Tunnel visions : the rise and fall of the superconducting super collider /

Tunnel Visions is an engaging history of the rise and fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), a proton accelerator being built south of Dallas, Texas. The project was canceled in 1993. Riordan (physicist and science historian), Hoddeson (emer., Univ. of Illinois), and Kolb (formerly, archivist, Fermilab) drew upon oral histories of key participants, archival material, and press accounts to explore the reasons for the failure of this basic science enterprise, which was by far the largest and most expensive ever undertaken. Initially approved during the Reagan administration as necessary to show the scientific and technical dominance of the US, its financial support waned as the Cold War ended and Congress grew ever more intent on slashing the federal budget. Other significant impacts explored were the site choice, the complexity of management, competition from other physicists, and the growing dominance of control of the SSC construction by the military-industrial complex and the ensuing clashes with the very different culture of the physicists. Once the SSC was canceled, particle physicists turned to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built at CERN in Switzerland as the way to pursue frontier research. Their efforts were rewarded in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers. --Martha Dickinson, Maine Maritime Academy