o John Silber, President of Boston University and member of the governing Council of Presidents of URA, was also identified in the Journal as the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 1990.
o The italicized quote from the article selected to summarize the contents was "The Superconducting Super Collider is the single national initiative most likely to spur economic activity, invention and long-term prosperity. It is pump- priming appropriate to this technological age."
An Apollo Project for the '90s
"The Senate will soon have a chance to rescue the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC. Although the House recently voted to cut off funding for the project, a Senate vote scheduled for early August could force a conference with the House and allow proponents of the SSC to make the arguments that will save it. It definitely should be saved.
"Those in the House who voted against the SSC probably thought they were striking a blow for a balanced budget. In reality, they struck a blow against the American economy by halting a journey into space that, like the Apollo Project -- President Kennedy's initiative to place a man on the moon -- would combine extraordinary scientific progress with immense economic benefits.
"This time, it is not the outer space of the solar system that beckons but the inner space of the atom.
"The SSC is the ultimate particle-smasher, creating collisions that emulate conditions not seen since the instant after the Big Bang. Physicists will be able to test the hypothesis that various forces that govern the physical universe -- like electromagnetism, radioactivity and the strong force, which holds the components of atoms together -- were once a single force. The SSC will also reveal the structure of the fundamental building blocks of nature with the utmost precision.
Apollo Project
"Like the Apollo project, the SSC will cost billions of dollars. Like the Apollo project, it presents immense challenges in engineering. The engineering challenges of the Apollo project called forth a host of remarkable developments -- of which the microcomputer is only the best known -- that needed only the will and the intellectual and financial resources to be made real. These developments have long outlasted the Apollo project and transformed our daily lives. The same will be true of the SSC.
"The benefits of the SSC are threefold: scientific, economic and technological.
"First, the SSC is the greatest scientific project ever undertaken, and offers us the opportunity to complete our understanding of matter. The last steps of the revolutionary scientific journey begun by Kepler and Newton now lie before us.
"Second, the SSC is the equivalent of a major public-works project. It will require massive amounts of building materials and $1 billion in heavy construction. Building the physical structure in itself will provide a major jump-start to the economy. More than a thousand industries, millions of man-hours of labor and hundreds of thousands of workers will be involved. To date, more than 27,000 contracts have been signed, primarily with technological start-up companies.
"But this economic impact will be eclipsed by a third benefit: the technological and industrial revolution that will follow from inventing and making the project's scientific components. When the best scientists and engineers work on the challenges of the SSC, they will inevitably invent new materials and technologies. As the Apollo project demonstrated, technical goals thought to be insurmountable in fact stimulate wondrous results.
"The SSC will be located within a circular tunnel 54 miles around. Boring this tunnel will help to create new technologies that will result in significant economies for the tunneling industry. These will directly benefit the water and sewage infrastructure of our aging cities, where many of the tunnels built at the turn of the century or before must be replaced over the next two decades. The recent Chicago flood, the result of crumbling tunnels, cost the city a billion dollars -- an eighth the cost of the SSC.
"Another example: Through the center of each of the SSC's magnets runs a 54-mile ring containing absolutely nothing -- a vacuum more nearly perfect than that on the moon. The track along which protons travel at nearly the speed of light will be the Earth's largest high-vacuum system.
"The magnets of the SSC will form a gigantic doughnut. Supercooling these magnets to within four degrees of absolute zero will transform our ability to refrigerate efficiently and safely. The magnets themselves must be kept in precise alignment, a task that will require a new generation of monitors of unexampled accuracy and reliability. The current in the magnets must be precisely controlled as well, so as not to lose the protons as they accelerate.
"Literally hundreds of thousands of microprocessors will be needed to control the SSC. A new generation of supercomputers will be required to track the collisions at each experimental port. These computers, and the advances in superconductivity required by the SSC, will lead to better electrical power generation, to better load-leveling technology (with decreased environmental impact), and to improved electric motors.
"Development of the SSC will also provide the manufacturing infrastructure needed for magnetic-levitation railroads, a transforming technology invented in America that Congress seems determined to abandon to other countries.
"The SSC is the single national initiative most likely to spur economic activity, invention and long-term prosperity. It is a pump-priming project appropriate to this technological age, with far greater potential than the projects of the WPA. The building and maintenance of bridges, highways and schools provide useful work that contributes to the infrastructure of the nation. But the SSC will not merely put tens of thousands of people to work in all parts of the country; it will transform our industrial and technological apparatus. Its ripple effects will far exceed those of the Apollo project if for no other reason than that the SSC is based on and in the earth.
"Much of the work required by the SSC will by its nature provide significant opportunities for defense conversion. Defense industries seeking a new role in peacetime production can build many of its components, preserving thousands of jobs and avoiding serious social dislocations.
"To scrap the SSC at this point, as the House majority voted to do, is to engage in self-defeating economizing -- to save a penny and throw away a pound. The SSC is not an item of consumption, as nuclear weapons were, but an item of investment that will continue to generate wealth far into the next century. And the investment is not merely in long-term scientific progress but in immediate and long-range economic development.
Crucial Technology
"European observers, seeing this American retreat from a crucial technology, are astonished. But they are also opportunistic. If we drop the SSC, Europe will almost certainly expand its own existing collider, known as CERN, in Switzerland. This improved collider will provide some of the scientific results expected from the SSC. But it will provide America with none of the economic benefits.
"America is too young to step down from world leadership. Such leadership depends upon economic strength, and economic strength depends on the developments necessary to the building of the SSC. If we resign ourselves to a service economy we will resign ourselves to becoming the world's richest Third World nation.
"Critics say we cannot afford to build the SSC. The truth is that we cannot afford not to build it.