Get Physical

HIGH ENERGY physics is a lot like hockey the better you get, the more expensive the equipment becomes. As research has exploded with starting new discoveries, physicists' primary tools, once pencil, paper and a few gadgets, have become tremendously complicated and expensive tools like high-energy accelerators Made possible by the new, high technology and machinery, physics research has surged into areas never before dreamed of Perhaps most importantly, infinitesimally small quarks--the building blocks of more familiar sub-atomic particles like protons and nuetrons--have been found.

With discoveries like the quarks, physicists are just beginning to understand the universe's most fundamental laws Probing ever deeper they are redefining our understanding of the world, but a proposed new accelerator which would significantly increase physicists capacity has become the topic of hot controversy among scientists who study elementary particles Accelerators produce extremely high energy collisions between matter and anti-marter travelling at close the speed of light in opposite directions around a ring several kilometers in circumference.

Roughly 100 kilometers in circumference, the proposed Super Conducting Super Collider would be much larger than any existing accelerator and would allow investigators to study physical processes at 40 times the energy supplied by the largest existing accelerators It would also take at least 10 years to build and at a cost of approximately $1 billion is well out of range of any private organization and would have to be built by the Federal government, consuming a sizeable portion of the nation's budget for basic research.

Opposition to the project is strong and the price tag is high, but it should be supported, because the accelerator has the potential to lead to such important discoveries with benefits hardly forsee-able today. The discovery that atoms consist of neutrons, protons and electrons led to countless discoveries in many fields.

The quarks discovered using slower less effective accelerators are indicators of the potential the larger tool has In recent months several experiments at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva have generated results inexplainable by accepted theory Physicists agree that the results could reflect the workings of the long sought single unifying force which may control all of nature's other forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. The theory is far from proven but preliminary calculations using the new results show promising evidence. However definitive answers may only be attainable with the proposed Super Collider.

Despite the evidence, however, some physicists remain skeptical that the theory holds water, leading them to doubt the practicality of constructing the huge accelerator.

AT THIS point, however, high energy physics research is moving as fast--or faster--than any other field. Discovering quarks certainly will not feed hungry children, but in the Jong run piecing together nature's structure is likely to have repercussions barely foreseen today--in all realms of sciences, not just physics.

Not only could the Super Collider have incalculable scientific worth, but it would return the United States to the forefront in a field where its superiority has eroded Accelerators, such as Harvard's Cambridge Electron Accelerator, or the now out-of-commission Princeton-Penn accelerator have been shut down as they have become technically dwarfed by accelerators in places such as Geneva and Germany While Fermilab in Batavia. III. is regarded as one of the top labs anywhere, the United States is simply no longer regarded as the center of high energy physics.

And, closer to home, the lack of adequate facilities in the U.S. means that most of Harvard's star high energy physicists, such as Carlo Rubbia and Karl Strauch, have been forced to take months, even years, off to live and work abroad to continue their research. The commutee they say, slows their work and hinders their teaching.

To some, spending $1 billion on a machine that smashes electrons may appear to be a colossal waste of money. Instead, they argue the funds can be applied in a more "useful" way, and now, as always, there are countless demands on the government for research grants. Nonetheless, probing new frontiers is the essence of all science and time after time most significant discoveries have come from experiments where practical results were not the primary goal Moreover, as demonstrated by the highly successful Space Program. America must take the initiative and probe further limits if it expects to make a significant contribution to humanity risks bring great rewards.