🚀 go-pugleaf

rcj@lhdsy1.lahabra.chevron.com (R.C. Jones) says:

> I know that the Macneil Leherer hour on PBS is
> a political program, but I can't help asking if
> my ears  heard Rustum Roy say " Nobel Laureates in
> physics! Who cares about them. "
> What are the more scientific opinions about the value
> of the Super Conducting SuperCollider program?

Despite Rustum Roy's extremism (he said that the SSC is not science),
the main issue is one of cost.  Even Dale Bass would not object to
the SSC if it only cost $10.95.  The main scientific goal of the SSC
is to discover the Higgs boson or its dynamical equivalent.  One of
these must exist if spontaneous symmetry breaking is responsible for
low energy particle physics phenomenology.  The energy of the SSC was
chosen to ensure that theoretical predictions will be confronted by data.

In the PBS program, I thought that Bumpers and Johnston, the politicians,
did a much better job of presenting their cases than did Schwitters and Roy,
the scientists.