Fundamental physics and its justifications

HALLAM STEVENS* Fundamental physics and its justifications, 1945-1993 IN THE UNITED States in the 1960s and 70s high-e...

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HALLAM STEVENS*

Fundamental physics and its justifications, 1945-1993

IN THE UNITED States in the 1960s and 70s high-energy physicists, investigators of the tiniest elements of the universe, propounded unique and persuasive arguments for the importance of fundamental science by appealing to its cultural and fundamental value. In 1975, particle physicist Fritjof Capra wrote a popular book that attempted to draw out the parallels between modern fundamental physics and the ancient wisdom of Asian mystics.1 [T]he influence of modern physics…extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in our conception of the universe and our relation to it…those who are attracted to eastern mysticism, who consult the I Ching and practice Yoga…, in general have a marked anti-scientific attitude. They tend to see science, and physics in particular, as an unimaginative, narrow-minded discipline which is responsible for all the evils of modern technology. This book * Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK; [email protected]. An earlier verson of this paper was presented as an honors thesis to the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. I would like to thank Sam Schweber for his advice and support. The following abbreviations are used: AEC, Atomic Energy Commission; APS, American Physical Society; AUI, Associated Universities Incorporated; CERN, Centre Européene pour la Recherche Nucléaire; DOD, Department of Defense; DOE, Department of Energy; FNAL, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; IDA, Institute for Defense Analysis; JCAE, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy; HEP, High Energy Physics; HEPAP, High Energy Physics Advisory Panel; NAS, National Academy of Sciences, NSF, National Science Foundation; PSAC, Presidential Science Advisory Committee; SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative; SDIO, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization; SLAC, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; SPEAR, Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Rings; SRI, Stanford Research Institute; SSB, spontaneous symmetry breaking; SSC, Superconducting Super Collider; URA, Universitites Research Association. 1. Fritjof Capra, The tao of physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism (Berkeley, 1975), 17, 25. HSPS, Volume 34, Part 1, pages 151-197. ISSN 0890-9997. ©2003 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

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aims at improving the image of science by showing that there is an essential harmony between the spirit of Eastern wisdom and Western science. It attempts to suggest that modern physics goes far beyond technology, that the way—the Tao— of physics can be a path with heart, a way to spiritual knowledge and self-realization.

Elementary particle physics, according to Capra, was beginning to reveal something deep and important, a beautiful truth, about the universe, and even about ourselves. As far fetched as this particular example may seem, The tao of physics captured the essence of a moment in high-energy physics (HEP) in which beauty, elegance, simplicity, and unity were propelled to the forefront of discourse. The mode of this defense centered around a particular concept: symmetry. As a powerful and general set of principles in which the high-energy community believed, symmetry came to represent the cultural value of fundamental physics. In the immediate postwar period and during the 1950s HEP had drawn the support it required for its Big Science projects primarily from direct appeal to the importance of basic science to national security. The Cold War military-industrial complex justified an ever-increasing expenditure on science. Beginning in the middle of the 1960s an anti-science movement, crystallized around opposition to the war in Vietnam and drawing strength from counter-cultural critiques, took root in the United States. In undermining and even inverting basic assumptions about science, the anti-science movement seriously jeopardized the position of physics. At this critical juncture, high-energy physicists generated its sophisticated and cogent narrative about their work that centered on the concept and metaphor of symmetry. The success of HEP between 1945 and 1980 was crucially dependent both on symmetry as a tool of immense theoretical power and on public expenditure on accelerator facilities. Section 1 outlines how symmetry developed from an esoteric computational aid to a general principle that provided deep insights into the structure of nature and came to define the practice of HEP. The expensive accelerators that were used to verify and extend these findings were justified largely by appeals to the importance of basic science during the Cold War.2 Section 2 demonstrates that the symmetry narrative was a response to the crisis in HEP precipitated by the anti-science movement and realized in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), being emblematic of the beauty and cultural value of the field as well as a testament to its ongoing success. Section 3 turns to physics beyond the Standard Model. The rise of string theory in the early 1980s was accompanied by renewed military spending. Further, condensed matter physicists asserted the importance of broken symmetry in understanding real-world problems; this counter-narrative not only suggested an alternative approach to fundamental physics, but also implied that no single, “grand,” approach could capture 2. Paul N. Edwards, The closed world: Computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, 1997), 275-281.

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the complexity of nature. Under these circumstances the physics community fractured and the cohesive narrative of the 1960s and 1970s began to dissolve. In advocating the construction of a Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), high-energy physicists once again appealed to the technological imperatives of the national security state. When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1991 the justification lost its urgency. Because of the fragmentation of the physics community, high-energy physicists could not respond as they had in the face of the anti-science movement; the grand symmetry narrative, displaced by a tangle of strings and an array of broken systems, was no longer plausible. Congress cancelled the SSC in part because high-energy physicists could not sustain a coherent and believable argument for the cultural importance of their field. 1. THE EARLY COLD WAR

Symmetry An object has a symmetry if it appears identical when our point of view changes in some way. This intuitive definition applies equally well to real objects in threedimensional space (for example, a cylinder rotated about its central axis) and to mathematical properties in an abstract space. The former type of symmetry, associated with translation and rotation in actual space, are called spacetime symmetries, while the latter, dealing with transformations in mathematical (vector) spaces, are called internal symmetries. For many physicists, symmetry is associated with not only aesthetic beauty, but also with unity and mathematical and conceptual simplicity. In Dreams of a final theory, Steven Weinberg associates beauty with a sense of “inevitability” in theories, “the sense that nothing in the work could be changed…the beauty of a perfect structure, the beauty of everything fitting together, of nothing being changeable.”3 Symmetry is associated with simplicity because it helps to classify objects into manageable groups that can be manipulated and easily understood. And by showing how different points of view can be reconciled as manifestations of the same fundamental object or property, symmetries can unify previously unrelated physical concepts. Unity can also be promoted where different physical systems exhibit the same type of symmetries, and can thus be understood in similar or analogous ways. Feynman pointed to this suggestive property: “Discovering the laws of physics is like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle….Many [pieces] are lying around and cannot be fitted with the other ones…but we get encouragement from the common characteristics of several pieces….All the physical laws obey the same conservation principles.”4 Physicists in the 20th century came more and more to think of symmetry as closely related to beauty, simplicity, and unity. Albert Einstein was the first to show how symmetry principles could direct physicists to the resolution of fundamental theoretical problems. Both his special 3. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a final theory (3rd edn., New York, 1992), 135, 149. 4. Richard P. Feynman, Character of physical law (Cambridge, 1965), 83.

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theory of relativity (1905) and his general theory (1915) were based on symmetries that Einstein assumed should hold in the universe. Einstein began his paper on special relativity by pointing out an “asymmetry which does not appear to be inherent in the phenomena” that his theory would remove. The general theory rested on the principle of equivalence, a symmetry between all uniformly accelerated frames in a gravitational field. Beginning in the 1920s a handful of other theorists and mathematical physicists, including Arthur Eddington, Hermann Weyl, and Paul A.M. Dirac took up Einstein’s approach. The advent of quantum mechanics in 1925 enhanced the importance of symmetries to fundamental theory. The linear formalism of the new mechanics meant that rotations, reflections, and transformations could be applied naturally to the atomic realm. Considerations of symmetry figured heavily in Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of the theory. In her biography of her husband, Heisenberg’s wife related, “[h]e talked about the miracle of symmetry as the original archetype of creation, about harmony, about the beauty of simplicity, and its inner truth.”5 Heisenberg allowed the mathematical symmetries of quantum mechanics to substitute for much of his visual-intuitive sense, leading to his discovery of the uncertainty principle and his formulation of isospin symmetry.6 Dirac was “guided by a strong belief in formal beauty” in devising his relativistic theory of the electron in 1928. He believed that nature must be simple and the laws of nature must “possess mathematical beauty;” the interpretation of the mysterious negative energy solutions to the equation as positive electrons (positrons) was “forced on [physicists] by general considerations about the symmetry between positive and negative electric charge.”7 Although symmetry thus played an increasing role in the development and articulation of physical theory during the 1920s and 1930s, only a few influential and highly imaginative physicists had perceived how it could be deployed to gain fundamental insight into the intricate structures of nature. Beginning in the late 1940s, cosmic ray research and the new particle accelerators revealed a large number of previously unknown elementary particles. Cosmic rays brought the pion and muon, the accelerators the neutrino, the lambda, sigma, xi, and delta particles, and the antiproton between 1947 and 1955. By the early 1960s over one hundred sub-atomic objects were known.8 Murray Gell-Mann used symmetry principles to group these proliferating particles into “multiplets.” At this stage, the mathematics of group theory also began to assume a new importance. Elements of a mathematical group collectively de5. Quoted in S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and beauty: Aesthetics and motivations in science (Chicago, 1987), 22. 6. Arthur I. Miller, Imagery in scientific thought: Creating 20th-century physics (Boston, 1984), 142-152. 7. Quoted in Helge Kragh, Dirac: A scientific biography (Cambridge, 1990), 61, 275-76, 97. 8. Andrew Pickering, Constructing quarks: A sociological history of particle physics (Chicago, 1984), 48-50.


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fine a symmetry. In 1961 Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman independently managed to extend the concept of multiplets to a more sophisticated symmetry scheme based on the group SU(3). In a reference to the Buddhist path to enlightenment, GellMann called it the “eightfold way.” In this theory, symmetry became more than a tool of classification as the group properties were interpreted to reveal something deeper, though still hidden, about the structure of nature. Gell-Mann’s quark model of 1964, which reduced the more than one hundred known hadrons to combinations of three “quarks,” continued the use of symmetry to probe underlying structure. At first even he did not believe in their reality as fundamental particles: “It is fun to speculate about the way quarks would behave if they were physical particles of finite mass (instead of purely mathematical entities as they would be in the limit of infinite mass).” Experiments to search for quarks could only “help to reassure us of the non-existence of real quarks.”9 Quarks appealed to physicists not because they existed as electrons do but because they provided beauty, economy, and symmetry to strong-interaction dynamics. During the 1960s in HEP, the roles of symmetry as a tool of classification (as in crystallography) and as a tool of insight (as in Einstein’s usage) were combined. Symmetry allowed high-energy physicists to not only bring sense and order to the myriad of particles, but also to gain understanding of the architectures that held them together. By the early 1970s symmetry determined dynamics. Especially in the development of a full theory of the strong interaction (eventually called quantum chromodyanamics, QCD) the choice of the symmetry group of the gauge bosons— SU(3)—automatically picked out the form the force would take.10 Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani proposed the existence of a fourth quark (a “charmed” quark) extending the symmetry of hadrons from SU(3) to SU(4). Although their mechanism was designed to resolve an anomaly in the decay of kaons it was “motivated primarily by the symmetry between the four quarks and the four leptons which resulted, rather than by any requirements of the data.”11 As Glashow and his colleagues wrote in 1970, “The weak hadronic current is constructed in precise analogy with the weak lepton current, thereby revealing suggestive leptonquark symmetry.”12 Approximate symmetries, which had become especially important since Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang’s 1957 discovery of parity violation, also became increasingly revealing of underlying structure and dynamics. In 1964 James Cronin 9. Murray Gell-Mann, “A schematic model of baryons and mesons,” Physics letters, 8 (1964), 214-215, on 215. 10. Murray Gell-Mann, “Indirect approaches to fundamental theory,” in Harvey B. Newman and Thomas Ypsilantis, eds., The history of original ideas and basic discoveries in particle physics, NATO ASI Series B, Physics, vol. 352 (New York, 1996), 3-5, on 3. 11. Pickering (ref. 8), 184-85. 12. S.L. Glashow, J. Iliopoulos, and L. Maiani, “Weak interactions with lepton-hadron symmetry,” Physical review, D2 (1970), 1285-1292, on 1286.

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and Val Fitch, by examining kaon decays, discovered that CP (charge conjugation and parity combined), which switched left and right and matter for antimatter, was also not an exact symmetry of nature. Symmetry violation sparked a spate of articles speculating on the deeper philosophical issues behind conservation laws.13 The importance that symmetry, simplicity, and elegance had taken on by the early 1970s is well illustrated by the opening paragraph of Sheldon Glashow and Howard Georgi’s paper on SU(5) theory:14 We present a series of hypotheses and speculations leading inescapably to the conclusion that SU(5) is the gauge group of the world—that all elementary particle forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic) are different manifestations of the same fundamental interaction involving a single coupling strength, the fine-structure constant. Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.

The Lagrangian of the Standard Model, the theory generally accepted by the highenergy community by 1980, could be derived entirely from the local gauge invariance of the appropriate symmetry groups. High-energy physicists, both theorists and experimentalists, had come to accept symmetry as the most important and powerful tool for gaining insight into the underlying structure of the universe that they sought to describe. Between 1965 and 1980 this commitment to symmetry came to define the high-energy community as a cohesive scientific group. Big Science The symmetry schemes with which high-energy theorists tinkered, however, had to be grounded in observation, their mathematical elegance tested by experiment. To do this effectively required increasingly large and expensive particle accelerators capable of colliding the fundamental constituents of matter at high velocity. The proliferation and growth in size and public investment in such machines was as important to HEP as symmetry principles. If high-energy physicists could have chosen when to begin their enterprise, they could not have done much better than the early postwar years. Faith in science and scientists was unparalleled. Physicists and the public understood basic science, although often liberally supported by the DOD, as a “pure” discipline isolated from weapons research. HEP, being especially fundamental (and therefore most removed from “applied” concerns), appeared to be especially “pure” 13. Eugene P. Wigner, “Violations of symmetry in physics,” Scientific American, 213:6 (1965), 28-36; Gerald Feinberg and Maurice Goldhaber, “The conservation laws of physics,” Scientific American, 209:4 (1963), 36-45. 14. Howard Georgi and Sheldon L. Glashow, “Unity of all elementary particle forces,” Physical review letters, 32:8 (1974), 438.


