It’s important that we not end up with a Cadillac but with a Chevrolet… I’ll help Congress get over the sticker shock, and you’ll have to make sure of a sturdy and reliable Chevy.
— SENATOR PHIL GRAMM (R.-TEXAS)
May 10, 1991
[The SSC costs are] on the road to a bottomless pit.
— CONGRESSMAN JAMES SENSENBRBNNER (R.-WISCONSIN)
February 7, 1992
Exotic luxuries like the Space Station and the Super Collider perhaps ought to be put off or canceled until we can shore up ourfaltering economy.
— SENATOR ROBERT BYRD (D.-WEST VIRGINIA)
May 1, 1992
We told [the other congressmen) that the DOE had blown the $5 billion budget cap [voted by the House in 1990], that we were not going to see the $1.7 billion in foreign contributions, and that they wanted to balance the budget. It’s an easy case to make in fifteen or twenty seconds.
— STAFF AIDE TO CONGRESSMAN SHERWOOD BOEHLERT (R.-NEW YORK)
This place [the SSC] attracts scientific genius the way the Dream Team attracts autograph seekers.
— PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH
31
TUNNEL MAKER FLOATED INTO THE INSTRUMENTATION enclosure and connected to a neural node. He felt anxious. It had been more than two rotations since the Bridge had been established and there was still no indication that the Bridgehead had been noticed. The instruments recorded that it remained at rest in the same medium of elements 82, 14, and 8 where it had been stopped. Occasional short-duration flashes of light were observed. These occurred at very regular intervals. They were perhaps part of a testing process but were definitely not a signal.
Tunnel Maker’s apparatus continued to send light-coded messages through the Bridge. These used the time-tested codes that had been successful in other contacts. They had now been transmitted many times over the past three days, but with no response.
Tunnel Maker considered his options. He could continue on the present course. He could try other more energetic transmissions, bursts of positrons, muons, gamma rays, or antiprotons that might attract attention to the Bridgehead. Or he could notify the Concantation of Individuals that this attempt to establish contact with a microcsopic Bridge had failed and that the time had come to enlarge the Bridge to macroscopic size and perhaps send an Emissary through the Bridge aperture.
It was clear that he must allow more time before approaching the Concantation. And increasing the energy of the signals had its dangers for the inhabitants of the other Bubble, who might be damaged by the radiation. He would save it as a last resort. He decided that he must be patient. Experience with other contacts indicated that communication often required a dozen or so rotations.
Tunnel Maker resolved to wait for at least another dozen rotations before taking any further action. The waiting vigil was the most difficult part of contact.
32
GEORGE SAT IN THE THIRD ROW OF THE SSC’S LARGE lecture theater. The room was about one-fourth full. The speaker was a distinguished theorist, a Nobel laureate and holder of an endowed chair on physics at an Ivy League university. He waved the laser-spot pointer at the diagram projected on the tall screen at the front of the room. He was discussing the Energy Desert and once again raising the possibility that particle physics, as practiced at the SSC, was about to come to an end.
George had heard this argument before. The progress of particle physics had been driven by a succession of ever more powerful accelerators beginning with E. O. Lawrence’s original cyclotron and culminating with the SSC. The field had advanced in a series of carefully orchestrated leaps, quantum jumps from each particle accelerator to the next new and more powerful one. And like clockwork, again and again new phenomena, completely unexpected discoveries, had appeared when each new accelerator began to produce its higher-energy particle beams. One of the wisdoms of science is that to see what none have seen before you must look where none have looked before. That maxim was epitomized by the unbroken chain of remarkable discoveries that had emerged from experimental particle physics from the 1930s onward. But the chain could break.
The pessimistic argument that the speaker was presenting was that, in his esteemed judgment, the chain of new discoveries was indeed about to break, the series was about to terminate. With the wisdom of hindsight, one could see that the great discoveries of particle physics had all been consequences of the fundamental underlying structures of matter, the quarks and leptons and the “carrier” particles that mediated the fundamental forces. The set of these particles now seemed almost complete. All the expected quarks and leptons had been found, culminating with the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab in 1994-95. The Higgs particle, presently being sought in different ways by several experimental groups at the SSC, might be the last piece in the cosmic puzzle. The next generation of particles might lie vastly higher in energy, at the Planck scale, the mass scale set by the smallest possible black holes, the domain where gravity and the three other forces of nature must unite into a single force.
If that was so, the SSC was the end of the line for accelerator-based particle physics. There was little point in building an even more powerful machine. From the SSC at the edge of the desert a vast energy wasteland stretched from the Higgs to the Planck scale, a great energy region where nothing of interest would happen, where no new particles would be discovered. Where the dance of theory with experiment to produce new knowledge was about to come to an end.
The QCD Standard Model worked too well, the speaker declared. There would be few surprises in the energy region that the SSC had opened to exploration. Experimental particle physics was reaching its logical conclusion. He advised the younger physicists in the audience to begin preparing for an alternative career.
George thought of the violet track with its twenty-nine clusters of jets, and he laughed. Others near him glanced curiously in his direction. He knew something that the speaker had come to doubt. The universe is indeed a far stranger place than is dreamed of in our philosophies.
George’s cellphone made a chirp. It would have to be of some importance, he thought, because he had set the threshold at a fairly high urgency level. As unobtrusively as he could, he squeezed down the aisle past several sets of knees, shrugged at the speaker in apology, and walked up the aisle to the rear door.
When he was in a quiet place, he pressed the receiver button of the device. “George,” said Wolfgang, “I wanted you to know that there was a cancellation in the superconducting metallurgy group’s schedule. We have time on their X-ray fluorescence microprobe on Monday morning at 7 a.m. Is that okay with you? If it is, I will prepare an insert now, so it will be ready to go on Monday.”
“Monday morning is fine,” said George. “I could even have some results in time for the group meeting at 10 a.m. I’m scheduled to report on our progress then. I just hope this works, Wolfgang. If those speckles on the pixel chip aren’t the problem, we’ll have to go back to square zero.”
“Just one step at a time,” said Wolfgang, “as they used to tell us in the East German Army.”