The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the American high- energy physics project begun in 1983 and abruptly terminated in 1993 by Congress after $2 billion had been spent on construction, offers everyone interested in science studies a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of "big science." This four year project under the direction of Professor Lillian Hoddeson is being carried out by an experience multidisciplinary team and aims to unravel and explain the factors responsible for the genesis as well as the demise of the SSC. A proton collider more than an order of magnitude more energetic than any earlier accelerator and far more expensive, the SSC was the most ambitious particle accelerator project ever attempted. This frontier machine was intended to fulfill `the desires and aspirations of the whole US high energy community." Because of its size and cost, the alliances necessary to support this project reached deep into the political, industrial, and even military communities of the United States. Professor Hoddeson and her team aim to examine these linkages and to study how a major scientific community creates a large project and reacts to its collapse. In examining the termination of the SSC, the study will consider whether big science, which previously had grown almost without bounds, has reached a turning point, or perhaps an evolutionary dead end, and whether future projects on the scale of the SSC will ever be possible again. For more than a decade, all four members of this research team have been studying the field of high-energy physics, including the SSC, from varying perspectives-- scientific, historical, archival, philosophical, and sociological. Two of them have been communicating with SSC staff in an effort to preserve important documents as well as the collective institutional memory. This study will integrate the complementary experience of these scholars of science. They will undertake an intensive effort to study documenta tion, preserve oral recollections of principal participants, and prepare a carefully researched study of widest interest.
