Glimpses of Truth, Not Gadgets, Are Spinoffs of Super-Collider

Let’s clear up a little $8.2-billion misunderstanding. The real reason we want to build a superconducting super-collider in Waxahachie, Tex., isn’t to explore matter and energy and push back the boundaries of human knowledge; it’s to boost U.S. industrial competitiveness versus Japan and Europe.

“There is no question that our economic future is being harmed by a declining international competitiveness due in part to insufficient investment in basic scientific research,” argues Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), who championed the Senate’s overwhelming vote Monday to spend $550 million this year for the proton smasher. (The SSC debate now moves to a House-Senate conference committee.)

Twenty years ago, the rationale for the SSC would have been national security, not industrial competitiveness. Proponents argue that building it is as much an investment in the future of industry as the future of scientific knowledge. Like the space program, they say, the SSC will eventually spin off new commercial technologies as readily as it spins off subatomic cousins to leptons, hadrons and quarks.

Now there should be little doubt that a 54-mile-long, multibillion-dollar particle smasher will eventually yield a bedazzling array of valuable insights into the essence of nature. But the argument that an $8.2-billion super-collider can be linked in any meaningful way to regional economic development or significant industrial growth in our lifetimes has not a neutrino of truth to support it. In fact, if history is any indicator, our investments in high-energy particle physics have generated far more knowledge than revenue.

Look around: There’s no “Brookhaven Belt” of high-tech companies surrounding the Long Island, N.Y., national laboratory. Similarly, Chicago’s FermiLab has yet to spawn a “Lepton Lane” of job-generating entrepreneurial ventures. Even the linear accelerator in Silicon Valley has had only a tangential influence on the region’s economic destiny.

“To be honest with you,” says Mike Riordan, assistant to the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, “with the exception of Varian Associates (a defense electronics company), Silicon Valley hasn’t had all that much to do with SLAC.”

Indeed, if having an atom smasher is important to global high-tech competitiveness, you’d think that Europe, with its giant CERN facility, would have a stronger competitive position. Needless to say, Japan seems to be competing fine without making multibillion-dollar investments in high-energy particle physics research.

The fundamental truth is that over the last 25 years, research fueled by atom smashers is not the stuff of new industries. To be sure, there have been several valuable commercial high-tech spinoffs from our accelerator investments--most notably in magnetism and cryogenics. But politicians, White House technocrats and the few scientists who promote the SSC as an engine of economic development are confusing an appetite for pork with the hunger for real investment.

“I don’t think that the reason for funding a scientific research project should be for the spinoff benefits,” says Michael Odza, publisher of Technology Access newsletter. “What’s more, if you’re going to claim economic benefits, you better have a metric for measuring them.”

In fact, the Department of Energy offers no such measures. Last year, a General Accounting Office report concluded that “technology transfer” was not a priority activity at federal labs and that technology transfer activity hadn’t met expectations. To be sure, places like FermiLab have vigorous programs to try to commercialize technology. But with a program on the vast scale of the super-collider, you have to wonder whether the benefits can match the costs.

Measured in today’s dollars, Chicago’s FermiLab facilities were built for roughly $1 billion. By contrast, the SSC will probably end up costing $10 billion. That’s an order-of-magnitude increase.

While FermiLab spun off several useful technologies, such as superconducting magnets used in magnetic-resonance imaging, can we legitimately expect a similar order-of-magnitude increase in spinoffs from the SSC? Probably not.

“I think the SSC will have the same order of impact that FermiLab has had,” says SLAC’s Riordan. In other words, we’re probably going to get a comparable economic return for 10 times the money. Sorry, that’s not an investment in the future of industry--that’s a con job on the American taxpayer that will inevitably breed cynicism and distrust. There’s a thin line between optimistic hype and outright deception.

If we’re going to do the SSC, it’s time to stop cloaking it in the flimsy garb of U.S. competitiveness and put it into a lab coat and a smock. The SSC is science, not crypto-industrial policy. What’s more, it’s not nationalistic knowledge; it’s global science. The fundamental knowledge will be available to the entire world.

So why should American taxpayers consistently be forced to subsidize the scientific research of physicists in Asia and the EC? The answer is, they shouldn’t. Congress and the Administration should fund the SSC only contingent upon international contributions.

Several American missions overseas have tried--and failed--to secure foreign contributions. But perhaps there are more creative ways of selling “shares” in the project and running it than have been explored.

Most certainly, the international scientific establishment needs to be reminded that it should not be a free rider on the American taxpayer. If that means “taxing” foreign researchers who use our national labs, so be it.

If understanding the origins and future of matter is worth investing billions, then make the case on its merits. To count on serendipitous spinoffs as the economic rationale for a $10-billion investment isn’t just a leap of faith; it’s a betrayal of the public trust.