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The Superconducting Supercollider and US Science Policy

Abstract

Reasons for the Superconducting Supercollider’s (SSC’s) termination include significant changes in the attitude of the government towards large scientific projects originating with management reforms introduced decades earlier. In the 1980s, the government insisted on inclusion of elements of these reforms in the SSC’s management contract, including increased demands for accountability, additional liability for contractors, and sanctions for infractions. The SSC’s planners could not have opted out of the reforms, which were by then becoming part of all large publicly funded projects. Once these reforms were in place, management mistakes in the SSC’s planning and construction became highly visible, leading to termination of the machine. This episode contains two key lessons about science policy. One is that the momentum of the government’s management reforms was unstoppable, and its impact on large scientific facilities and projects could not be reversed. The other is that specific measures such as cost and schedule-tracking systems to provide measures of program performance and impact were also inevitable; large scientific projects needed new parameters of accountability and transparency in what can be called the Principle of Assurance.

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References

  1. See Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider, under consideration by University of Chicago Press.

  2. See for instance Catherine Westfall, “Retooling for the Future: Launching the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence’s Laboratory, 1980–1986,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008), 569–609; “A Tale of Two More Laboratories: Readying for Research at Fermilab and Jefferson Laboratory,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 32 (2001), 369–408.

  3. Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Rochester, University of Pennsylvania, Yale. For more about the first twenty-five years of Brookhaven’s history see Robert P. Crease, Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 19461972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  4. See Robert P. Crease, “Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, Part 1.” Physics in Perspective 7 (2005), 330–376; “Quenched! The ISABELLE Saga, Part 2.” Physics in Perspective 7 (2005), 404-452.

  5. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/5760/.

  6. Proceedings at: http://lss.fnal.gov/conf/C8206282/.

  7. Robert P. Crease, “Recombinant Science: The Birth of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008), 535–568.

  8. The panel was sponsored by the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the General Advisory Council of the AEC, and chaired by Harvard’s Norman Ramsey, who collaborated with I. I. Rabi in the mid 1940’s to launch BNL. See Crease, Making Physics (ref. 3). This is the origin of HEPAP.

  9. The history of this period is detailed in Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine, Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  10. Herman Wouk’s novel A Hole in Texas (New York: Little, Brown 2004) paints a picture of aspects of the impact of the SSC’s cancellation on employees.

  11. Lillian Hoddeson and Adrienne W. Kolb, “The Superconducting Super Collider’s Frontier Outpost, 1983–88,” Fermilab-Pub-01/076 (August 2001) [Minerva 38 (2000), 271–310].

  12. Stanley Wojcicki, “The Supercollider: The Pre-Texas Days: A Personal Recollection of its Birth and Berkeley Years,” Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology 1 (2008), 259–302; “The Supercollider: The Texas Days: A Personal Recollection of its Short Life and Demise” Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology 2 (2009), 265–301.

  13. JHM Oral history interview, June 6, 2009, interviewed by Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan.

  14. Crease, Making Physics (ref. 3).

  15. Dall W. Forsythe, Performance Management Comes to Washington: A Progress Report on the Government Performance and Results Act (Albany, NY: Rockefeller Institute of Government, 2000).

  16. See Wojcicki, “The Supercollider: The Texas Days” (ref. 12).

  17. National Research Council, The Nuclear Weapons Complex: Management for Health, Safety, and the Environment (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1989).

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Correspondence to John H. Marburger III.

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John H. Marburger III (1941–2011) was President of Stony Brook University (1980–1994), Chairman of the Universities Research Association (1988–1994), Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory (1998–2001), and Science Advisor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2001–2009). This is an excerpt from his book Science Policy Up Close (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2014), edited by Robert P. Crease.

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Marburger, J.H. The Superconducting Supercollider and US Science Policy. Phys. Perspect. 16, 218–249 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0133-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-014-0133-9

Keywords

  • Brookhaven National Laboratory
  • Department of Energy
  • Fermilab
  • Isabelle
  • Science Policy
  • Superconducting Supercollider
  • Universities Research Association
  • Leon Lederman
  • Maury Tigner
  • James Watkins
  • Robert R. Wilson