A Costly Monument to ‘Big Science’ Difficulties : Research: Physicists and displaced families ponder legacy of $2-billion holes in the ground left from super collider project.
In the beginning, the superconducting super collider was a 4 1/2-pound blue book that cost $60 million to produce.
For physicists, that 712-page proposal was a riveting text that envisioned a machine to reveal the origin of matter. Among the small-town politicians and congressmen who saw in its dry technical specifications a more earthly promise of 15,000 local jobs, it became an instant bestseller. This week, with a key congressional vote to deny funding, the project may have entered its last chapter.
More than a decade and $2 billion after it was first authorized, the atom smasher appears to be ending as 10 miles of dry holes in Waxahachie--a monument to the ambitions and the bitter failures of “Big Science.”
Long after the House voted almost 2 to 1 to halt construction of the collider, people in Waxahachie were just starting to tally the human toll--local families disrupted and homesteads demolished to make way for the construction, others uprooted to follow the lure of the research opportunities. In all, the government bought 16,000 acres and nearly 200 homes to make room for the 54-mile oval tunnel. The entire community of Boz, home to about 400 people, was razed to make way for the super collider laboratory’s west campus.
Jo Ann Collier, 61, was forced from her home because it was in the path of the super collider. Her husband had cancer at the time. He died last year. “We wanted to stay in that house ‘til we died, and it’s all torn up now,” she said, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. “It makes you feel so helpless.
“My life has been in complete turmoil, for what? Now they’ve spent all that money and they’re not even going to build it.”
Scientists and policy experts say the determination to kill the $11-billion super collider may be the turning point in a decade-long debate over the size and scope of federally funded science projects such as the space station, the human genome project, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the $237-million “asymmetric B-factory” accelerator awarded last week to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The Stanford project is still awaiting approval of its funding from a congressional conference committee.
“It means a withdrawal from one of the most important parts of a widespread scientific frontier,” said Dr. Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor of the University of Maryland system and president of the American Physical Society, which represents 43,000 physicists.
Throughout the last decade, the federal government promised scientists funding for an unprecedented array of expensive instruments. New projects planned during the 1980s for completion in the 1990s totaled $60 billion in construction costs, with another $100 billion in total operating costs estimated, according to the Congressional Research Service. At one point, the annual budget request for the proposed space station dwarfed the entire annual budget for the National Science Foundation.
Cost overruns, design flaws and accidents, such as the recent disappearance of the Mars Observer spacecraft, helped turn such efforts to expand the frontiers of science into powerful symbols of gilt-edged incompetence, according to congressional science experts and some policy analysts.
But more important, it made them conspicuous targets for belt-tightening in an era of retrenchment and recession.
“It is obviously energetic budget cutting,” said George E. Brown Jr. (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee. “But you are threatening the economic development of the country in a very broad sense.
“You have a majority (in Congress) who weren’t even around when this project was started. It is a high-priority target for them,” Brown said. “A project that takes this long may no longer be viable in a Congress that has no collective memory.
“The space station will be their target to kill next year,” he said.
The decision to eliminate the super collider, however, may free up funding for other physics research projects, including the Stanford project, Brown said.
Jack Storey, who gave up a prestigious job in Boston to become associate director of the sprawling super collider laboratory in DeSoto, about 20 minutes from Waxahachie, spoke emotionally about the project, which was to probe the most fundamental building blocks of matter.
“There’s no question we thought the most important science project to occur in the next 20 years was going to happen here. It’s a tremendous disappointment,” he said. “Lots of people are frightened.”
Jim Siegrist, a senior physicist on the super collider, quit his job as a professor at UC Berkeley and moved to Texas two years ago with his wife and two young sons.
“We knew that you had to get funding every year, but Congress made a commitment to build in 1990 and it seemed implausible they would just sort of go back on that commitment,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wasted my time if I knew (they would).
“Now we’ve got to pull up and get out of here and go somewhere else unless I find a job here, which seems unlikely. . . . I haven’t really figured it out.”
Henry Lubatti, a 56-year-old physicist, moved from Seattle two years ago. “The emotional impact is enormous, but we haven’t given up,” he said. “There is a level of commitment here that makes people hang on ‘til the end.
“It goes well beyond physics,” he said. “It was a flagship for the American basic research, a magnet to inspire young budding scientists, to stimulate thinking.”
The super collider’s congressional backers said Wednesday that they hope what has been built--about 20% of the project--can be preserved. They suggest the facility could be mothballed until it could be revived as the centerpiece of a proposed international physics consortium that would link the fortunes of physics projects in the United States, Europe and Asia.
But European and Japanese science officials, who already have been disappointed in their efforts to participate in the U.S. space station project, may view the fate of the project as a cautionary tale. The state of Texas invested millions of its own tax money, then was abandoned.
“I do have to ask what really are our chances of getting foreign countries intimately involved with a project that our Congress can unceremoniously dump with no notice,” Langenberg said.
“The U.S. is not a reliable partner in either multinational or other cooperative large projects. We sucker (Texas) into spending large amounts of their resources and then right in the middle we turn it into a political football and kick it away,” he said. “The U.S. government is an inconstant lover, to use a Shakespearean term.”
Hotz reported from Los Angeles and Hart from Waxahachie.
