Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 11–14, 2015; Baltimore, Maryland
Session R12: Invited Session: Three Perspectives on the Supercollider |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Catherine Westfalll, Michigan State University Room: Key 8 |
Monday, April 13, 2015 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
R12.00001: DOE Perspectives on the Supercollider Invited Speaker: James Decker The Superconducting Super Collider was to be built in Texas at a cost of more than {\$}8B and completed in 1999. It would have been the most expensive scientific instrument ever built with a discovery potential far exceeding any existing accelerator. If it had been completed, the future of continued discovery at the ``energy frontier'' of high energy physics would be assured and the fortunes of high energy physics in the United States would be much more robust. There were many issues that contributed to the final decision by Congress to cease funding of the SSC. Some of these were: perceived value of the SSC's science; competition for funding in an environment of constrained federal funding (e.g. the Space Station); attacks by parts of the scientific community; management issues; cost growth; lack of significant foreign participation; and lowering of the national priority of physics at the end of the Cold War. Real and perceived issues were used by dedicated Congressional opponents to kill the SSC. There are differing opinions as to which factors were the most important and which could have been avoided. There are many stories about what happened behind the scenes at high levels of government. Perhaps more important than the history of what went wrong are the lessons learned from project management to the politics of very large projects. The viewpoints expressed in this talk are based on my involvement in the SSC primarily as Deputy Director of DOE's Office of Science. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 13, 2015 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
R12.00002: The Disappearing Fourth Wall: John Marburger, Science Policy, and the SSC Invited Speaker: Robert Crease John H. Marburger (1941-2011) was a skilled science administrator who had a fresh and unique approach to science policy and science leadership. His posthumously published book \textit{Science Policy up Close} contains recollections of key science policy episodes in which he participated or observed closely. One was the administration of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC); Marburger was Chairman of the Universities Research Association, the group charged with managing the SSC, from 1988-1994. Many accounts of the SSC saga attribute its demise to a combination of transitory factors: poor management, rising cost estimates, the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus of the Cold War threat, complaints by ``small science'' that the SSC's ``big science'' was consuming their budget, Congress's desire to cut spending, unwarranted contract regulations imposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) in response to environmental lapses at nuclear weapons laboratories, and so forth. Marburger tells a subtler story whose implications for science policy are more significant and far-reaching. The story involves changes in the attitude of the government towards large scientific projects that reach back to management reforms introduced by the administration of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter in the 1960s and 1970s. This experience impressed Marburger with the inevitability of public oversight of large scientific projects, and with the need for planners of such projects to establish and make public a cost and schedule tracking system that would model the project's progress and expenditures. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 13, 2015 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
R12.00003: A Bridge Too Far: The Demise of the Superconducting Super Collider, 1989--1993 Invited Speaker: Michael Riordan In October 1993 the US Congress terminated the Superconducting Super Collider --- at over {\$}10 billion the largest and costliest basic-science project ever attempted. It was a disastrous loss for the nation's once-dominant high-energy physics community, which has been slowly declining since then. With the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, Europe has assumed world leadership in this field. A combination of fiscal austerity, continuing SSC cost overruns, intense Congressional scrutiny, lack of major foreign contributions, waning Presidential support, and the widespread public perception of mismanagement led to the project's demise nearly five years after it had begun. Its termination occurred against the political backdrop of changing scientific needs as US science policy shifted to a post-Cold War footing during the early 1990s. And the growing cost of the SSC inevitably exerted undue pressure upon other worthy research, thus weakening its support in Congress and the broader scientific community. As underscored by the Higgs boson discovery, at a mass substantially below that of the top quark, the SSC did not need to collide protons at 40 TeV in order to attain its premier physics goal. The selection of this design energy was governed more by politics than by physics, given that Europeans could build the LHC by eventually installing superconducting magnets in the LEP tunnel under construction in the mid-1980s. In hindsight, there were good alternative projects the US high-energy physics community could have pursued that did not involve building a gargantuan, multibillion-dollar machine at a green-field site in Texas. [Preview Abstract] |
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