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and “good.” Scientists existed on a moral plane above the ordinary person.15 Riding the wave of the atomic bomb and the Cold War, esteemed by society, high-energy physicists had little trouble justifying expenditure on larger and larger accelerators. Most physicists favored the program set forth in Vannevar Bush’s Science, the endless frontier. Bush had stressed the need for the continuation and even strengthening of ties between science and the military. Yet he advocated the creation of a civilian government-funded research agency.16 The Steelman Report of 1947 makes a similar reference to national defense. “It is unfortunate that any part of the case for Federal support of science should rest on its military importance. But no responsible person can fail to recognize the uneasy character of the present peace.”17 The founding of Brookhaven National Laboratory illustrates the ease with which particle physics established itself in the wake of the war. Brookhaven was first proposed in 1946 not as a high-energy installation, but as the site of a nuclear reactor to serve universities in the northeast.18 Norman Ramsey and I.I. Rabi, returning from wartime work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and Los Alamos, wanted a large-scale, federally funded laboratory that could serve several of the northeastern institutions.19 Thinking fully within the model of wartime physics, they realized that interdisciplinary co-operative effort, effective administration, and national security concerns would be paramount in a project of this sort. A number of New York universities formed a consortium and submitted their initial proposal (on January 16, 1946) to the director of the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers. As reflected in its cheap, factory-like design and its hasty construction, Brookhaven was an extension of wartime laboratory work into peacetime basic science. These physicists assumed that the basic research they wished to undertake would be supported by the Federal government. They insisted that the laboratory should be restricted to non-classified work and did not think it necessary to appeal to anything but the intrinsic value of basic reactor research to justify the expenditure. Although they encountered numerous problems in both design and management, they were allowed to continue and their reactor successfully achieved criticality on August 22, 1950. The mystique and promise of wartime science was difficult to shatter for both physicists and the public that supported them. Between 1948 and 1952 Brookhaven built the Cosmotron, a 2,200-ton, $8.7 million synchrotron designed to reach a maximum energy of 3 GeV. At the comple15. Robert K. Merton, “The normative structure of science,” in Norman W. Storer, ed., The sociology of science (Chicago, 1973), 267-278. 16. Vannevar Bush, Science, the endless frontier (Washington, D.C., 1945), 12. 17. John R. Steelman, Science and public policy: A program for the nation (Washington, D.C., 1947), vols. 1, 3. 18. Allan A. Needell, “Nuclear reactors and the founding of Brookhaven National Laboratory,” HSPS, 14:1 (1983), 93-122. 19. Norman F. Ramsey, “Early history of associated universities and Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1966” (Brookhaven Lecture Series—Unity of Science), 1-2.

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tion of construction in 1952, Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), the consortium responsible for managing the project, wanted to hold a large public dedication to celebrate the “social good” of this publicly funded machine. The AEC thought the fanfare unnecessary and ruled that the dedication should be a “scientific and academic” event: the benefits of the Cosmotron, they argued, “could not be well understood by a sufficiently large percentage of the population to permit it to be used as a basis for a presidential pronouncement.” Henry D. Smyth, an AEC commissioner at the time, declared at the ceremony that the accelerator was built for the “enlightenment and benefit of mankind,” a phrase later immortalized on a steel plate over the beam tunnel.20 President Eisenhower warned that this enlightenment might come with strings attached. In his famous valedictory address of January 1961, he warned that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” and elsewhere complained that “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” 21 In 1963 Meg Greenfield, a science commentator for The reporter, echoed Eisenhower’s concerns: scientists’ roles in laboratories, universities, and as government advisors created dangerous conflicts of interest that compromised America’s position vis-à-vis the USSR. “The prevalent view seems to be that since science is more or less objective truth, scientists themselves are all but interchangeable, and their individual identity need not be a matter of concern…[but now] the Congress has learned that a scientist’s own emotions and his personal politics may well affect the advice he gives.” 22 More importantly, commentators began to raise concerns over the level of public funding of basic science. Daniel Greenberg, a journalist covering politics for Science magazine through the early 1960s, recalled that from about 1962 onward basic science began to be called to account: “while basic research grows ever more costly, it has nothing to sell in the conventional marketplace…when the public is asked to support science, it is, from its own scientifically illiterate perspective, being asked to support the production of incomprehensible intangibles.”23 The public, quite reasonably, wanted to see some material return on their investment in basic science. Congress too began to ask physicists more awkward questions about the benefits of their research. These became loudest in the debates over the development of another accelerator, this time on the West Coast. Wolfgang Panofsky proposed the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in April 1957, a few months before Sputnik. The cost was estimated at $78 million plus $14 million per year in operating costs, yet the initial proposal made little effort to justify such lavish 20. Robert P. Crease, Making physics: A biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946-72 (Chicago, 1999), 148, 149. 21. Daniel J. Kevles, The physicists: The history of a scientific community in modern America (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987), 393, and Ralph E. Lapp, The new priesthood: The scientific elite and the uses of power (New York, 1965), 14. 22. Meg Greenfield, “Science goes to Washington,” The reporter, 29 (1963), 20-26, on 22, 25. 23. Daniel S. Greenberg, The politics of pure science (New York, 1967), 27.


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expenditure apart from appeals to its intrinsic value to high-energy research.24 “Stanford scientists took for granted that the government would support largescale particle accelerators for their own sake.” Between late 1957 and May 1959, when Eisenhower finally announced that he had asked Congress to underwrite the machine, the debate over SLAC became one of the most controversial and complicated political issues of the day. SLAC endured criticism from scientists and politicians alike. In 1960, Congressman John R. Pillion (R–New York) asked: “What is the practical value of this accelerator? What are the prospects of putting the knowledge that we will obtain from this accelerator into practical use? How will it aid our defense? How will it raise the annual standard of living of our people?”25 Big Science would have to answer for its big budgets. The question, why should the government fund basic science that promised no tangible return to society, became entangled with another: what was the proper role of scientific advisors in policy-making? Whereas funding from the Brookhaven Cosmotron had come directly and promptly from one agency (the AEC), the SLAC debates involved three funding bodies, the DOD, the NSF, and the AEC, all vying for funds to support the project. Whereas the major problems facing the Cosmotron proposal were technical and scientific, SLAC was drawn further and further into partisan politics and broader questions of the value of HEP to society. Simultaneously, some physicists challenged the scientific merit of the Stanford accelerator. In mid-1958 the AEC and Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) formed a joint committee to investigate the SLAC proposal and to evaluate the importance of HEP more generally. The Piore Panel, as it came to be known, ran into immediate internal disagreement. Rabi and Hans Bethe (from Cornell) both questioned the scientific merit of the proposal and Eugene Wigner denounced the committee’s recommendation in support of the Stanford accelerator as “irresponsible.” Later Wigner continued to criticize the findings of the Piore panel, saying that the diversion of resources jeopardized the national defense and represented a commitment to HEP out of proportion with other areas of science.26 Moreover, he saw it as blatantly misrepresenting the aims of particle physics: “[W]e do not expect at present that high-energy physics results will lead to ‘practical results’ in the near future. Its aim is a deeper understanding of nature, not the increase of our power to accomplish something tangible.”27 24. “Proposal for a two-mile linear electron accelerator,” Apr 1957, in Subcommittee on Research and Development and the Subcommittee on Legislation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,” Eighty-Sixth Congress, First Session, 14 and 15 Jul 1959, 283-525. 25. Zouyue Wang, “The politics of big science in the Cold War: PSAC and the funding of SLAC,” HSPS, 25:2 (1995), 329-356, on 332, 338, 345. 26. Ibid., 338, 345, 350-351. 27. “Commentary by Dr. Eugene P. Wigner on the PSAC-GAC Panel Report of December 14, 1960, on High-Energy Accelerator Physics” in Piore Panel Report–1960, President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, Washington, D.C., 15 Dec 1960. Reprinted in JCAE, Congress of the United States, “High-energy Physics Program: Report on national policy and

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SLAC’s supporters fell back on the Cold War and Sputnik to justify their aims. Stanford’s initial proposal, as well as most of the Piore Panel’s first report, contain little justification beyond the project’s scientific and technical merit. By early 1959, however, a PSAC report argued that: “[L]inear accelerators…have at times been suggested for military weapons applications such as defeating air dropped nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles. Although these possibilities have not materialized, they further illustrate the relevance of linear accelerator technology to the long-term interests of the DOD.”28 Scientists also invoked “national prestige” and competition with the Soviet Union to justify expenditures on accelerators. George Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist, and later Jerome Weisner, MIT electrical engineer, used their positions as Presidential Science Advisors to push this rhetoric as far as possible. The big accelerators and their GeV energies “captured the public’s imagination and became important measures of a country’s international prestige.”29 Even before Sputnik, scientists visiting the USSR reported on the Dubna accelerator as a machine far better than anything in the United States. It was an “awe-inspiring sight…almost twice as big as the Berkeley machine…costs and budgets don’t count,” physicists told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). The respected particle theorist Robert Marshak from the University of Rochester reported that Soviet labs were “reminiscent of wartime operation…getting enormous momentum and that the objective is to overtake American science in its great diversity, its high quality and its magnificent sweep.”30 The message for science administrators: the U.S. had to do all it could to keep up. Complimentary to these arguments, other physicists made claims, as PSAC did for SLAC, that HEP might yield something for the military.31 And there might be civilian “spinoffs” too: high power transmitting tubes, vacuum pumps, magnetic technology, electronic and on-line computing systems, and especially highly trained-students and technicians that spread their talents to other industries. Even if high-energy physics never contributed directly to weaponry, its laboratories attracted and nurtured talented individuals who went on to work on more applied projects. This human output included engineers and technicians in cutting edge technologies. The Manhattan Project had needed tens of thousands of people; national security required a pool of technically-trained workers that could be mobilized for large-scale projects. The NSF, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and PSAC emphasized that advanced technology was crucial to the United States

background information,” 89th Congress, 1st Session, Feb 1965, 132. 28. Quoted in Wang (ref. 25), 339. 29. Ibid., 352. 30. Quoted in Greenberg (ref. 23), 217. 31. In 1965 it was reported that Luke C.L. Yuan, a Brookhaven physicist, had speculated that if quarks and antiquarks could be separated and stored, and then brought together to annihilate, one thousand times more energy could be released than from a thermonuclear reaction. “Research facilities and programs,” Physics today, 18:5 (1965), 100-106, on 100.


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in its “concern for its economy, the health of its citizens, and its defense.”32 They pointed to the unpredictable nature of basic research and its role in creating the new knowledge and technology that can be translated into economic growth. Basic science would inevitably, if indirectly, lead to tangible gain. 2. THE SITES OF FERMILAB

Counter-culture By July 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson had added 50,000 ground troops to the 75,000 already in Southeast Asia, with 175,000 more to follow soon after. He increased the draft from 17,000 to 35,000 per month, authorized offensive ground operations in Vietnam, and stepped up bombing. The same year saw the first public demonstrations of opposition to the war: a campus teach-in at the University of Michigan in March 1965 and a march in Washington, D.C. in April began eight years of antiwar protest.33 For many young, middle-class Americans, the Vietnam War symbolized the ugly and corrupt nature of Cold War America. The war threatened their lives and epitomized their discontents. Vietnam was a war of the strong against the weak, of machine against man, of technology against nature, of an impenetrable bureaucracy against simple peasant farmers. The antiwar movement quickly became associated with causes that embraced a range of social discontents from sexual liberty to racial discrimination. It opposed not only the conflict in Vietnam but the social, political, and cultural institutions that it believed made the war possible. Science, and in particular the physical sciences, came under attack for several related reasons. As a major player in the military-industrial complex it was an obvious and visible target. Scientists designed and built the weapons of war. Many high-energy physicists belonged to military think tanks, like RAND and the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) where they conceived not only new weapons but attempted to devise new strategies of war-making. The elite Jason Division of the IDA, for example, which included Murray Gell-Mann, Marvin L. Goldberger, Steven Weinberg, and Freeman Dyson, attempted to devise methods of anti-ballistic missile defense, counterinsurgency, and infiltration; during the Vietnam War they proposed the creation of an electronic barrier across the demilitarized zone between north and south Vietnam that would kill anyone who entered the area.34 When the anti-science critique extended to basic science, particle physicists reaped a consequence of their association of their work with the rhetoric, practice, and funding of Cold War science.

32. Basic research: A national resource (Washington, D.C., 1957, VII, NSF 57-35); Scientific progress, the universities, and the Federal Government (Washington, D.C., 1960); Federal support of basic research in institutions of higher learning (Washington, D.C., 1964). 33. Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s war (New York, 1996), 98, 112. 34. Kevles (ref. 21), 402.

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Counter-cultural views of society placed machines, technology, and the scientific worldview at the center of their critique. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, who became a hero for the dissidents, put the dehumanizing influence of science as being at the root of many social discontents:35 The individuals who make up the bulk of the population in the “affluent societies” live in a universe of permanent defense and aggression. It manifests itself in the war against the Vietcong and in the struggle against the Negroes, in the huge network of industries and services which work for the military establishment and its accessories, but it also manifests itself in the violence released and made productive by science and technology…[there is a] progressing transfer of power from the human individual to the technical or bureaucratic apparatus, from living to dead labor, from personal to remote control, from machine (or group of machines) to a whole mechanized system.

For Marcuse the heart of the problem was the totalizing and all-consuming system that the machines of science constructed. Marcuse’s was not a lone voice. In his book Pentagon of power (1964), Lewis Mumford criticized science for ignoring the “personal forces” that affect experience.36 He saw the space race and nuclear weapons as manifestations of a megamachine, designed by the technocracy to reinforce their coercive power structure. Science was more than complicit in creating this “absolutism of the system.” Ralph Lapp and Charles Reich’s semi-popular writings also questioned the powerful position of science in society.37 The works of Theodore Roszak, particularly his Making of a counter-culture (1968), were among the most influential characterization of the counter-cultural movement. Roszak’s damning social analysis opposed science to democracy, freedom, adventure, humanity, peace, and inter-subjectivity. With its “objective consciousness” science had pervaded and polluted society with “cool curiosity, untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder…without sympathy or identification.” Society had become beholden to “experts” whose job was the “elaboration of chilly jargons and technical terms that replace sensuous speech.” Science aimed to conquer and subjugate nature by categorization; the scientist was a mere machine for carrying out this task. “[Scientists] systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death. They do their job as they are ordered to do it…objectively. For them the world at large has become a laboratory.”38 The carefully cultivated image of the scientist as a dispassionate observer of nature now played out as a poignant cri35. Herbert Marcuse, “The individual and the great society,” in Bertram M. Gross, ed. A great society? (New York, 1968), 62. 36. Lewis Mumford, The myth of the machine: The pentagon of power (New York, 1964). 37. Lapp (ref. 21); Charles Reich, The greening of America (New York, 1970). 38. Theodore Roszak, The making of a counterculture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition (3rd edn., Berkeley, 1995), 218, 219, 223.


