Origins of the Super Collider

In all failures, the beginning is certainly half the whole. — GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

During the late 1970s, US high-energy physicists could look back on three decades of unparalleled achievement. They had constructed a steady succession of particle accelerators with exponentially increasing energies and used them to probe the interior of the atomic nucleus, making one major discovery after another of the fundamental particles from which matter is made and about the forces binding them together. Combined with theoretical advances, in which US physicists also played a leading role, these discoveries culminated in the Standard Model of particle physics, the dominant paradigm to which almost all members of the discipline subscribed by 1980. This theory posits that ordinary matter is composed of basic building blocks called quarks and leptons — point-like particles, collectively called fermions, that carry half-integer spin. These constituents interact by exchanging other kinds of particles (such as the familiar photon) bearing integer spin called gauge bosons. The Standard Model succeeded in combining the previously dissimilar electromagnetic and weak forces into a single, unified force called the electroweak force. Unifications of fundamental forces are exceedingly rare and thus tremendously significant events in the history of physics, typically occurring about once every century.

Largely because of their ability to construct ever more powerful accelerators and colliders, in which two particle beams clash to generate the highest collision energies attainable, US physicists had taken the lead in this research. In the 1970s, proton or electron machines at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Cornell University in New York, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL, also called Fermilab) in Illinois, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California supplied US physicists with a variety of high-energy beams. Europeans strove to keep pace, collaborating to construct competitive proton machines at the European Center for Nuclear Physics (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, and electron machines at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, West Germany. But the entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking that characterized American experimenters had generally won this competition, allowing them to make the lion's share of the important discoveries while their European counterparts were able only to confirm these breakthroughs. During the 1960s and 1970s, five quarks and two additional leptons turned up initially at laboratories west of the Atlantic.

European physicists had evolved a more conservative tradition of building particle accelerators, colliders, and detectors, which were thoroughly engineered before construction began. While it meant that the equipment generally worked as designed from the outset, this approach also took longer to implement, giving more adventurous US physicists the inside track on important discoveries. On the other hand, it also meant that Europeans had the edge in constructing complicated particle detectors, such as the immense Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN, which they used to obtain convincing evidence in 1973 for the weak neutral currents required by theories of electroweak unification.

US HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS AT A CROSSROADS

As the 1970s ended, however, Europe was pulling abreast of America in high-energy physics, often called particle physics. Due in part to US funding delays, DESY's collider PETRA began operations in 1979, more than a year before its SLAC equivalent PEP. PETRA eventually allowed physicists to study the collisions of electrons with their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, at combined energies over 40 billion electron volts, or 40 GeV — about five times higher than previously attainable. This advantage meant that European physicists (plus several groups of US physicists working at DESY) received credit that year for discovering the gluon — the gauge boson responsible for conveying the strong force that sequesters quarks together inside protons and neutrons.

Moreover, the European particle-physics community, which had for years been steadily concentrating its efforts at CERN, was developing adventurous plans for the future as the 1980s began. CERN was adapting a large proton accelerator, the 300 GeV Super Proton Synchrotron, or SPS, to function also as a high-energy proton-antiproton collider able to produce the ultra-massive W and Z particles predicted by the Standard Model and thought to be responsible for radioactivity. And CERN was planning a far bigger machine, the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, which would occupy a 27 kilometer tunnel under the Swiss and French countryside and eventually allow electron-positron collisions to occur at energies up to 200 GeV.

In contrast, US high-energy physics had been buffeted by shifting economic and political forces during the 1970s. In part because of the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the attendant surge in energy costs, a major shakeup occurred in its principal federal funding agency. An outgrowth of the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC (which funded almost all US accelerator building through the mid-1970s), was dissolved in 1974 and its responsibilities segregated into the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). ERDA in turn became part of the even larger Department of Energy (DOE) under the Carter administration in 1977. High-energy physics was subsequently just one part of a larger energy portfolio, which included billions of dollars for solar and renewable-energy projects during the late 1970s. Funding for US high-energy physics was nearly flat (in constant dollars) during the latter half of the decade, while the costs of constructing its ever-larger particle accelerators, colliders, and detectors increased unabated.

The Cold War rationale for building these expensive scientific facilities had declined during the 1970s, after the administration of Richard Nixon and the Soviet government of Leonid Brezhnev tacitly agreed to détente in their relationship, thus encouraging scientific exchanges and joint projects such as the 1975 docking of the Apollo and Soyuz space capsules. High-energy physics had enjoyed a privileged status under the old AEC, whose General Advisory Council often made decisions in secret about proposed projects — which Congress then debated in closed sessions of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. But after the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, the AEC ceased to exist. And congressional jurisdiction...