At the very end, some of it wasn't too bad, but there was nothing that really addressed what the project was about on a level accessible to bright but skeptical non-physicists. I've read some of the material intended to justify the SSC. No one asked to pay for this had the foggiest idea of what a Higgs boson is. The whole thing has an aura, in the view of at least some Congress people I've talked to, of 'nerds gone wild' - which I suppose is an uncharitable way of describing curiosity-based science. They are for something that is, worrisomely from the point of view of many, called 'the theory of everything.' Explanations that involve entities called quarks, charm, flavor, color, etc., sound as if physicists are being cute. Few in Congress understood what modern high-energy accelerators are for. But this debate was not, I think, mainly about declining interest in the support of science. It was cancelled by Congress in 1993 after about $2 billion had been spent - a worst of both worlds' outcome.

CASE 5: Big science - little rhetoric The following excerpt is from Carl Sagan's book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, itself both a plea for and an excellent example of clear scientific communication: The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) would have been the preeminent instrument on the planet for probing the fine structure of matter and the nature of the early Universe.

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