The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider

超导超级对撞机（SSC）是1983年开始的美国高能物理项目，在花费了20亿美元建造之后，于1993年被国会突然终止，它为每个对科学研究感兴趣的人提供了一个研究“大科学”动力学的独特机会。在Lillian Hoddeson教授的指导下，这个为期四年的项目由一个经验丰富的多学科团队进行，旨在解开和解释导致SSC起源和消亡的因素。质子对撞机的能量比任何早期的加速器都要高一个数量级，而且要贵得多，SSC是有史以来最雄心勃勃的粒子加速器项目。这台前沿机器旨在满足“整个美国高能社区的愿望和抱负”。由于它的规模和成本，支持这个项目所必需的联盟深入到美国的政治、工业甚至军事社区。霍德森教授和她的团队旨在研究这些联系，并研究一个主要的科学团体如何创建一个大型项目，并对其崩溃做出反应。在检查SSC的终止时，该研究将考虑以前几乎没有止境的大科学是否已经达到了转折点，或者可能是进化的死胡同，以及未来SSC规模的项目是否有可能再次出现。十多年来，这个研究小组的所有四名成员都从不同的角度——科学、历史、档案、哲学和社会学——研究了包括SSC在内的高能物理领域。其中两人一直与南司工作人员联系，以努力保存重要文件和集体机构记忆。这项研究将整合这些科学学者的互补经验。他们将付出巨大的努力来研究文献，保存主要参与者的口头回忆，并准备一份广泛关注的仔细研究报告。

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.