by David Kaiser
Perhaps the most surprising response of all, however, came from scientists. Some certainly responded as we might expect, downplaying the book as mere popularization and dismissing the countercultural overtones as just so much zeitgeistische pap. Famed biochemist and science writer Isaac Asimov, for one, bewailed the “genuflections” to all things Eastern made by “rational minds who have lost their nerve.” Jeremy Bernstein, Harvard-trained physicist and staff writer for the New Yorker, went further. He concluded his review of Capra’s book, “I agree with Capra when he writes, ‘Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science but man needs both.’ What no one needs, in my opinion, is this superficial and profoundly misleading book.”20
These predictable responses, however, were by no means the norm. Mysticism aside, Capra offered a vision around which many physicists could rally. In his opening chapter he had noted the “widespread dissatisfaction” and “marked anti-scientific attitude” of so many people in the West, especially among the youth. “They tend to see science, and physics in particular, as an unimaginative, narrow-minded discipline which is responsible for all the evils of modern technology.” “This book aims at improving the image of science,” Capra declared; the insights and joys of modern physics extended far beyond mere technology. Indeed, “physics can be a path with a heart, a way to spiritual knowledge and self-realization.” Few reviewers missed the point. Physics Today ran a review of the book by a Cornell astrophysicist. The review began by citing the profession’s litany of woes: the “anti-scientific sentiment” of the age, which distressed Capra and his critics alike, “manifests itself on all levels of our society, from a decrease in funding for basic research to a turning to Eastern mysticism and various forms of occultism.” Not an auspicious start for the volume under consideration. Yet the reviewer judged Capra’s book to be a great success. For one thing, the book got the physics right. Even more important: The Tao of Physics integrated “the abstract, rational world view of science with the immediate, feeling-oriented vision of the mystic so attractive to many of our best students.”21
The reviewer’s comments proved more than a passing observation. Just as the review was going to press, Capra was busy teaching a new undergraduate course at Berkeley based on his book. He reported proudly to MIT’s Victor Weisskopf that one-third of the students were science majors, eager to learn about the foundations of modern physics: just the sort of philosophical material they were not receiving in their other physics classes. Soon the American Journal of Physics, devoted to pedagogical innovations in the teaching of physics, began carrying articles on how best—not whether—to use The Tao of Physics in the classroom. One early adopter began by citing the huge market success of Capra’s book. “This leads naturally to the question,” he continued, “how can a physicist utilize this interest by offering a course using Capra’s book?” A follow-up article commented matter-of-factly: “Anyone involved in physics education is likely to be asked to comment on parallelism [between modern physics and Eastern mysticism] at some stage. It would be easy to dismiss such ideas entirely, and in so doing possibly risk alienating a new-found interest among students. This field has the potential of appealing to the imagination and should perhaps be carefully explored and maybe even ‘exploited.’” With budgets falling and enrollments crashing, physicists could ill afford to turn their noses up at anything that might bring students back into their classrooms.22
As late as 1990, university physics courses throughout North America still routinely listed The Tao of Physics on their syllabi as a “helpful reference.”23 When critics complained that Capra’s book might just as likely confuse students as enlighten them—why becloud difficult concepts from quantum physics with other difficult concepts from Eastern thought?—some of the physicists who had adopted Capra’s book for classroom use were quick to respond. “It should be emphasized that most of these students would not have taken an offering in the Physics Department if it were not this one,” came one spirited reply. His Tao-centered physics course had become one of the best in his department at delivering “bums in the seats.”24 Indeed, using Capra’s book had inspired this physicist to develop new lesson plans on topics like Bell’s inequality and quantum entanglement—that beguiling interconnectedness that Einstein had dismissed as “spooky actions at a distance”—which still had not made their way into standard physics curricula or textbooks.25
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In a roundabout way, Capra thus fulfilled his original goal: he wrote a successful textbook after all. Physicists across the continent eagerly snatched up The Tao of Physics. In their classrooms, the book helped demonstrate to disaffected students—or so physicists hoped—that physicists, too, were “with it.”26 Capra’s surprising commercial success with The Tao of Physics presaged a wave of similar books, including Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), Fred Alan Wolf’s Taking the Quantum Leap (1982), and Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality (1985). Like Capra’s punchy paperback, these books sold handsomely, and several netted national awards. They also discovered second lives in physicists’ classrooms. Just as reviewers had done for Tao, physicists touted the popularizations as useful textbook proxies. Next-generation textbooks on quantum mechanics—composed after the crash in enrollments had become the new normal—quoted liberally from the popular books and recommended them for further reading.27
Books like The Tao of Physics capture a moment when all that seemed solid nearly melted into air. The boundaries between disciplined academic physics and an inchoate countercultural youth movement, on the one hand, and between peer-reviewed textbooks and blockbuster best sellers, on the other, assumed a newfound plasticity. No single arrow pointed from one domain to the other; no diffusion or osmosis smuggled bits of “real” physics to the New Age seekers or back the other way. Instead, smart and well-trained young scientists—earnest in their pursuit of wide-ranging questions, caught up in a tectonic shift of professional roles and expectations, and immersed in the counterculture’s technicolor bloom—charted a new way to be a physicist during the tie-dyed 1970s.28
MATTER
10
Pipe Dreams
On 10 September 2008, I huddled with colleagues around a laptop, furiously clicking “refresh” on the web browser. We were watching real-time updates as the first batch of protons began their inaugural lap around the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, a brand-new particle accelerator near Geneva. Revved up to enormous speeds by supercooled magnets, the protons raced around the LHC’s huge ring, twenty-seven kilometers in circumference. They crisscrossed the French-Swiss border more than ten thousand times per second before smashing into each other, releasing primordial fireworks.