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tique. Not only science, but the “scientific spirit” must be abolished if society was to heal its social and political wounds. Here is Roszak on big physics:39 [H]igh energy accelerators offer melancholy examples of major scientific talent taking expensive advantage of the public gullibility….[Scientists] have accepted the support of military and paramilitary agencies to finance high-cost computerized research in counterinsurgency warfare or behavioral modeling. At times, their arguments have been as barefacedly nationalistic as that of any bomb physicist.

By rejecting science’s special claim to truth and doubting its disinterestedness, Roszak undermined its claim on public funds. Concerns over the social wisdom and responsibility of scientists fed into other counter-cultural anxieties, especially within the fledgling environmental movement. Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson both highlighted the consequences of overconsumption and linked big science and big technology to the destruction of the natural world.40 If science was so closely tuned to nature, Roszak asked, why did it create some of the greatest environmental problems?41 Operational success has, supposedly, been the ultimate validation of scientific knowledge. Science is true, we have been told over and over again, because “it works.” But now we discover that the scientific world view does not work. Not if our outlook is holistic. Not if we consider the long run—which, in the case of industrial society, seems to be about two centuries…people in our society seem to be learning more about their proper place in nature from American Indian lore, Zen, and Tantra than from Western science…urban-industrial society must look beyond its own science to such primitive and exotic traditions for a life-enhancing natural philosophy.

Roszak and Marcuse’s analysis of modern social ailments might seem a long way from a popular movement against science. Yet their criticisms captured the essence of what many people felt. HEP machines seemed exorbitantly expensive; the connection between science and weapons-makers was all too clear on many campuses; scientists were increasingly visible in Washington; the technologies of killing filled the images streaming from Southeast Asia; and the disharmony between cars, chemicals, industry and the environment became more and more apparent in everyday living.42 These observations aggregated to form a visceral 39. Theodore Roszak, “Science: A technocratic trap,” Atlantic monthly, 230 (1972), 56-61, on 58. 40. Rachel Carson, Silent spring (London, 1962); Ralph Nader, Unsafe at any speed (New York, 1965). 41. Roszak (ref. 39), 61. 42. Indeed, the Port Huron statement of 1962, written by the young leaders of the fledgling Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), bears strong similarities to the concerns of Marcuse and Roszak.

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sense of science as inhuman, unresponsive to social needs, insensitive to nature, and part of a network of control that maintained the status quo. The connections between the antiwar movement, the counter-culture, and the antipathy toward science emerged explicitly in the student protests that racked college campuses in the late 1960s. Many of these demonstrations were directed specifically against university laboratories. In April 1968 riots at Columbia led to the occupation of the Pupin Physics Laboratory as a protest against some of the faculty membership in the Jason division.43 At the University of Wisconsin radicals detonated a bomb that damaged a building shared by the physics department and the Army Mathematics Research Center.44 In May 1966 students and faculty had picketed administrative offices to protest against secret contracts between the CIA and the Stanford Electronics Laboratory. The Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a large on-campus business sponsored by AEC and Army contracts for warrelated research, including chemical weapons, came under especially harsh criticism. Part of SLAC was destroyed by bombs. On April 3, 1969, after occupations of the Systems Techniques Laboratory and the Applied Electronics Laboratory, students demanded that Stanford end all classified research at SRI and at the university. Increasingly destructive and violent protests as well as long sit-ins followed. In May the trustees dropped SRI and the Dean of Engineering announced that his department would no longer accept classified contracts.45 Vietnam mobilized radical students against science on campus. The most significant symbol of the new opposition to science were the events of March 4, 1969 at MIT. Early that year graduate students and faculty began to plan a “research stoppage” to raise awareness of the “misuse of scientific and technical knowledge.”46 Faculty speakers included Hans Bethe and Victor F. Weisskopf. Other physicists who signed the document supporting the research stoppage included Francis Low, Steven Weinberg, Philip Morse, and Herman Feshbach. The “strike” was directed particularly at the Instrumentation Laboratory, run by Charles Draper, which developed missile guidance systems. Most of the speakers spoke about the militarization of science. “Scientists must be concerned about the physical and social effects of their work,” Weisskopf said. “The main and most important case of misuse of science is its use for military purposes.”47 March 4 captured the mood of the public. Newspapers praised the faculty and students involved for finding “the courage to bite the hand that has been feeding them.”48 Scientists, students, and the Pounds Panel appointed to investi43. Ronald Fraser, 1968: A student generation in revolt (London, 1988). 44. Kevles (ref. 21), 403. 45. Steward W. Leslie, The Cold War and American science: The military-industrial-academic complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993), 241-249. 46. Nelson Bryce, “Scientists plan research strike at MIT on March 4,” Science, 163 (1969), 373. 47. Weisskopf’s speech, “Intellectuals in government,” is printed in Jonathan Allen, ed., March 4: Scientists, students, and society (Cambridge, 1970), 25-29. 48. “March 4 at MIT,” New republic, 160 (1969), 10-11.


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gate the effects of military contracts called for a gradual conversion from military to “socially useful” research. What happened at MIT, the New York Times editorialized, “is a significant contribution to sanity and social responsibility, not merely for MIT but for all scientists, on questions that have caused deep concern to the entire academic community.”49 Campuses across the nation followed MIT’s example and stopped classes or organized protests. In September, Draper was replaced as the head of the Instrumentation Laboratory and by January 1970 MIT had decided to divest itself of the laboratory.50 The antiwar movement had found a tangible target in the military-industrial-scientific complex on campus and proved remarkably effective in forcing universities and scientists to rethink their policies. The focus on science-for-weapons increased popular doubts about the social usefulness of basic science and consequently escalated criticism of its funding. Harper’s magazine predicted in 1966 that: “the country is going to have to make some decisions that we have been evading.…How can the taxpayer’s natural eagerness to get something for his money be reconciled with the scientist’s desire both for virtually unlimited money and for freedom in using it, regardless of payoffs?”51 Congress became increasingly reluctant to appropriate funds for basic science in areas where the “social good” was questionable:52 [M]ost vulnerable to budget cuts will be those costing very large sums of money— such as Mohole and the 200-bev accelerator—with little foreseeable benefit, either to the ordinary citizen or to other branches of science. The accelerator, for instance, would be the most costly single scientific installation ever built....What could we expect to get in return? So far as I can discover, nobody really knows....Why, then, should we be in such a hurry to build this vastly expensive piece of specialized equipment—especially at a time when the economy is overheated, the budget strained, and scientific talent in short supply. Why shouldn’t it be downgraded on the priority list—to be considered again in a few years, or decades?

The war, the protests, and the counter-cultural critique added a new urgency to the problem of public support for science. The Mansfield Amendment demonstrated the seriousness of the threat. In 1968 Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) put forward changes to the military authorization bill that would prevent the DOD from funding any research not directed at a specific military purpose. Although defeated in that year, in 1969 Mansfield succeeded in pushing through the crucial sections.53 The amendment provided for increased funding for NSF to take over support of basic 49. “Sense on defense science,” New York Times (4 Jun 1969), 46. 50. Leslie (ref. 45), 234-238. 51. John Fischer, “Why our scientists are about to be dragged, moaning, into politics,” Harper’s, 233 (1966), 16-27, on 17. 52. Ibid., 27. 53. Kevles (ref. 21), 414-415.

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science, but its passage resulted in an overall reduction in research and development funds. Around 1967, federal support of research and development started to decrease in constant dollars. As Congressman Melvin Price (D-Illinois), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Research and Development of the JCAE, warned: “Scientists should not forget that if society pays for their research, there must be adequate repayment to society.”54 Total spending on basic research in physics declined (in 1983 dollars) from $1045.2 million in 1967 to just $690.2 million in 1976.55 The scientific community complained bitterly. The elitism of science also came under attack. Too much of the NSF budget, Congressmen complained, went to a handful of prestigious institutions (mostly in the Northeast and California). Congressman Albert Thomas (D-Texas), Chairman of the Independent Offices Appropriations Subcommittee, berated NSF’s associate director Henry W. Riecken, Jr.:56 Where do these top five percent come from? That is one of the defects of the program, in my own judgement. That you pick them from half a dozen universities to the exclusion of everybody else. I do not think there is much difference in fundamental intelligence and human nature. You give these people an opportunity to spread their wings and fly and they will do it.

The location of the 200-BeV accelerator laboratory raised similar concerns with geographical and institutional equity. Scientists insisted that their enterprise be run on a merit basis, but they did not assuage Congressional concerns. Instead legislators looked into the distribution of money between different fields of basic science. As Senator Warren G. Magnuson complained, “we don’t seem to receive much help from the scientific community on the question of priorities.”57 As the Congress well realized, every scientific discipline wanted as much as it could get. HEP seemed to be absorbing a hugely disproportionate share. By the late 1960s basic research in general and HEP in particular had reached a state of crisis. The justification that had sustained lavish expenditure on projects such as Brookhaven in the early 1950s and SLAC in the aftermath of Sputnik no longer attracted financial and popular support for basic science. The counter-cultural critique tarred all science with the same military brush and claimed to demonstrate that big science was out of touch with humanity, nature, and all significant social issues. Physicists saw their research funds diminish as their traditional justifications grew impotent.

54. “Research facilities and programs” (ref. 31), 100. 55. Kragh (ref. 7), 395. 56. Quoted in Daniel S. Greenberg, “NSF budget: Cuts by House group leave little leeway for growth in support of research projects,” Science, 148 (1965), 329. 57. Fischer (ref. 51), 27.


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Fragmentations In the winter of 1963 Minerva published an article by Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that outlined a method of determining how to divide funds between different branches of science.58 During the early 1960s Weinberg had been working to diversify Oak Ridge’s research program to include such socially useful projects as desalination of sea water and cheap energy. He challenged other branches of science to do likewise: to prove their value to society. Directly addressing the worth of science vis-à-vis education and social welfare programs, Weinberg had in mind Congress’s suspicion of science of dubious relevance. The merit of a scientific field, Weinberg argued, lay in its relevance to other “neighboring” fields of science; funding should depend on this relevance and congruence with human values and welfare. HEP fell short on this scale.59 [In] relevance to the sciences in which it is embedded, relevance to human affairs, and relevance to technology—high-energy physics rates poorly....[T]he world of sub-nuclear particles seems remote from the rest of the physical sciences.…I know of few discoveries in ultra-high-energy physics which bear strongly on the rest of science. As for its bearing on human welfare and technology, I believe it is essentially nil. These two low grades would not bother me if high-energy physics were cheap. But it is terribly expensive.

Weinberg’s attack on HEP was not only highly visible and influential, but demonstrated that as funds for basic science became scarcer, scientists in other fields would not hesitate to criticize fundamental physics. Solid-state physics had grown even faster than particle physics after World War II. It was not only larger than HEP, but with its contributions to electronics proved far more relevant to both weapons-related and socially useful technologies. Yet during the 1960s it too experienced financial cutbacks and many solidstate physicists began to resent the large amounts spent on HEP. In a famous article that appeared in Science in 1972, Philip Anderson challenged the notion that particle physics was more fundamental than other branches of physics. “At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear.” The laws that govern the larger scale cannot be deduced from those of the smaller scale.60 Radically new structures and features emerge that could not have been predicted in any way from a full mathematical description of the smaller scale. The reductive imperative of particle physics led to increasing abstraction and complication, but little of inherent value: “the more elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of fun58. E.g., Alvin Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, 1967). 59. Alvin Weinberg, “Criteria for scientific choice,” in Edward Shils, ed., Criteria for scientific development (Cambridge, 1968), 21-34, on 30. 60. Philip Anderson, “More is different,” Science, 177:4047 (1972), 393-396.

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damental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.”61 Of particular importance to Anderson’s argument was the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB), first described in superconductivity research. Universal symmetries break down in complex, large-scale systems. For instance, when a ferromagnet cools below the Curie temperature the isotropic symmetry of the system breaks with an unpredictable outcome—the axis that picks out the magnetic poles and breaks the symmetry may fall in any direction, and a new physics is required to describe the system. Unlike the broken or approximate symmetries of high-energy physics, SSB implied a fundamental disconnect between the symmetric and disordered states and gave a concrete example of how the reductive chain of explanation could be broken. Particle physicists perceived approximate symmetries as revealing something profound about the structure of nature at a deeper level, whereas SSB suggested a break between laws at a certain scale and laws at a smaller (deeper) scale. Moreover, the power of SSB to explain superconductivity suggested that interesting and useful physics was to be found amid disorder and contingency. In the mid-1960s scientists mobilized to provide new criteria for the support of science. In 1965, a report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Astronautics addressed the questions, “Why should our society support basic science at all…[and] how much basic science should we support?”62 Frederick Seitz, President of the NAS, expressed the sense of instability and hostility scientists then felt in his introduction to a later report:63 The changes that are taking place at present—and I believe that we are in midstream—are so rapid that new concepts impinge significantly upon old ones deeply rooted in our national traditions. Clearly, we are in one way or another evolving an entirely new set of national traditions under conditions in which old viewpoints die hard and in which a climate of struggle will continue for at least another twenty years, by which time the new traditions—whatever they may be— will probably have achieved something in the nature of a steady state.

In July 1971, Philip Handler, a biochemist and Seitz’s successor at the NAS, addressed the convocation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He argued in “defense of science,” that the social problems associated with science (environmental degradation, the nuclear arms race, drugs) could not be attributed to science alone. Rather it was a societal and governmental responsibility to “examine, in advance, each new technology before it is made generally available.” Handler 61. Ibid., 393. 62. Basic research and national goals: Report to the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives (National Academy of Sciences, CA, 1965), 21, 5. 63. National Academy of Sciences, Science, government, and the universities, ed., Frederick Seitz (Seattle, 1966), 7.


