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One of the reasons I went into high energy physics was that the prospects were so bright. This optimism seemed justified when I (a brand-new Ph.D.) was hired by Penn in August, 1993 to do detector development for the SSC. The project was halted two months later. That was half of the field of high energy physics in the U.S. Since then, the field has dropped by another third and has stabilized there, at about 1/3 the size it was when I graduated.

I'm not bitter about the lack of job prospects. Nobody owes me any sort of job. Lord knows I'm not in it for the money: after more than 11 years of college and 10 years experience at the Ph.D. level, I make less than the starting pay for a local public school teacher. That choice is entirely mine.

What bothers me is that the research is important, and we've irresponsibly ceded it to other countries and centuries. But I'm afraid the national opinion is dominated by people who believe that, "The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas", which slams the door on the notion that the research has any value at all.

Sorry, but the SSC was the biggest pork barrel project that we have ever witnessed in the sciences, and a sheer act of arrogance by the particle physics community. Basically, they said spend $40 billion -- and it would have probably been substantially more once overruns were factored in -- or else we will totally lose the particle physics race. There was no room for compromise, and they money dwarfed all other spending on sciences at the time.

I have talked to people in particle phsyics, and even they admit that they really blew it with the SSC. Some "science" is just not worth the cost. I would certainly put the civilian uses of the space shuttle and the international space station in that category. I would be tempted to put the "war on cancer" ther also, and leave cancer cures to the pharmaceuticals.

The scientific community can be incredibly arrogant, is often extraordinarily biased to produced scare-mongering chicken little prophecies in order to get more attention and funding and has lead to university faculty which is more interested in raising money for their labs and promoting orthodoxy rather than uncovering new knowledge.

I am a refugee from the "temple," and everything I have seen made me feel that politics (personal and governmental), rather than intellect, were what was primarily rewarded in academia.

What bothers me is that the research is important, and we've irresponsibly ceded it to other countries and centuries. But I'm afraid the national opinion is dominated by people who believe that, "The SSC promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy particle physicists and transfer wealth to Texas", which slams the door on the notion that the research has any value at all.

Yes it is important. As I remember it was shut down during the Clinton administration because Texans had the nerve to elect a second Republican Senator for the state. I have never heard of it not being useful for scientific research.

I'm not bitter about the lack of job prospects. Nobody owes me any sort of job. Lord knows I'm not in it for the money: after more than 11 years of college and 10 years experience at the Ph.D. level, I make less than the starting pay for a local public school teacher. That choice is entirely mine.

North Korea's hiring. ;^)

Explaining high energy particle physics to politicians must be like trying to teach, well, high energy particle physics to pigs.

I would explode from frustration.