Watching the LHC come on line was a thrilling moment for me, but also a bittersweet one. Squinting at the tiny laptop screen, my thoughts began to wander. I imagined a similar celebration off in some parallel universe—a celebration that never was. For almost exactly fifteen years earlier, construction on a similar machine, even grander than the LHC, had ground unceremoniously to a halt. That other machine was known as the Superconducting Supercollider, or SSC; it was to be based outside Dallas, Texas, in the small town of Waxahachie. (The town’s other main attraction: Southwestern Assemblies of God University.)
As an undergraduate, back in 1992, I had worked as an intern for a few months at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in northern California. In Berkeley I joined a tiny subdivision of a sprawling, international collaboration that was building a huge detector to be used at the SSC.1 I used to joke with friends that my term in Berkeley served as my “foreign study”: having grown up on the East Coast, Berkeley seemed just as exotic and unfamiliar as the tales my friends told of their semesters in Edinburgh, Florence, and Tokyo. My first day on Berkeley’s main campus, down the hill from the Lab, student protesters had hoisted themselves up to the top of the iconic Campanile, a three-hundred-foot-tall clock tower on campus. There they set up a rickety platform and refused to come down until all ex
periments on campus involving laboratory animals had stopped. And that was before I had discovered Telegraph Avenue. I might as well have moved to Mars.
I wrote a research article during that internship, predicting some features of the fleeting interactions among subatomic particles that the SSC was designed to observe. The first draft began confidently, with the matter-of-fact scientific prose that young students quickly learn to imitate: “The high energies and luminosities available when the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) comes on-line have intensified interests in probing various extensions of the Standard Model.” The eyes of a generation of physicists were focused on the SSC and on the riches it promised to reveal. I was eager to become one of them, a gadfly on the outskirts of billion-dollar science.
As my article bumped along through peer review, however, larger forces—far more powerful than the particle collisions that we anticipated within the SSC—began to play out. By the time I submitted a revised version of my article, the SSC’s political fortunes had changed dramatically. I dropped all reference to the SSC, substituting a generic line about future generations of accelerators, off in the indefinite future.2 Not long after that, the US Congress took its final vote to kill funding for the SSC. As it happens, that vote occurred about four weeks after I had begun my doctoral studies in high-energy physics. A few days before the final vote in Congress, a well-meaning young professor called me into his office. He advised me to leave graduate school if the vote went the wrong way. I stayed, but he didn’t: a year or so later he jumped ship to Wall Street, along with so many other students and colleagues. With that single vote to end support for the SSC, Congress cut annual funding for high-energy physics in the United States in half. Support for the field continued to erode, losing ground against inflation, for the rest of the decade.
Since that time, scientists, policymakers, and historians have spilled much ink over what led to the SSC’s demise. (Even novelist Herman Wouk, of Caine Mutiny fame, got into the act with his 2004 novel, A Hole in Texas.) Some point to cost overruns; others highlight deeply felt differences over how to distribute limited resources across the gamut of scientific research. All agree on one major factor: the Cold War had ended.3
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Figure 10.1. The partially excavated tunnel for the Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahachie, Texas, early 1993. In October 1993, Congress canceled the project. (Source: Fermilab Archives, SSC Collection.)
How different that moment was, in the early 1990s, from what had come before. Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence had helped to usher gigantism into American physics during the 1930s, building a series of larger and larger particle accelerators known as “cyclotrons” in the hills overlooking Berkeley’s campus. The first models had fit easily on a tabletop; later they swelled to fill rooms and eventually whole factories’ worth of space. Lawrence could measure his progress by the size of his machines. His team graduated from a model with an 11-inch diameter in January 1932 to a 27-inch replacement that December. In the fall of 1937, Lawrence commanded a 37-inch cyclotron, which itself was eclipsed by a 60-inch machine less than two years later. By 1940, funding was in hand, and one thousand tons of concrete were poured to support his 184-inch cyclotron.4
Figure 10.2. Ernest Lawrence and his staff pose with the newly renovated 184-inch synchrocyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1946. (Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.)
