hot Congressional debate can be ineffective and even dangerous.
(f) Congressional opposition and the SSC votes -- The opposition to the SSC in Congress was surprisingly slow to develop. Even in 1991, after the official DOE cost of the project had moved from the initially announced $4.4 billion to $8.6 billion, an attempt to kill the project in the House was voted down by a margin of 251 to 165. However, the worsening US economy, the freshman Congressmen swept in with Clinton, and the rising emphasis in Congress on balanced budgets and cost cutting, particularly after the 1992 election, resulted in House votes to kill the project of 232 to 181 in 1992 and 280 to 150 in 1993.
The lukewarm support of the SSC by the Clinton Administration in 1993 and the decision to stretch out and escalate the cost of the project also became large factors in its demise. Science Advisor John Gibbons failed to provide the support for the project that his predecessor, Alan Bromley, had. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary proclaimed during her confirmation hearings that she was “not passionate” about the SSC. By September, 1993 when her passions finally became somewhat aroused, she only took ineffective steps to re-shuffle the major SSC contractors and increase the already bloated DOE oversight of the project. Neither President Clinton nor Vice President Gore was willing to make broad personal appeals, as George Bush had, on behalf of the SSC to House Members before the two critical votes in June and October.
Despite unfavorable votes in the House, the SSC was saved by a maneuver of the House Leadership in 1992 and was almost saved again in 1993 by the same maneuver. When the House and Senate differ in their legislation, a Joint Conference Committee composed of members of both bodies is appointed to resolve the differences. In both 1992 and 1993 House Speaker Tom Foley appointed as House representatives on the Conference Committee only Members who were SSC supporters. Consequently, in both 1992 and 1993 the Conference Committee agreed to the Senate version of the legislation which included continuation of the SSC project. However, any Conference Committee action must be ratified by the House as a whole. In 1993 a floor fight led by Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) rejected the Conference Committee report by a vote of 282 to 143. At this point the SSC supporters conceded defeat, and the project officially died.
Opposition in Congress came from several sources: (1) fiscal conservatives like Boehlert and Senator Dale Bumpers (D-Arkansas) who appeared to understand the scientific value of the project but felt that on balance the nation could not afford the expense at this time, (2) “sore losers” of the competition for choosing the SSC site, who felt that the decision to place the project in Texas was politically motivated and were resentful of the power in Congress of the Texas delegation; and (3) scalp-hunters who would soon face tough re-election campaigns and who wanted a large and conspicuous government project which they could say they had killed. The latter group included many of the 114 freshman members of the House who had been swept in with Clinton, about 70% of whom voted to kill the SSC.
Freshman Congressman Jon Matthews (D - Oregon) and his staff assistant Joe Ramsey are fictional. Senator Bumpers and Congressmen Boehlert, Slattery, Eckart, and Wolpe are real.
(g) Who killed the SSC? -- There is plenty of blame to go around. Here is my list of the seven top contributors to the demise of the project, in roughly chronological order:
(1) The Central Design Group led by Prof. Maury Tigner of Cornell and based at LBNL in the 1980s, for producing an initial SSC design in 1986 that turned out to be marginal, leading to the eventual redesign that increased the project cost by $2.7 billion.
(2) President Ronald Reagan and members of his administration, for allowing the DOE to misrepresent the cost of the project in 1987 by minimizing the effects of inflation and by omitting the $1 billion cost of the detectors needed for the project.
(3) President George H. W. Bush and members of his administration, for appointing Admiral Watkins as Energy Secretary and for failing to formally request Japanese participation in the project when he had the opportunity.
(4) Admiral James D. Watkins, for crippling the SSC project with a human wave of DOE bureaucrats and Navy-oriented managers that slowed and hampered every aspect of the project, increased its estimated cost, and destroyed Congressional confidence in the project’s management.
(5) Dr. Roy Schwitters, SSC Director, for permitting the expenditure of DOE funds on office amenities (paintings and decorative plants) and morale-boosting gatherings like Christmas parties. The fraction of SSC funds involved was very small and amounted to only a few dollars per employee, but its impact in Congress was quite large and helped to create the impression of poor management which led to the project’s termination.
