The future of U.S. high-energy physics is uncertain, and as a consequence I have had a lot on my mind of late. This entry will be the first in a series of essays on messages: messages to the American people, to the Congress, and to the physics community. This time, more than a decade beyond the lessons of the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC), is unparalled from the three perspectives of discovery, policy, and money. The only question left is: do we have the strength of will, as a community, to come together to seize this convergence?
When the SSC was canceled, I was literally a “schoolboy”. To be fair, I was going into my senior year in high school. I had taken an introductory freshman course – “chemistry and physics”, labored through the smells and sights of biology, and enjoyed thrilling moments in chemistry class with only a metal air vent between me and the lung-stopping effects of hydrogen disulfide. When I entered my senior physics class, I was ready for a world full of opportunity to study the cosmos. In this world, the U.S. was a leader among its powerful scientific peers, rich in discovery potential in particle physics.
When the SSC was canceled, I wasn’t even told. All I remember is a poster on the wall of Mr. Dumais’ physics class, a controversial and scandalous poster with a timeline of historic discoveries in science. As the line passed through the date when the final Congressional vote on the SSC was cast, it was bisected by a dashed line with little scissors printed next to it. The timeline of discovery shot up geometrically after that date. Written next to the dashed line were the words, “Cut here if the SSC is canceled.” This poster, to this day, lives in the memory of many of my colleagues. It brings both a level of disgust – too much showmanship – and a level of remorse.
By the time I got out of college, the big players in Europe were ramping down to prepare for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Tevatron was resting, preparing for the coming Run II, and the SLAC B-Factory was just finishing construction in preparation for its inaugural year, 1999. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) was also completing construction at Brookhaven. These were hopeful times. The decks, once cluttered with the salvage from the SSC, were polished and covered with buffet tables heaping with the hope of discovery. Would the Tevatron find the Higgs? Would the B-factory identify the source of matter/anti-matter imbalance in the cosmos? Would RHIC witness the very soup of creation, the quark-gluon plasma that once reigned supreme in the moments after the Big Bang?
The rest of the world was not silent. From Japan we saw a brilliant era of discovery in neutrinos, an era that really jumpstarted the field in the late 1990s. With the discovery of neutrino flavor mixing, we had our first clue that the Standard Model edifice was cracking. To mix, neutrinos must have mass, a fact poorly accomodated and certainly never predicted by the Standard Model. Optimism was become the ambrosia of the particle diet, and as we warmed our accelerators at SLAC, Brookhaven, Fermilab, and KEK in Japan we readied to feast on discovery.
Through all of this, I became a product of one of the important contributions particle physics makes to society. I was educated, trained in research, put through personal mental toil, anguish, and elation, and finally rewarded with a Ph.D. I proudly changed my voicemail message at SLAC to say, “You have reached DOCTOR Steve Sekula.” Particle physics, with all of its quests for complete knowledge of the building blocks of the universe and its thirst for a glimpse of the creation moment, serves a critical but mundane purpose: it educates. I say “mundane” because it’s not the first thing we think about when we get into this. Many of us say outright that we loathe teaching, that we yearn only for research. The impact of even a diet only rich in research is still one that leaves a mark on education. Students schooled in the classroom subject of physics will one day venture into a real laboratory, working on a real experiment. The experience of the research physicist, huddled in phone meetings with colleagues a thousand miles away or pouring over data analysis at a desktop PC, serves too as an example for the impressionable young mind.
Each year, several dozen physicists go to Washington D.C. with a message. They represent the thousands of users – physicists who are not employed by labs but rely on their expertise and facitilites – who daily conduct cutting-edge research at SLAC, Fermilab, and the LHC. I have been part of their trip for many years, up until this one, when they met with over half of Congress. The message to Congress is simple: particle physics addresses great and inspiring questions, develops powerful technologies at the frontier of human understanding, and trains the next generation of students who will both lead physics research and go into the working world to power it with their knowledge. These are great messages, and they are true. All young physicists, like myself, found a great puzzle tackled by physics to be inspiring. All of us went through the pipeline, and many suffered personal toil and mental anguish to achieve their degree. Many of us stayed in the field, inspired by the questions and eager to engage ourselves in the experiments of the day. Some of us hope to continue on, leading others on this journey and becoming captains of new experiments in the future.
Not since the 1980s has the Congress been more receptive to this message. There are several reasons for this. First, particle physicists took a righteous beating for their hubris, their sense of entitlement to the monies guarded by Congress and gifted by the American People. This hubris was one ingredient in the failure of the SSC. There is a reason such a sense of pride was identified by the Greeks, and labeled hubris. We now come before Congress not just humbled by the lessons of the past, but humbled by the very universe we intend to study. We come as students of nature, to tell a tale of great questions and the complex experiments needed to address them. We come to talk of exploration, not entitlement, and hope, not expectation. All politicians are more receptive to a powerful story over a wild demand.
There is also a recognition widely in this nation that its technological greatness, predicated on a strong and diverse educational pipeline, is weakening. The innovative spirit of this nation is not powered only by degrees and academics, but by that sense of entrepreneurship and exploration that drove people like Edison and the Wright brothers. A sense of curiosity about the world has always started people on the path to discovery, but the mechanisms by which they can feast on knowledge have been critical for sustaining that spirit and nurturing it into real innovation. As we watch Congress and the American People struggle with the issue of K-12 education, we also realize that science plays a role as the students get older. It provides stories that inspire, it provides opportunities that engage, and it provides the talent and the means to achieve great ambitions. Without strong, curiosity-driven research, students would want for nothing more than to be able to fill the bubbles on their standardized tests. Science, like medicine or entertainment, drives the enthusiasm of students to become great like the greats they admire.
Congress and the President want to invest more in basic research. They are looking for scientific leadership to take advantage of this, to make the investments with that capital needed to create the next generation of innovators, and to generate the discoveries promised by the last generation. The American People are excited by science television programming, even if we scientists sometimes think it a bit sensational. There is a convergence in this nation of desire to invest in the intangible, to spend on the science of fundamental questions. Implicit in this is the understanding that we, as a community, can not only deliver the experiments we promised, but also train and educate the kids who, today, are sitting in their classrooms looking at inspiring posters on the wall.
There is a problem, however. While Congress is receptive to investing in fundamental science and the American People are eager to be more engaged in science, there is a threat that my own community – particle physics – cannot deliver on those goals. It was an insight recently made by a colleague of mine, a graduate student and young physicist at Stanford University. When she made the observation, it got me thinking, and resulted in this essay. In the next essay, I will discuss the nature of the problem.
