The Changed Partnership

Not many years ago in the United States, the special relationship between science and government seemed as permanent as an old-fashioned marriage. Whatever one partner requested, the other was more than eager to provide.

In the early 1980s, for example, American physicists in the field of high-energy particle physics urged the Reagan administration to fund construction of a gargantuan high-energy particle accelerator-the Superconducting Super Collider, commonly called the SSC. In an underground, circular tunnel some 52 miles in circumference, two beams of protons would be accelerated in opposite directions, each to an energy of 20 trillion electron volts. The huge subterranean donut would encircle an area 160 times as great as that enclosed by the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, which is the country's flagship machine, spitting out particles at one trillion electron volts.