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admitted that science had its problems, but many of them merely reflected broader social ills. The criticism of basic science as irrelevant ignored “the unpredictability and long lead time” necessary for the production of useful technology and the rapidly changing values of society, which gave science no “fixed target.” Science remained the best tool to “alleviate the condition of man.” 64 Physics experienced an additional alarm in the downturn in the number entering the field. Recruitment into physics (as measured by number of Ph.D.s granted) had declined from more than 1500 in 1970 to just over 900 in the early 1980s; solid state and particle physics both saw declines of over 50 percent.65 Many talented students took up biology or to the environmental sciences (or the social sciences) instead of physics, largely since they did not like the closeness of physics to the military. Competition between disciplines and disagreement over the best ways to respond to the criticisms against science led to political discord within the physics community. In 1967 Charles Schwartz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, asked the members of the American Physical Society (APS) to amend its constitution so that the Society would be able to oppose the war in Vietnam.66 The proposal was defeated. On October 30, 1971 Robert H. March of the University of Wisconsin at Madison proposed to amend the goals of the APS as follows: “to increase man’s understanding of nature and to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of life for all people. The Society shall assist its members in the pursuit of these humane goals and it shall shun those activities which are judged to contribute harmfully to the welfare of mankind.”67 More and more physicists responded to the crisis by echoing the concerns of the anti-science movement and by calling for social awareness within physics. Some prominent physicists gave up positions in Jason or other defense-oriented organizations or spoke out against the war. Steven Weinberg quit Jason, refusing to do research that potentially contributed to the Vietnam War.68 Repairs Despite the deepening crisis, between 1965 and 1980 HEP continued to prosper. SLAC reached completion in 1966, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator Bypass collider began operation in 1967. Construction ended on the National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory or Fermilab) in 1972 with a beam energy twice as high as originally planned. The SPEAR (Stanford Positron-Electron Asymmetric Rings) collider went online in the same year. Particularly important advances during this period include observations of scaling phenomena in deep inelastic electron scattering at SLAC and its subsequent expla64. Philip Handler, In defense of science (Jerusalem, 1971), 11, 17, 19. 65. Kragh (ref. 7), 396. 66. Kevles (ref. 21), 406. 67. “The APS amendment on professional responsibility,” Physics today, 25 (1972), 42. 68. Kevles (ref. 21), 402.

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nation (by Feynman and B.J. Bjorken) in terms of the quark-parton model, and the “November Revolution” of 1974 resulting in the discovery of “bound charm” quark states. How can these successes, especially in attracting money for accelerators, be accounted for? The answer lies in the particle physicists’ response to the crisis in funding and esteem. It became manifest in the person of Robert R. Wilson and the laboratory that he designed and built. Every aspect of this biggest of accelerators attempted to convey the essential features of HEP: a discipline seeking elegance and unity at the most basic level. The response of high-energy physicists to the anti-science crisis was a tangibly successful re-shaping of the story of particles to bring to the fore principles of symmetry and beauty that could be appreciated by the non-scientist. Fermilab inaugurated a grand narrative that sustained fundamental physics through the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Frontier, Wyoming in 1914, Robert Rathbun Wilson studied physics under Ernest O. Lawrence at Berkeley during the 1930s, earning his Ph.D. in 1940. That year he was appointed to a teaching position at Princeton where he undertook research into the separation of uranium isotopes (inventing the Isotron method) for the atomic bomb before joining the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1943. He became head of the physics research division responsible for experimental nuclear physics for the Manhattan Project. Wilson moved to Cornell in 1947 as director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies where he presided over the construction of four electron synchrotrons.69 During his twenty-year tenure at Cornell, Wilson developed a reputation for producing not only good accelerators and high quality physics, but also for doing so quickly, efficiently, and at low cost. Ingenious, even “maverick,” cost-saving innovations for accelerators became Wilson’s hallmark. “I learned from Lawrence to define what you want and then, damn, make it come out that way…you don’t think about what other people regard to be impossible…you work as hard as you can…you don’t ever say no, ever.”70 Wilson’s down-to-earth approach also helped him to communicate easily with politicians and other non-scientists about physics.71 Moreover Wilson was acutely sensitive to the broader impact of physics on society and culture. He worked diligently to bring atomic energy under civilian control and was influential in the founding of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, assuming its chairmanship in 1946. Wilson also expressed humanistic interests through artwork. He studied sculpture at the Academia Belli Arte in Rome and had a highly refined aesthetic sense that influenced his approach to accelerator design and permeated his physics.72 Wilson was the example of what HEP had to be if it was to enjoy public approbation and funding. 69. Boyce McDaniel and Albert Silverman, “Obituaries: Robert Rathbun Wilson,” Physics today, 53:4 (2000), 82-83. 70. Quoted in Catherine Westfall and Lillian Hoddeson, “Thinking small in Big Science: The founding of Fermilab, 1960-72,” Technology and culture, 37 (1996), 469-470. 71. Greenberg (ref. 23), 243. 72. In 1960 Wilson took a sabbatical from Cornell to pursue his artistic interests. Peter


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On February 6, 1967 the Universities Research Association (URA) responsible for the design and construction of a new high-energy accelerator at Weston, Illinois, asked Robert Wilson to direct their project.73 Edward Lofgren of Berkeley, the URA’s first choice, had turned the job down on the grounds that the $240 million budget would prove impossibly small. During 1965 Wilson had written a series of papers criticizing Berkeley’s proposals for a 200-GeV accelerator as “overdesigned” and “too conservative,” and suggested alternatives that would cost $50 million instead of the $340 million the Berkeley team proposed. Although Berkeley revised their designs, Wilson’s criticism no doubt influenced the AEC’s decision to award the 200-GeV project to URA’s Weston site rather than to one in California.74 The situation of the world’s most powerful HEP laboratory in the Midwest, proved extremely significant.75 Situating this new accelerator in the Midwest did much to quell arguments that funding of HEP was elitist and unfair. Moreover, the proximity of Weston to Chicago as a “balance point” of the American frontier, and its association with the great plains of America’s heartland had a symbolic significance.76 Some accounts suggest that President Johnson approved the Weston site to secure the passage of fair housing legislation through the Senate. Although the historical record does not confirm the connection, civil rights did have a significant influence on the siting of the accelerator. In 1966, during the decision process, the AEC worried that Illinois had “no fair housing laws” and that “civil rights leaders in DuPage County express[ed] doubt that assurance of nondiscrimination would be honored.” 77 Civil rights issues proved troublesome for the accelerator. In hearings before the JCAE in February 1967, Clarence Mitchell, Washington Director of the NAACP, and Edward Rutledge, Executive Director of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, both criticized the AEC’s decision and called for fair housing and equal opportunity employment laws to be instituted in Illinois.78 In arguing for the benefits of the 200-GeV accelerator, physicists had

Galison and Emily Thomson, eds., The architecture of science (Cambridge 1999), xviii. 73. URA succeeded MURA as the consortium representing a number of midwestern universities. MURA’s accelerator was cancelled in 1964, largely due to competition from Brookhaven and Berkeley. 74. Lillian Hoddeson, “Establishing KEK in Japan and Fermilab in the U.S.: Internationalism, nationalism and high-energy accelerators,” Social studies of science, 13 (1983), 1-48, on 18-19. 75. Catherine Westfall, “The site contest for Fermilab,” Physics today, 42:1 (1989), 44-52. 76. Lillian Hoddeson and Adrienne Kolb, “A new frontier in the Chicago suburbs: Settling Fermilab 1963-72,” Illinois historical journal, 88:1 (1995), 2-18. 77. Westfall (ref. 75), 50. 78. JCAE, Congress of the United States, General and Physical Research Program Including Proposed 200-BeV Accelerator (including Hearings before the Subcommittee on Research, Development, and Radiation on Management and Scope of the Proposed 200-BeV Accelerator), 90th Congress, 1st session, 25 Jan, 7, 8, 9, and 28 Feb 1967, 94-102.

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to address the issue of civil rights as they had not done before. Ultimately the response of Wilson and others to these challenges showed that HEP could be relevant and responsive to important social issues. From 1965, when the 200-GeV accelerator began to be seriously considered, until 1972, when the Fermilab came online, the value of the machine was repeatedly questioned and examined by the JCAE, the body responsible for appropriations for the AEC. Physicists, theorists as well as experimentalists, were called upon to defend their work in a public, and sometimes hostile, forum. Three general characteristics of these justifications can be discerned. For one, society could not expect technological returns, although they were likely in the very long run. Second, HEP should be valued for its own sake, as a cultural enterprise, as an expression of the universal human quest for knowledge and understanding. The enterprise revealed symmetry and beauty in nature that could be appreciated by non-physicists and enrich the cultural life of the nation. Third, high-energy physicists were aware of and sensitive to social issues and could even help with their solution.79 In January 1968 the National Accelerator Laboratory submitted a Design Report to the AEC outlining the structure, organization, and plans for the new laboratory. In a prefatory section addressing the “Purpose and Character of the Laboratory” the report compared the inner submicroscopic world of particles to the outer cosmic world studied by astronomers. HEP would contribute just as much to understanding the universe. However, hopes should not be high:80 This is not to imply that benefits will be forthcoming from this study are equivalent of those that came from previous nuclear research. Nevertheless, pure science, the search for understanding, is as important for its effects on the minds of men as it is for its eventual contributions to his standard of living. Man’s effort to achieve a better comprehension of the world in which he lives will continue to have a profound effect not only on his philosophy, not only on his well being, but also on his social organization.

In speaking of the achievements of American HEP before the AEC in 1965, Norman Ramsey, a physicist from Harvard University, expected “that the really exciting reasons to justify new machines will be ones that are so exciting and so different that we cannot anticipate them at the present time.”81 Wilson placed the payoff of 79. Cf. Joanna S. Ploeger, “The art of science at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: Aesthetic experience and the re-centering of human agency in the National Laboratory System in the 1960s,” in Catherine Westfall, ed., Second Conference on Laboratory History (Newport News, VA: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, 2001), 143-161. 80. Design Report (Batavia, IL, 1968) (Hearings before the JCAE, AEC Authorizing Legislation for FY 1968, 90th Congress, 1st session), Appendix 3, vol. 2, 228. 81. Subcommittee on Research, Development, and Radiation, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, Hearings on High-energy Physics Research, 89th Congress, 1st session, 2, 3, 4, and 5 Mar 1965, 122.


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HEP in the uncertain future.82 [I have a] firm expectation that technological developments will come. Directly, but only after a very long time; from the results of the research will come new technology…we know from past experience that new techniques inevitably develop, techniques which have paid, more than paid, for the cost of basic research that was not pointed to such developments.

Wilson realized that high-energy physicists had “an obligation to give a fair return immediately.”83 A report on HEP policy of 1965 articulated what it would be: “Despite the usefulness of the technological byproducts of high-energy physics, its primary justification continues to be the drive for a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of matter.”84 This view differed altogether from that expressed only a few years earlier when high-energy physicists placed the primary justification of their work in military and other technological “spin-offs.” If HEP could be portrayed as an enterprise that uncovered fundamental symmetries and sought a universal beauty, then it possessed a cultural significance that transcended pions or missile defenses. In referring to problems upon which the accelerator would shed light, the Design Report of 1968 placed questions concerning the “elementary” and “fundamental” nature of particles together with symmetry, at the top of the list.85 Searching for quarks was also a main task of the new accelerator, “which could give a much deeper insight into the symmetries of the strong force.”86 The highly symmetric quark model became particularly important in emphasizing the elegance, simplicity, and imaginativeness associated with particle physics. An article about the new laboratory published in Science in 1971 cited its purpose as “deeper probes into the properties of ‘fundamental’ particles.” It would address the most basic questions about matter and the universe, explain “the regularities observed in nucleon and meson spectra,” and allow discoveries that could “complete the symmetry” of electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces. 87 82. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: Congress of the United States, Hearings on General, Physical Research Program, Space Nuclear Program, and Plowshare (AEC Authorizing Legislation Fiscal Year 1970), 91st Congress, 1st session, 17 and 18 Apr 1969, 115. 83. Ibid., 117. 84. High-energy Physics Program (ref. 27), 19. 85. Design report (ref. 80), 1228-29. 86. JCAE, Congress of the United States, AEC Authorizing Legislation Fiscal Year 1968, Hearings on Nuclear Rocket (Rover); Space Electric Power; Physical Research; etc., 90th Congress, 2nd session, 7 and 21 Feb 1968, 1604 (Appendix 8, Report in response to questions pertaining to the scope of the 200 BeV accelerator by the High-energy Physics Advisory Panel to the Division of Research, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Jan, 1968). 87. JCAE, Congress of the United States, AEC Authorizing Legislation Fiscal Year 1972, Hearings on Physical Research, Space Nuclear, and Nuclear Waste Management Programs (Part 3), 92nd Congress, 1st Session, 9, 16, and 17 Mar 1971, 1215, 1217.

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During JCAE hearings in 1969, Senator John O. Pastore (D–Rhode Island) pressed the issue of why such an accelerator should be built:88 Senator PASTORE: And with all these other priorities of hunger, underfeeding, underclothing, and underhousing, how do you justify $250 million at this time for building something with which we don’t know what we’re going to find?… Dr. WILSON: [W]e expect to get answers to questions men have been asking for a very long time. One of these questions has to do with simplicity. Is there a simple understanding of nature? Are there a few elementary particles which could explain all the complexity of matter and life? Our present picture is one of tremendous complexity….But we believe there must be an underlying simplicity, perhaps three subparticles….Going to 200 BeV gives us a good chance to find such subparticles… The understanding of [these questions] will be all important to our future, to the future of all men.

The accelerator’s significance lay in its cultural, rather than its military, value:89 Senator PASTORE: Is there anything connected in the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country? Dr. WILSON: No, sir; I do not believe so. Senator PASTORE: Nothing at all? Dr. WILSON: Nothing at all. Senator PASTORE: It has no value in that respect? Dr. WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with those things. It has nothing to do with the military. I am sorry. Senator PASTORE: Don’t be sorry for it. Dr. WILSON: I am not, but I cannot honestly say it has any such application. Senator PASTORE: Is there anything here that projects us in a position of being competitive with the Russians, with regard to this race? Dr. WILSON: Only from a long-range point of view, of developing technology. Otherwise it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all these things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Two years later, Wilson, again pressed by Senator Pastore, now the chairman of the JCAE, expressed his justification slightly differently:90 Chairman PASTORE: But what do we say to the man on the street? What is this all about? Dr. WILSON: We can say to the man in the street that we are about to complete a 88. Ref. 82, 112. 89. Ibid., 113-114. 90. Ref. 87, 1206.


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new scientific instrument that will allow us to see much deeper into the atom, that we know there is much yet to be seen, that the new knowledge will help us to better understand the universe—and hence ourselves. Chairman PASTORE: In other words, this is a fundamental science from which everything else springs? Dr. WILSON: Yes; I hope he would be proud enough of his country to want that kind of cultural activity to be going on—to be proud that it is going on in this country.

