Accelerator Politics

Today, synchrotrons are some of the most striking creations of modern science. With many of them measuring several kilometers across, and costing hundreds of millions of dollars, they are the largest machines built for scientific research. The most powerful synchrotron in operation today is the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, which reaches 900 billion eV (900 GeV). The next step in the rapid evolution of these machines is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which will be completed in 2005. This synchrotron accelerator will reach energies up to 7 trillion eV—more than one million times the energy of the most energetic alpha particles—more than Sir Rutherford could have wished for in his wildest dreams!

When it is completed, the LHC will be the most advanced accelerator. It is the result of the long string of improvements that date back to the late 1920’s. The increasing sophistication and power comes at a price, however. The LHC will cost over U.S. $ 6 billion. Faced with such staggering costs, many countries have begun to consolidate. Early in the 1960’s, the three front-runners in the race to higher energies were the United States, Europe (with CERN), and the USSR. But beginning in the 1980’s, support for the U.S. high energy physics program began to wane. This concern was expressed in a 1985 article on what was to be the major advancement in the U.S., the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)⁴. The article was written by Nobel Prize Laureates Leon Lederman and Sheldon Glashow and warned:

“If we forgo the opportunity that [the] SSC offers for the 1990s, the loss will not only be to our science, but also to the broader issue of national pride and technological self-confidence. When we were children, America did most things best. So it should again.” [13]

If the SSC were not built, America’s leading role in fundamental physics research would be cast into serious doubt.

Sixteen years later, this fear has become reality. The SSC is nothing more than a dried-out worm in the Texan desert. The U.S. senate decided that the U.S. $12 billion price tag was

⁴The SSC, housed in a 54-mile-long circular tunnel, could have propelled protons and smashed them against their counterparts—antiprotons—to recreate conditions at 40 trillion eV, an energy comparable to that present near the instant of the universe’s beginning.

not worth the possible scientific discoveries the SSC promised. As a result, an increasing number of U.S. high-energy physicists now work with CERN, the only high-energy physics laboratory left in the world that still pushes the envelope of high energy physics.

Fifty years ago, things were different. The American high energy physics program, led by big movers such as Berkeley physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence, had just started. Thus began the new era of Big Science. Identified with national security after World War II, high energy physics had ample funding [14]. The European program, on the other hand, had been set behind by the War, and was far less well funded than its American counterpart. It was lagging behind. To catch up, the creation of a European Laboratory was recommended at a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) meeting in Florence in 1950. Less than three years later a charter for the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) was signed. [4]

From its inception, CERN made a conscious effort to be completely detached from national and military interests. To keep things this way, it was decided that CERN could not operate nuclear reactors which can be used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons [19] . Because of this separation, CERN has been largely unaffected by world politics. The American program, on the other hand, depended on funding through the Department of Energy, which itself received much of its for defense related research. Consequently, after the end of the Cold War, it was scaled back together with the rest of national defense (Table 4).