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Tunnel Visions

The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider

Starting in the 1950s, US physicists dominated the search for elementary particles; aided by the association of this research with national security, they held this position for decades. In an effort to maintain their hegemony and track down the elusive Higgs boson, they convinced President Reagan and Congress to support construction of the multibillion-dollar Superconducting Super Collider project in Texas—the largest basic-science project ever attempted. But after the Cold War ended and the estimated SSC cost surpassed ten billion dollars, Congress terminated the project in October 1993.
           
Drawing on extensive archival research, contemporaneous press accounts, and over one hundred interviews with scientists, engineers, government officials, and others involved, Tunnel Visions tells the riveting story of the aborted SSC project. The authors examine the complex, interrelated causes for its demise, including problems of large-project management, continuing cost overruns, and lack of foreign contributions. In doing so, they ask whether Big Science has become too large and expensive, including whether academic scientists and their government overseers can effectively manage such an enormous undertaking.

Reviews

“The termination of the Superconducting Super Collider project in 1993 sent more than US$10 billion down the drain and left the US high-energy-physics community reeling. In this in-depth tome on that “epochal transition”, science historians Riordan and Hoddeson, with Fermilab archivist Kolb, cover all the bases leading to that bitter end—which, they conclude, was down to a “cold-war mindset” and the untenable cost of going it alone.”

Nature

Tunnel Visions, a nearly three-decade writing project, describes the birth and death of the SSC. The authors...illuminate the serious problems that led to the 1993 congressional vote to terminate the SSC. Because of my personal ties to the field and to the national lab community, I enjoyed the play-by-play account in Tunnel Visions. The SSC has lessons for all who advocate the public funding of science.”

Physics Today

“Most good science stories are tales of discovery and success, but failure can be just as riveting. Here two historians and an archivist describe the greatest particle physics experiment that never was. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a planned 87-kilometer ring in Texas, would have crashed protons together at higher energies than any accelerator before or since, dwarfing even the current Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the Higgs boson was discovered. But in 1993 Congress pulled the plug on the more than $10-billion project because of cost overruns, mismanagement and changing political tides. Tunnel Visions examines what went wrong and what lessons the failure of the SSC can impart in an era when such Big Science projects are increasingly central to scientific research.”

Scientific American

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1  Origins of the Super Collider
Chapter 2  A New Frontier Outpost, 1983–88
Chapter 3  Selling the Super Collider, 1983–88
Chapter 4  Settling in Texas, 1989–91
Chapter 5  Washington and the World, 1989–92
Chapter 6  The Demise of the SSC, 1991–1994
Chapter 7  Reactions, Recovery, and Analysis

Epilogue  The Higgs Boson Discovery

Appendix 1. Physics at the TeV Energy Scale
Appendix 2. List of Interviews

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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