HEP was a grand cultural enterprise, elegant and profound, that deserved the support of society. Wilson carried this vision through into his design for Fermilab. From the time of his appointment to the Directorship in 1967, right through his involvement with the Laboratory until 1978, he strove to create a space not just for doing HEP, but for showing off HEP. Designing a lab that was not only functional but a beautiful “architectural paradise” served several purposes. “For one thing, we were competing with other laboratories for a select group of expert physicists.…Their expertise could well make the difference between our success or failure.”91 Physicists were not so immersed in some inner world that they could not appreciate their surroundings; they had somehow to be enticed to this Chicago backwater. Building elegant laboratories not only attracted physicists to the site but, perhaps more importantly, showed the public that physicists, like the public, were concerned with the world and environment within which they lived and worked. “Physicists, for the same aesthetic reason that they appreciate the physical world, also enjoy theater, music, museums, and good architecture.” Attractive buildings not only swayed physicists, but also leant grandeur and impressiveness to the Laboratory for non-scientists. If visitors could not understand the physics, they could appreciate the beauty and care with which the place had been constructed; as Wilson knew, “aesthetics is partly a matter of communication.” Ultimately the architecture would reflect upon the physics itself. “If we produced a dowdy site with shabby buildings…the statesmen, who might judge us in part by appearances, would not, in the long run, give us the funds we would need for our physics.”92 Just as cathedrals were magnificent structures to reflect the glory of God, so too would Fermilab reflect the glory and elegance of particle physics. The cathedral at Chartres was Wilson’s inspiration for the Central Laboratory building. “[The] medieval physicist [was] responding to a very challenging physical problem. Familiarly enough, both aesthetic and technical considerations were inextricably combined….There is a technological aesthetic in the accelerator too.” In his Richtmyer Memorial Lecture at the meeting for the American Association of Physics Teachers in 1968, Wilson spoke to the relation among particle physics, accelera91. Galison and Thomson, eds. (ref. 72), 461. 92. Robert R. Wilson, Starting Fermilab (Batavia, IL., 1987), 6, 18, published at URL: www.fnal.gov/projects/history/wilson/ and as part of the Fermilab Annual Report, 1987. Fermilab Archives, Milton G. White History of Accelerators Room, 3rd Floor, Wilson Hall.

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tors, and society. Physicists had not “been allowed to become flower children” and particle physics had been criticized for “being too far removed from society to be supported.”93 However, the merging of the technological and the artistic in building accelerators could form a conduit through which the “esthetic, social, and philosophical” value of physics to society could be communicated to the taxpayer. Wilson’s highly geometric sculptures adorn Fermilab. Some of them like “Broken Symmetry,” drew their inspiration directly from concepts in HEP. Wilson’s modernist structures sought to combine technological and aesthetic experience, often commingling form and function (for example, his power poles) or making use of left-over accelerator materials.94 The open, tree-filled, glass-walled spaces of the Central Laboratory also provided ideal locations for the exhibitions and concerts that were set up on the Mezzanine: “another manifestation…of the unity of art and science.”95 FNAL also strove to prove the relevance of HEP to society in other ways as well. Wilson and his staff worked to turn the potential public relations disaster into a boon for Fermilab. Reforming Illinois’ discriminatory housing laws was one way in which the Laboratory demonstrated “the relation between particles and accelerators with people and society.”96 Telegrams sent by Wilson and Ed Goldwasser, Wilson’s Deputy Director, to members of the Illinois legislature stressed that physicists “tend to have strong feelings about where they live” and that delays in passing open housing legislation would seriously jeopardize the future of the Laboratory. Wilson outlined his efforts in a letter to Chairman Pastore: 97 Those of us who have become members of the Laboratory have taken a strong stand for open housing…It will be my firm policy at the National Accelerator Laboratory to adopt procedures which will…ensure integration within the Laboratory and which will encourage the adoption of nondiscriminatory practices.

Both these documents were inserted into the Congressional record for hearings on the Laboratory; civil rights issues proved crucial in communicating the social value of HEP. In 1971, with much of the accelerator complete and many reforms enacted, Representative Melvin Price (D-Illinois) praised Wilson for “persuading the area to have open housing, the training programs that you have instituted, and the employment you have made available to minority groups. You have really 93. Robert R. Wilson, “The Richtmyer memorial lecture—Particles, accelerators, and society,” American journal of physics, 36:6 (1968), 490-495, on 490-491. 94. Ploeger (ref. 79), 151-156. 95. Wilson (ref. 92), 18. 96. Wilson (ref. 93), 490. 97. JCAE, Congress of the United States, AEC Authorizing Legislation Fiscal Year 1969, Hearings on Nuclear Rocket (Rover); Space Electric Power; Physical Research; Raw Materials; Isotope Development; Biology and Medicine; Plowshare; Special Nuclear Materials; Community; Program Direction and Administration; Training, Education, and Information; and Weapons, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, 7 and 21 Feb 1969, 1056-1057.


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accomplished a great deal to bring goodwill towards the whole atomic energy program.”98 Wilson ensured that Fermilab demonstrated an awareness and responsiveness to environmental issues. Creating a laboratory that celebrated the natural beauty of the prairie setting complemented Wilson’s architectural aims: “We treasured the trees, and our deer, and our grouse, and our owls, and even our bugs.” The site was designed to “evoke a romantic image of 19th-century life on the original midwestern prairie.”99 Wilson had old farm houses restored as office buildings, and on Arbor Day in 1969 local residents planted trees and shrubs to help restore the original woodland. Native animals, including a herd of bison, were introduced to the site. In 1974, the Fermilab Prairie Restoration Project began to seed prairie vegetation, creating one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in the United States.100 Congress did not ignore this sensitivity. Robert Sheldon, a materials specialist working on the main synchrotron ring developed an innovative material for the roof of the neutron experimental area. He packed discarded soda and beer cans between layers of plastic to form a “geodesic dome.” The record of the JCAE hearings included a press release about the new material. “[This] unique building material…not only saves money, but contributes to the fight against pollution,” Senator Clinton P. Anderson (D–New Mexico) noted.101 Fermilab also worked particularly hard to communicate its purpose to a wide public audience. Scientists encouraged locals and tourists to visit the Laboratory. The circular auditorium was designed for musical and dramatic performances as well as lectures on physics aimed at a popular audience. The laboratory gave tours of the site and implemented educational programs from the elementary to the graduate school level. Concert series and art exhibits were organized to attract people from Chicago and the surrounding area to the setting.102 Physicists understood that bringing the public to the Laboratory would go a long way in convincing them of its benefits. On March 1, 1972, the FNAL achieved its design energy. Wilson had fulfilled his promise of completing the Laboratory on schedule and for less than $250 million, and doubled the beam energy from 200 to over 500 GeV. Fermilab made possible significant advances in particle physics, including the observation of the bottom quark in June 1977. Congress was impressed. During hearings in 1971 Representative Price congratulated Wilson: “It is almost a miracle that you have been able to accomplish what you have, since in the total time of this project you have had [harsh] budget cuts.” Senator Anderson also lauded Wilson’s special ability to “dramatize…man’s effort to conquer inner space.”103 Wilson had captured the imagination of the physics community, the JCAE, and a wider public. His insis98. Ref. 87, 1196. 99. Hoddeson and Kolb (ref. 76), 13-14. 100. Galison and Thomson, eds. (ref. 72), 462. 101. Ref. 97, 1120-1121. 102. Wilson (ref. 92). 103. Ref. 97, 1196, 1219.

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tence on answerability, responsibility, and communication proved that HEP, by tackling big problems like civil rights or ecology, could be relevant to society. Most of all, his vision for a laboratory that combined “environmental beauty, architectural grandeur, and cultural splendor” symbolized all that particle physics stood for.104 Symmetry again As symmetry became accepted as a generative tool of great generality and power, the high-energy community used it to reshape the story of their science. Moreover, it did so in a way that allowed HEP to be associated with beauty and simplicity; the grand narrative of symmetry portrayed particle physicists as striving to uncover the elegance of nature on the most fundamental level. This was an enterprise that a wider public audience could not only comprehend on some level, but could also consider valuable as a cultural enterprise. High-energy physicists strove to create a narrative that could re-center HEP around human problems and thereby address the concerns of the anti-science movement. Their story was coupled to an active embrace of counter-cultural causes: increasingly high-energy physicists spoke out against Vietnam, ceased working for military organizations, and joined student efforts to remove defense contractors from campuses.105 In reporting to President Johnson on HEP policy in 1965, AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg pointed out that “[p]article physics…seeks the unifying concepts that underlie and determine the principles of physics and provide the ultimate basis for all natural science....The study of the interactions and symmetry properties of particles at high-energy is expected to expose their underlying structure.”106 Symmetry will unify and simplify, ultimately providing a coherent and beautiful basis for all physical science. In 1965 the JCAE called many physicists, including GellMann, Ramsey, and Panofsky, to speak to the benefits, achievements and uses of particle physics. Symmetry, SU(3), unification, simplicity, and the elegance of particle physics recur in their testimonies. Gell-Mann took the opportunity to explain the concept of the Special Unitary (SU) symmetry group to the Committee.107 Likewise, in discussing the achievements of Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1965, Maurice Goldhaber described the eightfold way and explained the importance of experiments of CP and T violation undertaken at his laboratory. Geoffrey Chew of Lawrence Radiation Laboratories discussed isotopic spin and the “particle-antiparticle relationship…now accepted, together with Einstein’s principle 104. Wilson (ref. 92). 105. Sheldon L. Slashow (with Ben Bova), Interactions: A journey through the mind of a particle physicist and the matter of this world (New York, 1988), 193; Victor F. Weisskopf, The joy of insight: Passions of a physicist (New York, 1991). 106. Ref. 27, 11. 107. Ref. 82, 29-40.


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of relativity, as a symmetry which any theory is required to satisfy.”108 Donald F. Hornig, President of the Office of Science and Technology, attested that HEP’s advances had “changed our whole concept of what the fundamental laws of nature are.”109 Similarly, a report of 1968 noted that the “discovery of symmetry violations in weak interactions originated in HEP and has had important repercussions in nuclear physics.”110 In countless instances physicists from across the high-energy community came out as they had not done before to speak or write about the symmetry and beauty of their work. In June 1964, Weisskopf rejected Weinberg’s criticism that HEP did not illuminate “neighboring scientific disciplines.” Rather, the type of questions particle physics asks are fundamental, and should be considered the root of all science. “[Parity violation] implied a thorough change of our views on the role of symmetry in nature, and this is what determines its relevance for the rest of science. It is most likely that the study of the subnuclear world will lead to changes in our view of matter and space, compared to which parity violation will appear trivial.”111 In a roundtable discussion on HEP at the APS Washington meeting in 1964, Chen N. Yang, from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, argued that the aim of HEP was not to extend experiment to smaller distances, or to accumulate knowledge about the structure of matter, but to “search for new formulations of concepts and laws which allow for a synthesis of the experimental facts.”112 “Deepened, comprehensive, and unified systems” that altered “the philosophical outlook of mankind” were the objective. Even in disparaging HEP, Weinberg realized the appeal of the symmetric descriptions of nature: “The new insights into nature’s deeper symmetries are marvelous and exciting and, insofar as a nonspecialist can understand them, I too am enchanted by them.”113 The “deeper symmetries” spoke to “the way we think of ourselves and the way we think of our environment,” thus “expanding man’s cultural horizon.”114 Semi-popular journals such as Physics today and Scientific American carried articles that explained and celebrated symmetry principles as a source of inspiration and beauty in the inner world of particles. In November 1964 Gell-Mann wrote in Physics today that “at this basic level of science a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis, even more than elsewhere in science, seems to be 108. Ibid., 134, 159. 109. JCAE, Congress of the United States, Hearings, AEC Authorizing Legislation Fiscal Year 1965: Biology and Medicine; Training, Education, and Information; Plowshare; Isotopes and Development; Physical Research; Communities; and AEC Administrative Programs (Part 3), 88th Congress, 2nd Session, 20, 25, 26, and 27 Feb, 2 and 3 Mar 1965, 1500. 110. High-energy Physics Advisory Panel, The status and problems of high-energy physics today (Washington, D.C., 1968), 1209, Appendix 2, Hearings before JCAE, 1968, Part 2. 111. Ref. 82, Appendix 17, 748-749. 112. The discussion was published in Physics today, Nov 1964, and reprinted as Appendix 19 in ref. 82, 751-760. 113. Ibid., 752, 755. 114. Ibid., 756, 758.

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the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.” A “real dynamical theory” of the weak and strong interactions seemed a long way off, but broken symmetries in the form of “approximate conservation laws…help a great deal in leading us to an understanding of what the correct theory can be like.”115 Symmetries, with their simplifying elegance, had promoted progress in theories of the weak and strong force. Leon Lederman, an experimentalist from Columbia, followed Gell-Mann’s article with a brief history of experimental HEP:116 Now the most exciting developments have been the uncovering of regularities in the new spectroscopy of elementary particles and the new symmetries of which Professor Gell-Mann has spoken….One expects the symmetries underlying elementary particle spectroscopy (resonances) to be new but no less profound.

Maurice Goldhaber, an experimentalist, and Gerald Feinberg, a theorist, related symmetry principles to conservation principles and to an Aristotelian concept of propriety. “[T]hings that do not change,” they argued, contained a simplicity and brought a pleasing order and comprehensibility to the complexities of nature.117 The Nobel Prize in physics for 1969, one of the most politically turbulent years for physics in the U.S., went to Gell-Mann “for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interaction.”118 GellMann’s “classifications” were of course elaborate and beautiful symmetry schemes. In 1965 a number of high-energy physicists contributed to a report entitled “Nature of matter: Purposes of high-energy physics.” Edited by Luke L.C. Yuan of Brookhaven, it was widely circulated among members of Congress and the White House staff.119 The high-energy physicists, as well as the other eminent scientists including Bethe and J. Robert Oppenheimer, downplayed the role of particle physics for technological applications. Gerald Feinberg argued that the “exploration of nature to all its limits” expressed the “highest spirit of our culture,” and that “this spirit is [America’s] greatest contribution to the human outlook.”120 This spirit emerged particularly from pushing understanding to the most fundamental level where laws took on simple and symmetric forms. For instance, Steven 115. Murray Gell-Mann, “Particles and principles,” Physics today, 17:11 (1964), 22-29, on 23. 116. Leon M. Lederman, “Observations in high-energy physics,” Physics today, 17:11 (1964), 30-42, on 30. 117. Gerald Feinberg and Maurice Goldhaber, “The conservation laws of physics,” Scientific American, 209:4 (1963), 36-45. 118. The Nobel Foundation, The Nobel Prize in physics 1969 (www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1969/) 119. Silvan S. Schweber, “A historical perspective on the rise of the Standard Model,” in Laurie M. Brown, Lillian Hoddeson, Michael Riordan, Max Dresden, eds., The rise of the Standard Model: Particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 645684, on 662. 120. Gerald Feinberg, “The future of high energy physics,” in Luke C.L. Yuan, ed., Nature of matter: Purposes of high-energy physics, BNL 888 (T-360) (Brookhaven, NY, 1965), 12-


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Weinberg discussed the relations between CP and T violation and asked:121 Who cares?….Are the symmetries of elementary particle physics just one more area for interesting scientific study, neither more nor less important than any other? I believe the answer to such questions must be answered on the assumption that nature has absolute laws of great simplicity, from which all the sciences flow in an ordered hierarchy.

