After 'the First Three Minutes': Death of the Super Collider as a case-study in Public Affairs
Our study of cosmology as an involving science has been largely directed to this end: to build a deep historical perspective on one of the major issues of Big Science and Public Policy.
We've seen how ideas change--and often, however much they change, culturally rooted assumptions stay the same. Give some examples.
We should also have some perspective on the practice of cosmology. Historically much of this science has been done as a 'cottage industry': ancient theories and early modern advances were largely the work of arm-chair astronomers, with little investment in experimental science. Thus Copernicus was largely a creature of the Church and would not have had the leisure to undertake his Revolutions without that position; Galileo similarly was creature of the Renaissance court, serving first the Medici and then Urban VIII. Newton was a Cambridge professor who never had to seek federal funding. Even Einstein had little recourse to experiments of his own.
But now the threshold for new discoveries, in order to establish something beyond speculative models, requires government expenditures on a collossal scale. It becomes an issue for Public Affairs.
To reproduce the kind of particle collisions that were usual in the early moments ABT, governments (our own and the Europeans as well) have undertaken to build vast 'runways' for accelerating particles by means of super-conducting magnets. By crashing protons together at collision energies equal or very near to those of the first fractions of a second, scientists hope to discover the key to the creation process.
Much like the model of electron + positron collisions producing photon's of equivalent energy, these proton collisions at vastly greater energy will make something mysterious suddenly present itself for observation. We might be able to identify a 'Higgs boson' which would go far toward confirming the presence of the Higgs field (giving distinctive mass to primal particles that were previously homogeneous). Conversely, we might identify some of the particles hypothesized but not yet proved for 'String Theory' with its multiple dimensions. And we might even get a glimpse of the 'Dark Matter' that supposedly makes up most of the mass in the universe.
In the 1980s a project got underway here in the U.S. to build such a device in Texas. It had the support of 3 presidents from both parties: Reagan, Bush (senior), and Clinton. Billions were spent on research and develpment; the land for the 'runway' was even purchased and excavation begun. And then Congress pulled the plug. The Death of the Super Collider is a case-study in how we make decisions in this hotly contested arena involving Big Science in Public Policy.
With this perspective, read Steven Weinberg's chapter 'Down in Ellis County' with the Afterword (handout from Dreams of a Final Theory) and consider:
What are some of the reasons the project was ultimately cancelled?
Are these reasonable concerns?
Weinberg, it may be objected, has a vested interest. In your own view, is this a Public Policy failure? Or not?
By either view, what can be learned?
For a look at a Big Particle Accelerator and what they do, go to CERN
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html
And for the most user-friendly approach, click on 'Cern in 2 Minutes'
For another look at accelertors (stateside) go to Fermilab and 'Start the timeline':