(6) President Bill Clinton and members of his administration, for appointing Hazel O’Leary as Energy Secretary, for deciding to stretch out the time scale of the project by four years and thereby adding $2 to 4 billion to its estimated cost, and for “benign neglect” instead of support for the project in Congress.
(7) The United States Congress, for its failure of will in seeing the project through to completion after initial approval, for failing to understand the scientific purpose and value of the SSC project, for debating entirely the wrong issues in deciding its fate, and for consistently failing to develop any long term science policy for the nation that can be depended on from one year to the next.
(h) Where did the SSC money go? -- The cancellation of the SSC project produced a billion dollar windfall in 1993 that could be diverted to other projects in the general category of Energy and Water. There is some evidence that at least some of the SSC funds went to such pork barrel projects rather than to an actual reduction in the federal budget, but it is very difficult to track the windfall or to establish a correspondence with other projects in the slippery interior of the pork barrel.
The Tombigbee Waterway mentioned in the novel is a real ongoing federal pork barrel project being carried out by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alabama and Mississippi, but its connection with the SSC cancellation is purely fictional (if rather plausible).
(i) The aftermath of the SSC killing -- It is perhaps worth noting that the described scalp-huntin
g strategy of certain Congressmen did not, in most cases, facilitate their re-election. For example, in my own Washington State none of the five members of the House who voted to kill the SSC in 1993 (Cantwell, Inslee, Kreidler, Swift, and Unsoeld) was re-elected in 1994, and Speaker Tom Foley, a key SSC supporter, was also defeated. The “Curse of the SSC” in the novel, for whatever reasons, seems to have been a real phenomenon. Of the four co-sponsors of the 1992 SSC cancellation amendment in the House who were at the center of SSC opposition, only Sherwood Boehlert was re-elected while Dennis Eckart (D - Ohio), Jim Slattery (D - Kansas), and Howard Wolpe (D - Michigan) were all defeated in 1994. Overall, of those Members of the House who voted to kill the SSC on June 15, 1993, about a quarter of them either lost or did not run in the 1994 election. On the other hand, of those who voted to continue the SSC, six-sevenths were re-elected and returned to office. No comparable pattern is apparent in votes on the Space Station during the same period.
The some two thousand people, physicists, engineers, and support staff that were directly or indirectly employed at the SSC laboratory all lost their jobs. The carefully assembled pool of accelerator construction expertise brought to a focus in Waxahachie has been dissipated and lost. The high energy physics community in the USA remains in a state of disarray. The field has been badly wounded by the SSC decision. There is an ongoing effort within the DOE and the US high energy physics community to join the physics effort at the CERN LHC project. However, any large scale participation in the CERN accelerator must be negotiated at the federal level by the DOE and must include substantial contributions to CERN.
At this writing (December 1995), the DOE itself has been under attack by the new Republican-dominated 104th Congress, and for a time its continued existence was in doubt. Moreover, a Congressional Committee recently deleted from the DOE budget the $6 million intended as a first step in joining the LHC project at CERN. This will make such negotiations difficult.
The US accelerator designers have not been completely discouraged by the cancellation of the SSC project. Recently a new international effort has begun that would leapfrog over the old synchrotron technology of the SSC and LHC to initiate a new project, a linear collider, which would be able to reach effective collision energies even higher than those which would have been accessible with the SSC.
We live in interesting times.
John Cramer
Munich, Germany, and
Seattle, Washington
Summer and Fall, 1995
Acronyms &
Definitions
Term
Definition
3D
Three dimensional, as in 3D graphics presenting a separate stereoscopic view for each eye of the user.
AEC
Atomic Energy Commission. The US government agency which first funded major projects in high energy physics and which was the predecessor to ERDA and the Department of Energy.