Oppenheimer summarized many of the common themes:122 We wish we had insight into the origin and meaning of these symmetries….It is not unreasonable to suppose that the hope of true dynamics, and that of an understanding of the symmetries, may be closely related….The last centuries of science have been marked by an unabating struggle to describe and comprehend the nature of matter, its regularities, its laws, and the language that makes it intelligible. The successes of this struggle, from the Sixteenth Century until our own day, have inspired the whole scientific enterprise, and lighted the world of technology, and the whole of man’s life.

Yang gave SU(3) symmetries of the strong force as an example of “knowledge that is of supreme importance in the eternal interaction between man and his surroundings, an interaction that is a major part of human history;” and Abraham Pais suggested that the knowledge gained from particle physics may be “a source of inspiration” and “a monument to our days.”123 In 1971 Yuan and his Brookhaven colleagues produced another report published under the title “Elementary particles: Science, technology, and society.” Its aim was to promote particle physics by demonstrating its relationship to astrophysics, space research, chemistry, biology, radiotherapy, and engineering. The preface stressed the fundamental relationship of elementary particle physics to all other science: “Since the basic nature of matter is at the root of every aspect of science and technology,” Yuan claimed, “a better understanding of this fundamental knowledge would certainly help advance correspondingly the understanding in all the branches of science and technology.” The authors also related physics explicitly to artistic creativity. They contrasted the mirror symmetry often used in art with the violation of parity in nature. Particle physics uncovered the “few basic ingredients” from which the universe is made: “Nature has satisfied our craving quite well for what we call ‘beauty’; her household seems uncluttered by unnecessary items, her laws are simple and symmetrical as conceivable, and her processes economical as possible.”124 15, on 14. Other contributors included Victor Weisskopf, Chen N. Yang, Geoffrey F. Chew, Abraham Pais, Julian Schwinger, Francis E. Low, and Sidney D. Drell. 121. Ibid., 72. 122. Ibid., 4, 5. 123. Ibid., 27, 74-75, 17. 124. Luke C.L. Yuan, ed., Elementary particles: Science, technology, and society (New

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The exemplar of symmetry was Gell-Mann’s quarks. Before physicists began to accept Richard Feynman and B.J. Bjorken’s parton interpretation of deep-inelastic scattering experiments in 1969, there was no experimental evidence for the existence of quarks. Nevertheless, the elusive entities created no end of interest within and outside the high-energy community; few articles written for a popular or semi-popular audience on HEP after 1965 failed to mention them.125 In 1974 WGBH produced a documentary as part of their Nova series entitled “The hunting of the quark.”126 The program featured footage of the interior and exterior of the two-mile SLAC tunnel and interviews with Feynman about the “simple and beautiful” patterns of nature. The miniscule quark and the gigantic SLAC helped to communicate the “colossal imagination” and the “tremendous adventure” of particle physics. High-energy physicists realized the appeal of the mysterious quark and played up the theory despite the lack of empirical evidence. Part of the quark’s appeal was its name, taken by Gell-Mann from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s wake.127 It made another connection between physics and art and lent a whimsical air to the enterprise. During the 1960s and 1970s particle physicists followed Gell-Mann’s example by coining catchy and imaginative names for particles and their properties: color, charm, flavor, truth, beauty, infrared slavery, asymptotic freedom fighters, technicolor. These catchy words may have made particle physics seem more familiar, more natural, and closer to everyday experience. Talking about HEP’s symmetric and aesthetic qualities was accompanied by language that suggested a bridge between the sensibilities of high-energy physicists and those of ordinary people. Philip Handler emphasized the importance of such language bridges:128 We will be successful only when Americans in all walks of life understand why the language of the scientist is indistinguishable from that common to all aesthetic experience. When describing the technique of an experiment—“elegant,” “beautiful”—the manner in which it compels conclusions—“overwhelming,” “forceful,” “masterful”—or the aspect of nature which has been revealed—“exquisite,” “magnificent,” “breathtaking”…the course of scientific investigation compels those very traits which the humanists seek to instill—independence, freedom, honesty, imagination, and critical analysis.

York, 1971), xi, 11, 5, 20-21. 125. W.H. Kendall, and Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, “The structure of the proton and the neutron,” Scientific American, 224:6 (1971), 61-77; Roy Schwitters, “Fundamental particles with charm,” Scientific American, 237:4 (1975), 56-70; Sheldon L. Glashow, “Quarks with color and flavor,” Scientific American, 223:4 (1975), 38-50, and “Science and the citizen,” Scientific American, 237:4 (1977), 74. 126. Horizon Films, “The hunting of the quark,” in NOVA (Boston, 1974). 127. Gell-Mann had to explain the literary allusion to the JCAE (ref. 82), 43-44. 128. Ref. 63, 107-108.


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3. BREAKING SYMMETRIES

Beyond the Standard Model By 1980 HEP had come a remarkably long way. The Standard Model unified the three important forces on the particle scale (electromagnetic, weak, and strong) under a common symmetry scheme: SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1). Although the three forces were described by three different symmetry groups, they all obeyed the same type of symmetry (non-abelian local gauge invariance). Moreover, the electromagnetic and weak forces had been completely unified and the common symmetry scheme indicated that the strong force would also fall under this unification at some much higher energy. However, the theory did not completely satisfy physicists as a theory of everything. For one thing, it omitted gravity completely. Moreover, the strong and electroweak forces obeyed different coupling constants. The Standard Model did not explain the masses of quarks and leptons, and required several experimentally determined universal constants. In the early 1980s the aesthetic appeal and the many possibilities of string theory made it a serious alternative to the Standard Model. By 1984, the theory had met with some initial success and began increasingly to divide the community of fundamental physicists. Political developments again affected HEP. About the time of the American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger strove to relax relations between East and West. A period of relative détente, exemplified by the SALT I agreement and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, persisted through the late 1970s. Beginning in the second half of President Carter’s administration, however, the Cold War gradually re-escalated. Carter began the development and deployment of new and potentially destabilizing weapons such as the Stealth (B2) Bomber and the Cruise, Pershing II, and MX missiles. President Reagan dramatically increased military spending, especially in technology-related areas. Defense spending rose from $197 billion in FY 1980 to $296 billion in FY 1985.129 The most important instantiation of this remilitarization began in March 1983 with Reagan’s announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to create spacebased laser cannons that would shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. To build such a shield required “the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”130 Although very few scientists agreed that such a “shield” could ever be as effective as the President imagined, the government spent $35 billion on the project over ten years. During this re-escalation, high-energy physicists trying to move beyond the Standard Model advocated the construction of the next generation of accelerator. 129. Edwards (ref. 2), 280-281. 130. Reagan’s address to the nation, 23 Mar 1983, quoted in ibid., 288.

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Beginning in the late seventies Leon Lederman and other influential particle physicists lobbied for the machine that became the SSC.131 Its initial price-tag was $4 billion, but the cost had escalated to over $14 billion by the late 1980s. The context of the heightened Cold War, the rise of superstring theory, and vocal criticism from condensed matter physicists suggests one explanation of how and why this massively expensive accelerator was at first sold to, and later abandoned by Congress. Superstring theory consists of a highly intricate and beautiful mathematical structure: “the mathematical structure of string theory was so beautiful and had so many miraculous properties that it had to be pointing towards something deep.”132 By smearing the interaction between point particles out over spacetime, superstring theory manages to smooth over the conflicts between gravity and quantum mechanics in a natural manner. Unlike the Standard Model, the theory requires only one arbitrary scale parameter. Superstring theory deals with distances on the order of 10-36 meters. In HEP small distances mean high energies. String theories cannot be tested by any conceivable experiments—the energies lie far above what can (or probably ever will) be produced in accelerators. String theorists must have other criteria against which to “test” their theories. First, the theories must be mathematically consistent—given the complexity and rigidity of the model this requirement can be extremely restrictive. Second, string theories must reproduce the symmetries of nature.133 If the symmetries that emerge from string theory are not those of nature, the theory must be fundamentally flawed. Greene goes on to defend this aspect of string theory:134 Aesthetic judgements do not arbitrate scientific discourse….Ultimately theories are judged by how they fare when faced with cold, hard, experimental facts….While a theory is being constructed, its incomplete state of development often prevents its detailed experimental consequences from being assessed. Nevertheless, physicists must make choices and exercise judgements about the research direction in which to take their partially completed theory…it is certainly the case that some decisions made by theoretical physicists are founded upon an aesthetic sense—a sense of which theories have an elegance and beauty of structure on par with the world we experience.

Superstring theory represents the dénouement of the evolution of the drama of symmetry in 20th-century physics. Not only is string theory constructed from symmetry considerations and reliant on a mathematical structure with symmetry 131. Adrienne Kolb and Lillian Hoddeson, “The mirage of the ‘world accelerator for world peace’ and the origins of the SSC, 1953-83,” HSPS, 24:1 (1993), 101-124. 132. Schwarz, quoted in Brian Greene, The elegant universe (New York, 1999), 137. 133. Peter Galison, “Theory bound and unbound: Superstring and experiment,” in Friedel Weinert, ed., The laws of nature: Philosophy and science (Berlin, 1995). 134. Greene (ref. 132), 166-167.


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at its core, but symmetry provides the only point of contact between the theory and physical reality. Symmetry becomes the arbiter as well as the inspiration for physical theory. Sheldon Glashow asked in Physics today in 1988: “Are string thoughts more appropriate to departments of mathematics or even to schools of divinity than to physics departments? Until the string people can interpret perceived properties of the real world, they are simply not doing physics.”135 Howard Georgi, Glashow’s Harvard colleague, shared this view of the “new physics.” To construct a theory from the “top down,” although always tempting, was not the way of physics:136 [W]e must try to work our way down to short distances from what we know at longer distances, working whenever possible in the effective theory which is appropriate to the scale we are studying. We should not try to guess the ultimate theory at small distances. Even if we could do it, it would probably be about as useful as explaining biology in the language of particle physics.

The “siren call” of ultimate elegance and unification of the type Einstein had sought throughout his life was familiar to almost all high-energy physicists. In Glashow’s mind, string theorists had given in to the temptation of the siren:137 [They] pursue an inner harmony where elegance, uniqueness, and beauty define truth. The theory depends for its existence on magical coincidences, miraculous cancellations and relations among seemingly unrelated (and possibly undiscovered) fields of mathematics….How satisfying and economical to explain everything in one bold stroke of our aesthetic, mathematical, or intuitive sensibilities.

Very economical indeed, as it did away with the need for experiments altogether. But its threat to the theorist was closer and more immediate. By focussing on the smallest possible level of matter, claiming an ultimate theory, and working with highly symmetric and elegant mathematical schemes, superstrings displaced traditional HEP as the path to the final beauty and truth of the universe. Whatever their critics claimed, string theorists presumed to attack more fundamental problems with more beautiful ideas. To move from doing traditional quantum field theory to string theory would entail an involved process of retooling and relearning. In response to Georgi and Glashow’s criticisms, Edward Witten argued that Einstein’s general theory of relativity seemed similarly marooned in terms of experimental verification when it first appeared in 1915. “[O]ne can be very close to 135. Sheldon L. Glashow, “Tangled in superstring: Some thoughts on the predicament physics is in,” The science, 28:2 (1988), 22-25, on 25. 136. Howard Georgi, “Effective quantum field theories,” in Paul Davies, ed., The new physics (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 456. 137. Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon L. Glashow, “Desperately seeking superstrings?” Physics today, 39:5 (1986), 7-9 on 7 and 9.

