Take U.S. Back to the Future

It’s rare for physics to make the news, but somehow the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator run by the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border, became a bona-fide celebrity. There hasn’t been a tube this famous since the London subway. The collider’s renown is likely because most of the news about it has been bizarre: The Wall Street Journal ran an article about physicists there studying with a comedy coach to help them think creatively. A rap about the collider reached three million views on YouTube. Rumors swirled that the LHC might suck the whole world into a black hole when the scientists switched on the power, which spawned even more news as hackers attacked the CERN computer system in an act of vigilante justice.

And then there’s the collider itself. Statistics about it don’t even sound real. Particles will reach 99.9999991 percent of light speed. Temperatures can drop to 456.25 degrees below zero. We’ll find the “God Particle!” (Not quite as apocalyptic as it sounds).

Hopes for LHC seem a little high, especially given that the collider will probably remain powered down until April due to a recent malfunction. But what hasn’t been in the news is that LHC comes 15 years too late and on the wrong continent. A potentially more powerful collider, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), was being constructed in Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1990s, but after much debate, Congress cut its funding in 1993 and had workers dismantle its 14 miles of underground tunneling. Without money, the project quickly collapsed. The official website is still frozen in time at early 1995.

What happened? SSC was criticized by Congress for going over its budget. At a time when NASA was demanding large amounts of funding for the International Space Station and the end of the Cold War made scientific competition appear unnecessary, the collider seemed like a luxury.

But considering the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war in Iraq or the $1.2 trillion that vanished in the stock market crash last Tuesday, the $12 billion that would have gone into the Texas collider would have been well worth the investment. Plus, by the time the project was cancelled, the costs just to dismantle the thing ran past $1 billion.

More importantly, this class of collider is vital to physics research. It has the potential to provide better answers to some of physics’ most niggling questions, like whether a Higgs Boson, the aforementioned “God Particle,” actually exists, or if the four fundamental forces in physics are all really the same force.

LHC will help us probe what the universe was like just moments after the Big Bang. It might explain why more than 95 percent of the stuff out there is actually invisible. And it could lead to technological breakthroughs years from now. Plus, with all the low hanging fruit in physics already picked, scientists need expensive technology to continue delving into the secrets of the universe. Clocks, pendulums, and oil drops just don’t cut it in the 21st century.

With all the American scientists working at the LHC, it’s true that we can benefit somewhat from the discoveries made at CERN without having to foot the bill. But we risk losing our leadership role in science and technology if we continue to let similar landmark projects be completed elsewhere. As President Clinton wrote in 1993 in a vain attempt to stop the cancellation of SSC, “the United States is compromising its position of leadership in basic science - a position unquestioned for generations.” In the time since then, we have also allowed our advantage in manned spaceflight to crumble—with the space shuttle’s mandatory retirement in 2010, we will be dependent on the Russians just to reach the International Space Station. Even the Chinese now have their own launch rockets.

And the risk doesn’t just lie in the big projects. Federal funding for scientific research has dropped significantly since the surge of interest in biomedical research at the beginning of the decade. In the last two years, the growth of money given to science programs at universities has essentially slowed to a stop. The amount of money spent by colleges and universities on research and development actually declined in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2005 to 2006.

The solution is simple. We need to allocate more federal money to universities for scientific research and development. President Faust said as much before Congress in March. More than in any other country, science has been the secret to success for the United States, from practical inventions like the airplane or the personal computer, to breakthroughs like the nuclear bomb, to feats of engineering like the lunar landing. If we keep going at this rate, we’ll wake up one morning to find Europe or Asia accelerating past us, and it won’t just be in underground laboratories.

Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Adams House.