ALEPH
A large solenoid magnet and time projection chamber for the LEP collider at CERN used since about 1988 with electron-positron collisions to study Z and W bosons.
ALICE
A detector planned for the LHC collider at CERN and planned for operation about 2005, to be used for the study of ultra relativistic heavy ion collisions, usually between lead nuclei.
Argonne
Argonne National Laboratory, one of the large DOE national laboratories, located south of Chicago and east of Fermilab.
ATLAS
A detector planned for the LHC collider at CERN and planned for operation about 2005, to be used for the study of proton-proton collisions.
axion
A hypothetical pseudo-scalar particle that is considered a possible source of dark matter (see below) in the universe. The axion, if it existed, would have a very small mass, would not interact with normal matter, and might be converted to a photon in the presence of a very strong magnetic field.
BBC
British Broadcasting Corporation.
Bevalac
An early high energy synchrotron accelerator constructed in the 1950s at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and used to discover the antiproton. Closed in 1992.
Bridge
A three-dimensional wormhole, usually connecting separated bubble universes, in the terminology of the Makers.
Bridgehead
One end of a wormhole, i.e., a wormhole mouth, in the terminology of the Makers. Note that a Bridgehead may be meters across, or it may be so small as to resemble a fundamental particle.
Brookhaven
Brookhaven National Laboratory (or BNL), one of the large DOE national laboratories, located on Long Island East of New York City at the site of WWI Camp Yappahank, an army training base.
Bubble
Maker terminology for Bubble Universe (see next entry)
Bubble
Universe
One of a number of completely isolated sub-universes, evolved during the Big Bang in separate nucleation events leading to exponential expansion, as implied by the inflation scenario of the Standard Model of cosmology.
CDF
Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of the two large detectors constructed at Fermilab in the 1990s to use the colliding proton-antiproton beams produced by the machine. The top quark was discovered with this detector in 1993-94.
center of mass system
The inertial reference frame in which the overall momentum of a system of particles is zero. Used in relativistic kinematics. Sometimes called the CM system.
CERN
Centre Europénne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, European Organization for Nuclear Research, the major European center for research in high energy physics, funded by 19 member nations and located just west of Geneva, Switzerland, spanning the Swiss-French border and sprawling over the French countryside. Operates the large SPS and LEP accelerators and is presently constructing the LHC accelerator in the LEP tunnel.
CIA
U. S. Central Intelligence Agency
Clifford
algebra
An unorthodox approach to the algebra of complex numbers and matrices that is currently viewed as a “growth area” in theoretical physics. There are some theorists who feel that the formalisms of relativity and relativistic quantum mechanics become simpler and more transparent when re-formulated using Clifford algebra.
CMS
Compact Muon Solenoid, a detector planned for the LHC collider at CERN and expected to operate about 2005, to be used for the study of proton-proton collisions.
collider
A relatively new type of high energy physics accelerator which produces two accelerated particle beams that are brought into head-on collision. This allows all of the available energy to be used in the collision, rather than losing a large fraction of it to motion of the center of mass of the system, as is the case with a relativistic particle beam strikes a target at rest.
Cornell
Cornell University, located in Ithica, NY, operates a high energy electr
on accelerator facility funded by the US National Science Foundation.
cosmic
background
Radiation produced 100,000 years after the initial Big Bang when the universe cooled enough for free protons and electrons to combine to form neutral hydrogen atoms. At this point the universe became optically transparent and a “flash” of radiation with a broad “black body” frequency spectrum was liberated. Due to the progressive red-shift as the universe expands, this radiation now has a characteristic temperature of 2.7 K.
Cosmotron
An early high energy synchrotron accelerator constructed in the 1950s at Brookhaven National Laboratory and used in early high energy physics experiments. Closed in the late 1960’s.
D.C.
District of Columbia, US Capitol
D/FW
Abbreviation for the Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport.
D0
D-Zero is one of the two large detectors constructed at Fermilab in the 1990s to use the colliding proton-antiproton beams produced by the machine. The D0 experiment provided supporting evidence for the discovery of the top quark.