Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 4, 1993 TAG: 9309090323
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDUARDO E. DUEK and VIGDOR L. TEPLITZ
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Ostensibly, $600 million to $1 billion per year will be saved by the SSC's termination. Yet in 1992, the SSC budget accounted for about one ten-thousandth of our national deficit.
Now suppose, $2 billion into it, that the SSC is actually terminated - after having been studied since 1982, funded by Congress since 1988, with agreements signed for foreign participation and with about 20 percent of the project completed. Allegedly, you and I will be winners. Is this true? And if so, who will be the losers?
The easiest loser to identify will be science. For almost a century, we have been building accelerators, machines that have allowed us to look ever deeper into the smallest constituents of matter. Demonstrably, the knowledge gained often spawned frontier technologies that, in turn, helped our society prosper and remain internationally competitive.
If the SSC is terminated, an active field of basic science - which has produced 26 of America's 49 Nobel Prize winners since World War II - will begin to fade not because its major questions have been answered but because we decided it was not worth sustaining the nation's commitment to answering them.
Historically, the first triumph of nuclear science was to show that the atom has a hard positive nucleus with a cloud of negative electrons. That seemingly esoteric discovery led to a lot of the applications of atomic physics to electronics - including silicon chips for computers and Nintendo games - to lasers, and to many other useful inventions.
As ever more powerful accelerators were built in the 1930s, another technical triumph was understanding the structure of the nucleus, which is composed of protons and neutrons. This work can be credited with having made nuclear power possible (and nuclear weapons), and it led to new applications of nuclear science in medicine, transportation and environmental protection.
The SSC will answer basic questions about the protons and neutrons themselves. If history is a guide, the new accelerator also will bring advances in the many technologies required to build it. Already, for example, more than 60 records of invention have been logged by the SSC, and 10 patents have been applied for.
Last year, a group of 24 Nobel laureates and 35 winners of the National Medal of Science, in physics as well as in other disciplines, wrote to former President Bush urging him to support construction of the SSC. The heirs of our Nobel prize winners, without a doubt, will be losers.
Will other sciences or projects - big or small - be winners?
The amendment to the appropriations bill to kill the SSC did not contain any provision to use the money saved to support ``small science'' or any science. The construction in the late 1960s of a large accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois did not adversely affect funding for ``small science,'' and neither will the SSC. On the other hand, if, after terminating the SSC, no immediate political consequences are apparent, at least one or two of the 535 members of the Senate and House may be encouraged to see whether there aren't other science projects whose termination could help balance the budget.
Education will be a loser if our goal is to encourage more students to go into science and engineering. At a 1989 congressional hearing, panelists testified that the most efficient vehicle for generating ``new wealth'' is science education. In a report published in 1989, the CEOs of three of the country's largest companies concluded that we will face our biggest challenge yet if we fail to improve the technical literacy of our work force.
Education is a primary goal of the SSC, and laboratory programs have already engaged more than 30,000 students and hundreds of teachers from all over the country. But suppose you are now a bright junior high school student wondering whether it is better to go into research and development or into economics and financial management. What lesson would you draw from noticing that the biggest science project in the history of mankind had been abandoned?
Technology and industrial innovation will certainly be losers. Originally, accelerators were tools for basic research. However, of the few thousand accelerators operating today, less than 2 percent are being used for basic science. Accelerators and detectors developed for basic research find new applications in lithography for computer chip production, in the treatment of certain types of cancer using proton therapy, and in medical diagnosis tools like PET and CAT. None of this would have been possible without the basic research accelerators of several decades ago.
Development of the new generation of superconducting magnets for the SSC has reduced the cost of superconducting wire by roughly a factor of 10, thereby possibly helping to speed the day when new, large-scale practical applications like high-speed magnetically levitated trains and magnetically propelled ships are commonplace.
Major computer manufacturers are working with SSC personnel to develop brand new, high-speed computer systems. SSC scientists and engineers also are working with industrial leaders to develop the world's largest and most complex, state-of-the-art cryogenics system for the SSC.
If the SSC is terminated, no one will ever be able to point, years from now, to a particular application of its technology that might have been and say that the House of Representatives deprived us of it in 1993. The application simply won't exist.
An incalculably big loser will be U.S. credibility.
If the SSC had been cancelled in 1989, before the go-ahead on construction, it might have been perceived as a conscious choice to give up our previous goal of world leadership in major fields of science to put our economic house in order. But, encouraged by the overwhelming support in Congress, we committed to building the largest scientific instrument ever conceived by mankind. Since then, we have gone around the world asking other countries to join us. (Our negotiations with the Japanese have posed a problem: Each time the House votes to cancel, negotiations stall. And then the lack of foreign contributions is criticized.)
Canceling the SSC now will appear to be the action of a country that no longer ``has it all together,'' a country that no longer has a sufficiently shared vision to move effectively in a coherent direction. Other countries may well adopt a conservative stance the next time we ask them to join a U.S.-led international science project.
The SSC has a firm scientific rationale and is meeting its technical milestones. Its current completion date delay and concomitant cost increase are entirely the result of a government decision to stretch out the construction schedule by three years.
The SSC means leadership in science and technology and improvement in education. It is supported by our best scientific minds, by U.S. industry and by our president. It will help bring us new technologies today and for generations to come. If considerations like these are no longer sufficient to carry the day for the SSC, then you and I and our country will be the biggest losers of all.
\ Eduardo E. Duek is head of the office of international coordination of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory in Dallas. Vigdor L. Teplitz is physics department chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They wrote this article for The Dallas Morning News.
Knight-Ridder/Tribune
by CNB