Naming rights: how to stake a claim in the dictionary of science

Ever-larger accelerators reach ever-higher energies, probing the fast-receding boundary between what is known and what is unknown about the universe. The big bang theory of cosmology asserts that the universe was once a very small and very hot soup of energetic subatomic particles. With a super-duper particle smasher, physicists might be able to simulate the earliest moments of the cosmos. In the 1980s, when U.S. physicists proposed just such an accelerator (eventually dubbed the Superconducting Super Collider), Congress was ready to fund it. Plans were drawn up. Construction began. A circular tunnel fifty-four miles around was dug in Texas. Physicists were eager to peer across the next cosmic frontier. But in 1993, when cost overruns looked intractable, a fiscally frustrated Congress permanently withdrew funds for the $11 billion project. It probably never occurred to our elected representatives that by canceling the Super Collider they surrendered the U.S. primacy in experimental particle physics.

If you want to see the next frontier, hop a plane to Europe, which seized the opportunity to build the world's largest particle accelerator and stake a claim of its own on the landscape of cosmic knowledge. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, the accelerator will be run by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (better known by an acronym that no longer fits its name: CERN). Although some American physicists are collaborators, the U.S. as a nation will watch the effort from the sidelines.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and a visiting research scientist at Princeton University.

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