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Against the SSC: Unnecessary Engineering in the Wrong Cause
| Article
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13475 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
1,846 Words |
| Author
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Rustum Roy
Rustum Roy is director of the Science, Technology and Society
Program and former director of the Materials Research
Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. |
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) is a clear example of the approaching end of truly innovative science. Some particle physicists believe that their field has run out of ideas and that massive instruments are the only way to advance it. They reject the possibility of new conceptualizations to more coherently explain the world around us. Such pessimists, giving up on science, have turned to the engineers and said, "Build us a bigger shovel so that we can dig deeper, since there is no other way to get that gold or oil, or whatever." It is as thought petroleum geologists, instead of using gravitational, magnetic, or other probes to pinpoint oil deposits, were to say, "Let's just scrape 10,000 feet off the whole of Texas: We are sure to find something." Of course they would. But they wouldn't call it science and it would hardly be the only way to do it.
Members of Congress know enough to call such a project what it is. The SSC is principally a public works project - money and jobs hang on it for one winning state, and taxes for the other forty-nine. It will no doubt make some contribution to the advancement of one corner of one field of science.
The 'Best Science' Issue
It strikes me that to argue the case, as the proponents of the SSC do, that particle physics and its particular hoped-for results are the "most important," the "most basic," the "most whatever" begs all questions. On what scale do we measure the "basicity" of a field of science? It surely cannot be on permanence of value. Whatever the SSC discovers, ten years after its start-up, particle physicists no doubt will be asking for an even larger accelerator to get to the really fundamental "building blocks of the universe."
Nor can it be judged by the universal acclaim of scientists or the public. I doubt if 5 percent of the physicists and 0.1 percent of all scientists alive think that bashing protons or deuterons around in a somewhat bigger machine is any more basic than their own field. Particle physics is not all that attractive to other scientists; even the physics community has already voted against it with its feet. Some 1500 of them have turned away from whatever important tasks they were doing to try to clamber aboard one of the most interesting advances in materials research - many of them doing amateur cookbook chemistry to try to make superconductors. Certainly no one has claimed that any breakthrough equivalent to a high-temperature superconductor can emerge from the $5 billion
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