In the late 1940s, the US secretary of war visited Lawrence’s laboratory, which had been a major contracting site for the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. After giving the secretary a tour, the entrepreneurial Lawrence mentioned that he could really use some additional funding for his latest project. The secretary gamely assured Lawrence that the Army would be glad to support his efforts. Just before leaving, the secretary stopped to ask, casually, “By the way, Professor Lawrence, did you say two million or two billion?” Both figures seemed equally plausible.5 By that time, Lawrence’s Berkeley model had found emulators across the country, as the Office of Naval Research and the Atomic Energy Commission supported the construction of dozens of new particle accelerators and nuclear reactors across the country. None started out as tiny as Lawrence’s originals had been. Rather, they chased after the lead that Lawrence continued to provide, such as his massive Bevatron, first operational in 1954.6
During those years, policymakers calculated that building such machines would be important for national security. The argument was not that the enormous devices would lead in any direct way to better bombs. Rather, in keeping with the view that scientific “manpower” was a vital national resource, the machines would serve as training devices with which to expand the pool of experts on whom the nation could call in an emergency. In 1948, for example, the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to fund not one but two massive accelerators, one at Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory and the other at a new facility on Long Island, New York, even though the scientific advisory group to the commission had argued that only one such machine could be justified on the basis of scientific merits. The decision to build both machines was made out of fear for the “morale” of the physicists at whichever laboratory had lost the bid. As a commissioner explained the following year, funding such machines would bring the government not just “big equipment” but “big groups of scientists who will take orders.”7 The connection became even more explicit after the United States entered the Korean War. In July 1951, an official with the Atomic Energy Commission argued that the commission should build even more particle accelerators. He went through a simple calculation: if N nuclear physicists were “willing, able, and eager to use particle accelerators, and on average five such men per accelerator is an effective team,” then the commission should build N/5 accelerators, or two per year for as long as “the international situation remains roughly as at present.”8
The first hints of trouble—that the federal firehose of spending on enormous machines like particle accelerators might not last forever—surfaced in the late 1960s, ultimately triggering the dramatic nosedive in physicists’ enrollment curve. In 1969, one of Lawrence’s protégés had to defend a proposal to build yet another particle accelerator, even grander than the rest, in the Midwest. He parried pointed questions from Congress about high costs and pragmatic ends. The proposed facility, the physicist calmly responded, would not aid in the nation’s defense; it would make the nation “worth defending.”9 The rhetoric worked, and the new accelerator was installed at Fermilab, outside Chicago, but only because the director’s public testimony had been reinforced by concerted backroom lobbying by a coalition of scientists and policymakers. In 1983, during a resurgence of defense-related spending by the Reagan administration, that coalition scored another victory, winning endorsement from the administration to begin construction on a still-larger machine, the SSC. By the time the SSC’s number came up, though, ten years later, that coalition had dissolved. Despite similarly soaring rhetoric from Nobel laureates, who promised Congress that the SSC would unlock the secrets of the universe and contribute to an epic adventure of discovery, their words fell flat.10 By the early 1990s, with no Soviet menace to face (real or imagined), the blank-check era of American big science had come to an end.
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A year after the SSC was abandoned, the governing board of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, approved its own plan to pursue the LHC. CERN’s leaders realized they could achieve goals similar to the SSC’s, but on the cheap. Most important, they decided to use a preexisting tunnel from an older experiment to save on the huge excavation costs. The choice was not ideal—using the older facility meant sticking with a colliding ring that was only one-third as long as the SSC’s would have been. The size of the ring had a direct bearing on the energies that the colliding particles could attain; these, too, would be only one-third as high in the LHC as they would have been in the SSC. But the CERN machine nevertheless could reach enormous energies at about one-fifth the cost of the SSC. And so
we celebrated that day back in September 2008—fourteen years after the commitment had been made—when the LHC spun to life and sent its first batch of protons circling around and around and around.
Operation of the machine came screeching to a halt just a few days later. Faulty electrical connections deep inside the LHC tunnel caused several magnets to overheat. That, in turn, led one of the tanks holding liquid helium to rupture. (The liquid helium was needed to keep the superconducting magnets ultracold.) No one could get close to the affected area to inspect the damage or begin repairs until the entire region had been taken off-line and ever so slowly warmed up. After fourteen months and an additional expenditure of nearly $40 million, the tank had been repaired, new equipment installed to try to bolster the LHC’s resistance to similar spikes in electrical current, and the entire machine cooled back down to its operating temperature. A new batch of protons were sent on their dizzying journey, round and round inside the huge accelerator.11