Its 60-mile circumference could embrace Manhattan, Barbados or (almost) Bahrain. Its 2 billion ft. of niobium-titanium wire could encircle the world 16 times. The 150 megawatts of power needed to operate it could light up a city of 15,000. And its price tag of as much as $6 billion could purchase half a dozen new space shuttles. All told, the superconducting supercollider (SSC), a gigantic particle accelerator that the Department of Energy may begin constructing somewhere in the U.S. before the end of the decade, would be the biggest, most elaborate and most ambitious physics project ever undertaken.
Yet what the underground megamachine might accomplish is more boggling still: it would serve as a circular iron-and-steel racetrack for beams of subatomic particles, traveling at fantastic speeds, that would be smashed together in an effort to mimic conditions at the earliest moments of the universe. It would enable physicists to probe fundamental mysteries about the origin of matter and energy and could help them achieve a long-sought goal: to weave the four known forces of nature--electromagnetism, gravity, the weak force (responsible for radioactive decay) and the strong force (which holds atomic nuclei together)--into a single, elegant, grand unified theory. Says Leon Lederman, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the high-energy physics facility near Chicago: "With the SSC, we are bound to make fantastic new discoveries."
At a hearing before a House subcommittee, physicists from the U.S. and Europe last week stressed the importance of the mammoth project for American science. "By building the SSC you will have predominance in this particular field," said Carlo Rubbia, a renowned physicist at the CERN accelerator center near Geneva. His testimony supported the view of Presidential Science Adviser George Keyworth, who earlier this year warned that "it would be a serious blow to U.S. scientific leadership if that facility were built in another country."
Anticipating a federal green light for the collider, 28 states are lobbying to be home to the sprawling complex, which, in addition to generating thousands of jobs, could attract other high-tech businesses to the area. In that respect, says Bob Chandler, city manager of Winnemucca, Nev. (pop. 5,270), one of the contending sites, "it's a hundred times better than the General Motors' Saturn plant."
The supercollider would be still another in a string of new colossal accelerators that seem to be proliferating almost as rapidly as the novel particles they produce. In these machines, electrons or protons (and usually their antimatter counterparts, positrons or antiprotons) are spurred to nearly the speed of light and tremendous energy levels by radio waves and steered on their circular course by magnets. The monumental girth of the new machines stems from limitations in the power of the guiding magnets; bigger circular tracks have gentler curves and thus require less intense magnetic fields to keep the particles on their required path.