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the truth and still be caught unawares by a sudden and almost accidental discovery…technology develops faster and farther than we think.”138 Witten could see solutions to many of the puzzles of fundamental physics resolving in string symmetries: non-abelian gauge symmetry of the Standard Model, supersymmetry, the symmetries of general relativity (non-compact global symmetries), and electromagnetic duality symmetry in four dimensions. “Widely disparate themes from several decades of theoretical physics have recently converged to become parts of a single story.”139 Fragmentations again In the early 1980s Edward Teller became fixated on the idea of an x-ray laser that could focus the energy of a thermonuclear blast to knock down incoming missiles. His enthusiasm won over President Reagan, who announced his decision to proceed with SDI in 1983 without consulting his science advisor George (Jay) Keyworth or other members of the White House Science Council. The total invested in SDI exceeded $60 billion before 1999. Many scientists were outraged at so large an investment in doubtful technology that might destabilize the Cold War. In 1984 the Union of Concerned Scientists published The fallacy of star wars, which included critiques of SDI by Hans Bethe, Henry Kendall, and Victor Weisskopf. The following year half the members of the NAS signed a petition criticizing Star Wars, and 2,300 university scientists announced that they would not apply for lucrative Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) grants. 140 High-energy physicists had a particularly high profile role in the SDI debates. Panofsky, “director emeritus” of SLAC, wrote in Physics today in June 1985 calling for a more restrained research program for missile defense. “[P]olitical perceptions as to what SDI is all about are running wildly ahead of the technical realities of strategic missile defense.”141 Scientists replied by criticizing and defending Panofsky’s views.142 Ultimately four Nobel prize-winners, including Feynman and Gell-Mann, signed a Caltech student petition against SDI. At MIT, students and scientists, including Herman Feshbach and Francis E. Low, reaffirmed the neutral or unfriendly attitudes of their universities toward “Star Wars”; Cornell students and faculty echoed their sentiments.143 138. Edward Witten, “Some remarks about string field theory,” Lars Brink et al., eds., Unification of fundamental interactions: Proceedings of Nobel symposium 67, June 2-7, 1986 (Marstrand, Stockholm, Sweden, 1986), 77. 139. Edward Witten, “Duality, spacetime, and quantum mechanics,” Physics today, 50:5 (1997), 28-33, on 28. 140. Daniel S. Greenberg, Science, money, and politics: Political triumph and ethical erosion (Chicago, 2001), 282, 284-287, 332. 141. Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, “The Strategic Defense Initiative: Perception vs reality,” Physics today, 38:6 (1985), 34-45, on 34. 142. “Letters: SDI: Poltical realities,” Physics today, 38:10 (1985), 142-144. 143. “Senators and scientists object to SDI costs and uncertainties,” Physics today, 38:7


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One of the major research areas of SDI involved “charged- and neutral- particle beams.” Project White Horse, based at Los Alamos, used accelerator technology (radiofrequency tubes and quadrupole magnets) to produce 2 MeV proton beams; presumably someone imagined that these mini-accelerators could be positioned in space to shoot down missiles re-entering the atmosphere.144 Because SDI directly involved particle physics technology, the high-energy community could not help but become involved on both sides of the SDI debate.145 Some saw the new influx of money as a reason to support SDI, over and above other objections. For example, Stewart Nozette, a member of the engineering faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that SDI provided a clear goal that could “stand up through the annual political debates and competition for resources” and would thus generate funding for science and technology that could keep the U.S. competitive.146 Despite the SDIO rhetoric concerning “innovative” and “creative” science, others saw reason for deep concern. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) warned:147 [I]t is critically important that we pay heed to the impact of SDI on our other research efforts—both military and non-military. Tens of thousands of scientists will be diverted from other activities. A significant percentage of all new research dollars will go to SDI. Research funds are not unlimited and capable scientists and engineers are in short supply. We must keep in mind the cost in opportunities foregone—to strengthen our conventional forces, to achieve biomedical breakthroughs or to keep US industry competitive—when we divert such a significant share of our research budget to this single effort.

The scope of science that SDI affected was massive: not only lasers and directed energy weapons, but optical and interferometric sensors to position them precisely, as well as sophisticated new organic crystals, polymers, and photochromics out of which to build them. Microelectronics, accelerators, and advances in computer hardware and software were also crucial. A letter to Physics today made the point more explicit: “there are lots of visionary, exciting ways to spend several billion dollars per year that would be far more beneficial to our country and to the development of new basic science and technology than SDI.”148 The pressure to prove relevance at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, which developed the x-ray laser, caused physicists there to exaggerate the feasibility of their schemes to the Department of Energy (DOE) in order to prolong funding. Jay Keyworth: “The (1985), 57-59. 144. Gerold Yonas, “Strategic Defense Initiative: The politics and science of weapons in space,” Physics today, 38:6 (1985), 26, 29. 145. The scientist, 1:7 (1987), 11-13. 146. Stewart Nozette, “The commercial potential of SDI,” in Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed., Promise or peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative (Washington, D.C., 1986), 191. 147. Ref. 143, 55. 148. Ref. 142, 142.

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whole argument for so-called third-generation nuclear weapons, directed-energy nuclear weapons whose radiated energy could be focused into a directed-energy weapon and used, for instance, as an SDI entity, was a pack of lies, unadulterated lies.”149 Cold War II and SDI quickly returned U.S. basic research in physics to a state similar to the 1950s, in which military, or at least economic or spin-off outcomes had to be the dominant justification. “[D]angling $120 million to $130 million before academic researchers [is] surely a tempting incentive to solve some elusive scientific and engineering problems that might be basic to weapons research and technology.”150 Staying at the forefront of science meant proving the relevance of work to SDI or other defense technology.151 The Star Wars conflict placed many physicists in a double-bind. Supporting SDI not only offended their better instincts and judgements (technically, strategically, and morally), but it would incur the wrath of their public, especially university students, who perceived weapons research as part of the military-industrialacademic complex. Many physicists would have recalled the anti-science movement of the 1960s that demanded an end to militaristic science. On the other hand, to join with SDI’s opponents meant subjection to strong criticism from politicians and elements of the public who supported missile defense. Representative Marilyn Lloyd rejected Panoksky’s objections: “we in the Congress look to Panofsky for the wisdom of his technological evaluations rather than his civics lessons.”152 Keyworth likewise faulted many scientists for their “demagogic” views:153 What I am particularly talking about is the position that the scientific community has taken publicly, in particular the Union of Concerned Scientists, which I do not think reflects well upon the objectivity of the scientific profession. Were it not for the fact that our public has seen this in the past, I think it would seriously—and perhaps has, to some extent—injure the credibility of the scientific profession.

Moreover, condensed matter physicists resented the disproportionate amounts being spent on high-energy. Had they not contributed at least as much, if not much more, in the way of technology and “socially useful” science? And their doctrine of broken symmetry provided a plausible basis for the claim that their level of understanding was as fundamental as that of particle physicists. Condensed matter thus renewed their critique of the 1970s. They perceived science funding as a zero-sum game and their field as losing out. As new projects in Big Science (SDI, the SSC) seemed poised once again to take precedence in the mid-1980s, Ander149. Greenberg (ref. 140), 292. 150. Ref. 143, 55. 151. William J. Broad, Star warriors: A penetrating look into the lives of the young scientists behind our space age weaponry (New York, 1986), 218. 152. Ref. 142, 10. 153. Greenberg (ref. 140), 292.


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son, now a Nobel Laureate and joined by other condensed matter and materials scientists, reiterated his arguments. He questioned the amount of money and talent being invested in HEP by both CERN and the U.S.; “[n]o data from the last generation of machines have to my knowledge been fundamentally useful to any other branches of science, and it is not likely that this situation will change.”154 Anderson saw the aesthetic qualities of physics as extending beyond the symmetries of the smallest level of matter: “The more theoretical physicists penetrate the ultimate secrets of the microscopic nature of the universe, the more the grand design seems to be ultimate symmetry and ultimate simplicity. But all the interesting parts of the universe are…markedly complex and markedly unsymmetric.”155 In the late 1980s, The scientist was speaking about a “civil war” within the physics community. Some condensed matter physicists contemplated seceding from the APS to form their own organization.156 Rustum Roy and Leo Kadanoff were conspicuous among them. A materials scientist and a vociferous critic of SSC, Roy argued that the entire enterprise of publicly funded basic research needed rethinking:157 [A] whole generation of scientists has grown up in this system, feeling entitled to receive federal funds in the name of eventually producing applications, but with the real aim of doing basic research to win status according to the profession’s increasingly narrow standard. This institutional factor now hinders efforts to couple science to the nation’s economic and technical needs.

Kadanoff criticized the physics community as a whole for pursuing Big Science at the expense of small, valuable projects: “It is easier to argue…for a supercomputer or a supercollider than for the broad programs that will provide the real intellectual base for understanding our natural world.…They have sufficient ‘sex appeal’ and economic impact to command attention….[However] over investment in big science detracts from what is really worthwhile.”158 One battlefield of the civil war was recruitment. Despite the dollars flowing into physics through SDI and the SSC, recruitment into high-energy physics remained low through the early 1980s. Condensed-matter physics, and later molecular biology, on the other hand, grew rapidly. These sciences, more readily applicable to everyday-scale questions and problems, were increasingly attractive to 154. Philip W. Anderson, “Are the big machines necessary,” New scientist, 50-51 (1971), 511. 155. Symmetries and broken symmetries in condensed matter physics, in N. Boccara (Paris, 1981), reprinted in Anderson, A career in theoretical physics (Singapore, 1994), 420. 156. Charles C. Mann, “Physicists fear civil war,” The scientist, 2:9 (1988), 1. 157. Rustum Roy and Deborah Shapely, Lost at the frontier: U.S. science and technology policy adrift (Philadelphia, 1985), 37. 158. Leo P. Kadanoff, “The big, the bad, and the beautiful,” Physics today, 41:2 (1988), 910. Also see Kadanoff, “Hard times,” Physics today, 45:9 (1992), 9-11, and “Cathedrals and other edifices,” Physics today, 39:11 (1986), 7-9.

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students. They offered an alternative to anonymity and mass-collaboration of accelerator facilities, they were often less readily associated with military projects, and fields such as genetics offered new possibilities for understanding life and human nature at a fundamental level. Such fractures within the larger physics community posed a direct challenge to particle physics. Condensed matter opposed a real, contingent, even “dirty,” human-oriented world to the clean, symmetric realm of Wilson’s utopian vision; the breaking of the symmetry becomes a metaphor for the breakdown of this conception of fundamental physics and for the fragmentation of the physics community. How high-energy experiments ended By the early 1980s Europe had begun to assume the lead in HEP experimentation. In 1983 CERN directly observed the long-sought carrier bosons of the weak 0 force, W+, W-, and Z , filling in one of the final gaps in the Standard Model. Many American high-energy physicists, including Robert Wilson, hoped for an international collaborative effort for building the next big accelerator, the “world accelerator for peace.”159 By 1983, CERN’s experimental successes and its progress on the LEP (Large Electron-Positron) collider stimulated many American highenergy physicists to advocate a bold, new accelerator design. Moreover, the completion of Fermilab’s Energy Doubler in March 1983 showed that superconducting technology could reduce the cost of accelerating into the multi-TeV range. On the advice of a High-Energy Physical Advisory Panel (HEPAP) sub-panel led by Stanley Wojcicki, and supported by Keyworth, the Department of Energy (DOE) decided to cancel the planned ISABELLE accelerator and build a 30 kilometer diameter 1020 TeV proton accelerator, the SSC.160 Although U.S. physicists billed the SSC as an international endeavor, largely in order to attract funds from overseas, neither Japan nor Europe wanted to have anything to do with it.161 Indeed, they rightly saw it as a nationalistic project fueled by a desire to regain the competitive advantage. President Reagan’s endorsement of the SSC in 1986 came shortly after his pronouncements on SDI and a new space station program. However, the cost of the new accelerator could never be justified in terms of pure science alone. In 1981 Keyworth had made clear the terms under which science was to be supported:162 We must strive to identify those disciplinary areas where vitality is required to support industrial, military, and other essential technologies, as well as those with 159. Hoddeson and Kolb (ref. 76); “The next generation of particle accelerators,” Scientific American, 242:1 (1980), 42-57, and Robert R. Wilson, “A world organization for the future of high-energy physics,” Physics today, 37:9 (1984), 9, 112. 160. Kolb and Hoddeson (ref. 76), 120-121. 161. Greenberg, Science, money, and politics (ref. 140), 406. 162. Hoddeson and Kolb (ref. 76), 114.


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particular scientific promise….The principle criterion for the support of areas of research directed toward technology advances is pertinence.

As they had done in the 1950s, high-energy physicists responded to the challenge of justifying their projects in terms of national prestige, technological spinoff, and military benefit. “[P]article accelerators and the associated technology,” wrote James Leiss, associate director for high-energy and nuclear physics in the Office of Energy Research of the DOE, “has had a profound effect in US science and technology…[and] [t]here is every reason to believe this role will continue and grow.”163 Defense applications, including “free-electron lasers” and “nuclear fuel breeding” featured prominently in his list of examples. Leon Lederman, Wilson’s successor as Director at Fermilab and a tireless advocate of the SSC, wrote in The scientist: “Many scientists, including high-energy physicists, believe the future of the nation might be more secure if science were much better supported; a nation that spends almost $1 billion a day on defense might well consider the benefits of a few incremental billions of dollars a year on good science.”164 Good science was good defense. Basic, fundamental science spawned technology that had value for industry as well as for defense. Writing in Physics today in March 1985, Lederman and Glashow cited spin-off as one of the major reasons for developing the SSC:165 The construction of great machines, elaborate detectors and powerful data-handling technique brings us to the cutting edge of modern technology. Our workers and our factories will be compelled to confront all but insuperable technical obstacles. Meeting these challenges will make American industry better able to compete, produce and flourish.

Areas in which such spin-off could occur included super-rapid transit, energy storage, power transmission, cryogenics, medicine (Lederman and Glashow claimed the CAT scanner for high-energy physics), and petroleum exploration. Moreover, the SSC would create more jobs in physics, attract talented young scientists back into the field, and ensure that America maintained a talent pool that would maintain its technological supremacy. Elsewhere Lederman claimed that SSC superconducting technology “enabled” developments associated with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a billion-dollar-a-year industry.166 National pride, especially vis-à-vis the Europeans also played 163. James E. Leiss, “Impact of accelerators on science and technology,” Physics today, 34:7 (1981), 9, 70. 164. Leon M. Lederman, “The SSC deserves better criticism….,” The scientist, 1:20 (1987), 11. 165. Sheldon L. Glashow and Leon M. Lederman, “The SSC: A machine for the nineties,” Physics today, 38:3 (1985), 33. 166. Task Force on Defense, Foreign Policy and Space of the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, Establishing Priorities in Science Funding, 102nd Congress, 1st session, 11 and 18 Jul 1991, 78.

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a major role in his justification: “Our concern is that if we forego the opportunity that SSC offers for the 1990s, the loss will not only be to our science but to our national pride and technological self-confidence. When we were children, America did most things best. So it should again.”167 High-energy physicists thus revived the justifications for support they developed during the early Cold War. Giving examples from nuclear research in the 1940s, Lederman testified before Congress that basic research, technology, and economic development are “intertwined together,” that the long-term outcomes of basic research could not be predicted, and that it yielded great economic benefit.168 “[The] SSC will restore the nation’s technological self-confidence and enhance the position in science and technology…spin-offs…have been enormous.…The technologies which have emerged now account for a significant fraction of our $4 trillion gross national product.”169 Roy Schwitters, the director of the SSC, pointed to its “strong links to new technologies” including synchrotron light sources, materials research, biomedicine, electronic components, and computers.170 Alvin Trivelpiece, the director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Research went further: The SSC is essential to advance the state of knowledge in an area of basic research vital to our national interests. The SSC is an outstanding investment in America’s future that demonstrates commitment to the pursuit of excellence in scientific research. Past investments and studies in the interior of atoms have been repaid hundreds of times over in new knowledge, new technologies, new jobs, national security, advances in medicine, and return to the Treasury.

Lederman likewise appealed to a sense of patriotism and national pride: “What are the benefits to the Nation? Well, it was already mentioned that the project is reminiscent of Apollo…and the general pride that our citizens get by being part of this accomplishment. After all, what are the achievements of a great nation? Surely meaningful scientific and technological accomplishments must be very high on the list.”171 The relatively unambiguous scientific aim of the SSC was to discover the Higgs fields and the associated mechanism by which the primordial universe lost its symmetry and the weak bosons obtained mass. High-energy physicists obviously did not believe that so obscure an objective would call forth the multi-billion dollar 167. Glashow and Lederman (ref. 165), 34. 168. Ref. 166, 77-78. 169. Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, United States House of Representatives, Superconducting Super Collider, 100th Congress, 1st session, 7, 8, and 9 Apr 1987, 263. 170. Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, Proposed Fiscal Year 1990 Budget Request (DOE’s Office of Energy Research), 101st Congress, 1st session, 24 Feb 1989, 101-102. 171. Ibid., 262.


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SSC in the climate of Cold War II. Instead, by appealing to the historic connections between basic physics, technology, and industry they hoped to show that their project would “make America strong” by contributing to the economy and to defense. When high-energy physicists did attempt to vaunt the cultural value of their science, Congress and other scientists responded less than sympathetically. A correspondent in Physics today criticized “Lederman’s beatific extolment of the philosophical and cosmological transcendence of high-energy physics insights and million-dollar detectors exhibits just the hubris [Rustum] Roy cites.” Another letter ridiculed appeals to symmetry and elegance even more bitingly: 172 “The nobility in their grand palaces, contemplating the ‘transcendent beauty and philosophical depth’ of their works of art, have heard the cries of the peasants and have told them to eat their virtual funding.” The presumption of particle physicists to address fundamental questions was now interpreted not in terms of the universal significance of its problems, but as the conceited arrogance of its practitioners. In Congress and elsewhere, Steven Weinberg worked particularly hard to eloquently express his views about the beautiful and simple “final theory” that the SSC might uncover. “We are going to come to a simple set of principles which will be almost self-evident and that will be at the bottom of everything, that will be completely universal and govern everything in the universe.”173 Philip Anderson, testifying directly after Weinberg, agreed that the questions that the SSC would pursue to answer were deep and fundamental, but no more or less so than important theorems in mathematics. Changing track, he observed that the SSC, a “large and inflexible machine,” could not have “serendipity,” the possibility of finding the unexpected:174 [T]he SSC is a very narrow and rather specialized area of physics with a very narrow focus. It focuses on the very tiny and very energetic sub-sub-structure of the world in which we live. Most of that substructure is well understood in a very definite sense. Nothing discovered by the SSC can, for the foreseeable future, change the way we work or think about the world and cannot change even nuclear physics.

In another exchange Weinberg explained that although the everyday concerns of life often seemed more important to him, “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t spend some time wondering about what kind of universe it is…You wonder what is governing it all. Why is it this way? What is the logic of it?” The SSC offered the possibility of answering some of these questions: “[T]he rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal…the simplicity and beauty that 172. William Moellering, Cincinnati, Ohio (10/85), and Joseph F. Lomax, Evanston, Illinois (9/85) “Letters: Funding Big Science,” Physics today, 39:4 (1986), 15. 173. Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Subcommitee on Energy and Water Development of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, Superconducting Super Collider, 103rd Congress, 1st session, 4 Aug 1993, 50. 174. Ref. 169, 58.

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we are finding in the rules that govern matter mirror something that is built into the structure of the universe, into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.” To this one a Congressman could only respond: “Will it help us find God?….If this machine does that, I am going to come around and support it.” 175 The functional, technological-economic objectives of the SSC came to be reflected in its conception and design. Whereas the Midwestern location of Fermilab played a role in ameliorating a range of scientific and social problems, the siting of the SSC in Waxahachie, Ellis County, Texas, coming on the day after President George Bush’s election, seemed to serve overtly political ends. Texas had promised to provide 200 square miles of land for the accelerator as well as $1 billion. Nor was George Bush the only influential figure in the picture: Jim Wright, Speaker of the House, Senators Lloyd Bentsen (who had just run for Vice President) and Phil Gramm (formerly Waxahachie’s Congressional representative) were all Texans. Realizing the potential for creating jobs and growth, more than half the states in the Union had submitted proposals for the new facility. Likewise the process of building the accelerator became a process of distributing SSC funds and industrial contracts across states in order to garner the widest possible support. By 1991 over ninety universities in thirty states had received hundreds of millions of dollars in extra grants and contracts.176 The New republic called it “quark barrel politics.”177 A “Laboratory Status Report” issued in 1992 made almost no mention of aboveground structures of the new laboratory.178 Moshe Safdie, an Israeli-Canadian architect, deliberately opposed his designs to Wilson’s vertical forms at Fermilab: “horizontality meant organic unity and a gently chaotic, urban sense of place.”179 The widely dispersed, low-roofed structures Safdie envisioned marked a return to the functional, factory-like laboratories of the 1950s. Attracted to the form of Brookhaven and CERN, Safdie argued that there should be no one “central” building on the large Waxahachie “campus.” Instead, he planned horizontal interactions between industrial type laboratories along a “street.” Safdie’s work, influenced by Louis Kahn (designer of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California), emphasizes form, functionality, and utility.180 The symmetry and beauty of Wilson’s Central Laboratory building was fragmented into a large number of small structures scattered across the site. None of the environmental and social problems 175. Ibid., 246, 278. The congressman was Don Ritter (R-Pennsylvania). 176. Daniel J. Kevles, “Big Science and big politics in the United States: Reflections on the death of the SSC and the life of the Human Genome Project,” HSPS, 27:2 (1997), 269-297, on 272-273. 177. Robert Bazell, “Quark barrel politics,” New republic, 196 (1987), 9-10. 178. Universities Research Association, Inc., Superconducting Super Collider: Laboratory Status Report—1992 (Dallas, 1992). 179. Galison and Thomson, eds. (ref. 72), 18. 180. Moshe Safdie, “The architecture of science: From D’Arcy Thomson to the SSC” (ref. 72), 482-495.


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Wilson’s planning and design had addressed were echoed in the Super Collider Status Report or in testimony before Congress. Even educational programs at the SSC, managed by its Education Office, received a relatively low profile.181 Although distinguished physicists such as Schwitters (an experimentalist and former member of the Harvard faculty), Nobel-laureate Weinberg, and the “unbridled, streetwise, and colloquial” Lederman vigorously argued the merits of the SSC, none of them could match the sensitive and personable qualities that Wilson had brought to his directorship; HEP lacked a charismatic leader who could speak convincingly about the concerns of fundamental science in ways understandable to non-physicists. The SSC outsourced the creative soul of the SSC to people like Safdie who had a limited conception of HEP and its problems. The result was a stagnant, industrial design that reflected the political and spin-off-oriented nature of the laboratory. The physical structure of the SSC reflected the breakdown and fragmentation of the symmetry-beauty narrative that had played such a large part in the construction of Fermilab. In June 1992, with concerns over deepening economic downturn growing, the House opted to cancel the SSC by a vote of 232-181. The Senate reversed the decision. After bitter debate, the House voted again to terminate the accelerator in 1993 (280-150). This time, although the Senate rejected the bill 57 to 42, the House killed the project decisively on October 19, 1993 (the vote was an overwhelming 282-143).182 The reasons for this loss of political support for the SSC are complicated and manifold. Economic downturn put increasing pressure on a fresh Congress to slash the budget; the SSC’s perpetually rising cost (estimates of the total increased to $11 billion by May 1993) seemed cause for genuine alarm. Moreover, leaked reports from the DOE hinted at gross financial mismanagement of the project.183 The end of the Cold War effectively spelled the end of the national security state that had sustained Big Science projects such as the SSC since World War II. The justifications in terms of technological and economic (and therefore military) benefits to which Lederman, Schwitters, and others had appealed were suddenly rendered hollow and ineffective. Senator Dave Durenberger (R-Minnesota) commented: “If we were engaged in a scientific competition with a global superpower like the former Soviet Union, and if this project would lead to an enhancement of our national security, then I would be willing to continue funding the project. But...we face no such threat.”184 Cut loose of links to defense, increasing U.S. economic and technological strength, and global competition in the Cold War context, the SSC became subject to the vagaries of domestic politics and budgetary constraints.

181. Ref. 178. 182. Kevles (ref. 176), 283-285. 183. Committee on Energy and Commerce, United States House of Representatives, Mismanagement of DOEs Super Collider, 103rd Congress, 1st session, 26 May 1993. 184. Quoted in Kevles (ref. 176), 292.

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The question remains, however, why high-energy physicists could not, as they had done with Fermilab in the 1960s, provide Congress and the public with other sufficient reasons for sustaining the SSC. Why could the prospect of a Higgs boson and the possibility of a beautiful, complete, fundamental theory of everything not hold its own? The answer to these questions lies in the fragmentation of the physics community. Anderson: “We have long since learned everything particle physics can tell us about the behavior of ordinary matter, even of nuclei, and probably of the stars themselves. If the particle physicists tell you they will understand even the Big Bang better as a consequence of the SSC, they are being wildly optimistic; and if they claim any other relevance, they are wrong. Their fundamental physics has become so ‘fundamental’ as to be almost totally irrelevant, even to the rest of science.”185 Anderson, with Nicolaas Bloembergen (a Nobel Laureate from Harvard), J. Robert Schrieffer (a Nobel Prize-winner for his explanation of superconductivity), questioned the spin-off potential of the SSC and called for increased funds to small-scale science, which had more direct links to useful technology.186 Members of Congress agreed. “I do not believe the SSC should be defended on the basis of its implications for U.S. competitiveness,” Robert Roe, chairman of the Committee on Space, Science, and Technology cautioned. “From this committee’s perspective, there are a number of more focused initiatives and applied sciences that will have a much more direct effect on U.S. industrial competitiveness and high technology.”187 After listening to testimony by Weinberg and Lederman, Congressman Don Ritter (R-Pennsylvania) said: “It seems to me that what you are talking about is so far down the pike, so far away, so shared, intimately shared, by all our competitors, that our fundamental need, which is to make our technologies more competitive via science, is not being addressed, because it is so far down the line.”188 The high-energy physicists could not come back with a convincing reply to such criticism. Fragmentations over strings, SDI, and condensed matter resulted in a cacophony of competing voices laying claim to “fundamental” science and drowning out the persuasive force of the symmetry narrative. In the demise of the SSC can be seen the confrontation of the simple, symmetric realm of particle physics with the complexity and contingency of the real world. In the real world, on human scales where human problems count, symmetries are broken and condensed matter physics has direct relevance. The fragmentation of the physics community over superstrings, SDI, and the SSC in Cold War II mirrored this spontaneous breakdown of order; no longer could any one story be told about HEP, no longer was there space and time for any grand narrative of physics. 185. Ref. 169, 906. 186. Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Department of Energy’s Superconducting Super Collider Project, 102nd Congress, 1st session, 16 Apr 1991, 42-46 (Bloembergen); ref. 169, 255-257 (Schritter). 187. Ref. 169, 2. 188. Ibid., 280.


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The narrative of elegance, simplicity, and fundamental symmetries of the universe that had been told by high-energy physicists in the 1960s and 1970s dissolved into a multiplicity of competing narratives (strings, broken symmetry) that made their own claims to being beautiful and fundamental. When the Cold War ended particle physicists could not reconstruct a justification (although some, such as Weinberg, tried) based on symmetry and fundamental entities as they had done in the 1960s; the fragmentation of the community had undermined the plausibility of this bold and heroic story.

HALLAM STEVENS

Fundamental physics and its justifications, 1945-1993 ABSTRACT:

The justifications for public expenditure on accelerator laboratories that high energy physicists deployed over the course of the Cold War are examined. It is shown how legitimization in terms of Cold War economic and national security aims was rendered ineffective during the 1960s anti-science movements. As a consequence high energy physicists framed a response that emphasized the elegance and cultural value of their work. Their story vaunted universal and fundamental concepts that could be appreciated by even an anti-scientific audience. In particular, the concept of “symmetry,” which had become a powerful tool of high energy physics, was utilized to communicate the aesthetic qualities toward which the physicists aspired. Robert Wilson realized this vision in his design and successful construction and operation of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (1967-1974). During the 1980s, renewed Cold War tensions, string theory, and challenges from condensed matter physicists fragmented the physics community and broke down the high energy physicists’ symmetry narrative. The multiplicity of competing stories about fundamental physics that resulted are considered as one cause of the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider.

Fundamental physics and its justifications

Strings and fundamental physics

Approaches to fundamental physics

Approaches to Fundamental Physics

Approaches to Fundamental Physics

Basics and Highlights in Fundamental Physics

Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging

Greek Law in Its Political Setting: Justifications Not Justice

Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (Fundamental Theories of Physics 152)

The Earth's Atmosphere. Its Physics and Dynamics

Radiation Physics of Metals and Its Applications

Radiation Physics of Metals and Its Applications

Quantum physics for scientists and technologists: Fundamental principles and applications

From Varying Couplings to Fundamental Physics

The Fundamental Constants: A Mystery of Physics

Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited

The Structure of Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics)

Quantum Physics: A Fundamental Approach to Modern Physics

The Fundamental Constants: A Mystery of Physics

Complex General Relativity (Fundamental Theories of Physics)

Modern Atomic Physics: Fundamental Principles (vol.1)

Rational Reconstructions of Modern Physics (Fundamental Theories of Physics 169)

Quantum Physics: A Fundamental Approach to Modern Physics

Physics of Manganites (Fundamental Materials Research)

Classical Electromagnetic Theory (Fundamental Theories of Physics)

Punishment: the supposed justifications revisited

Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited

Fundamental Baseball (Fundamental Sports)

Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods (Fundamental Theories of Physics)

Particles and Fundamental Interactions: An Introduction to Particle Physics

Fundamental physics and its justifications

Strings and fundamental physics

Approaches to fundamental physics

Approaches to Fundamental Physics

Approaches to Fundamental Physics

Basics and Highlights in Fundamental Physics

Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging

Greek Law in Its Political Setting: Justifications Not Justice

Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (Fundamental Theories of Physics 152)

The Earth's Atmosphere. Its Physics and Dynamics

Radiation Physics of Metals and Its Applications

Radiation Physics of Metals and Its Applications

Quantum physics for scientists and technologists: Fundamental principles and applications

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