Michael Riordan Co-writes Book on the SuperCollider

— from the University of Chicago Press —

Tunnel Visions, co-authored by Orcas resident Michael Riordan

Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider by Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb — US Publication Date: Dec 1, 2015 International Publication Date: Dec 14, 2015

Orcas island author Michael Riordan (in featured photo), now has yet another history of science book under his belt. Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider, being released this week by the University of Chicago Press, is the result of decades of research by Riordan and two coauthors. It chronicles the hopeful birth and painful death of what was the world’s largest and costliest pure science project, which was meant to discover the Higgs boson and reestablish US leadership in high-energy physics. Nobel laureate in physics Burton Richter of Stanford University calls it “a true techno-thriller.”

By the time Congress killed the SSC project in 1993, its estimated price tag had grown to more than ten billion dollars. Drawing on extensive archival research, contemporaneous press accounts, and over a hundred interviews with scientists, engineers, government officials and others involved, Tunnel Visions tells the riveting story of this aborted project. The book examines the complex, interrelated causes for its demise, including severe problems of large-project management, continuing cost overruns, lack of foreign contributions, and the end of the Cold War.

The leading figure in Tunnel Visions, SSC Director Roy Schwitters, turns out to have deep family roots on Orcas Island, as his mother Margaret Boyer grew up here and graduated from Orcas Island High School. A Washington native who was raised in Seattle and served as a Mount Rainier guide, Roy and his family often joined Orcas relatives for their annual July 4th celebrations near Olga. Last summer he purchased a second home on Willis Lane and plans to retire there from his current position as Professor of Physics at the University of Texas in Austin.

In addition to Tunnel Visions, Riordan has written The Hunting of the Quark and coauthored Crystal Fire, the history of the transistor, and The Solar Home Book, a bestseller on solar heating. Before moving to Eastsound in 2010 with his wife Donna and son Denis, he taught the history of physics and technology at Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he did part of the research for Tunnel Visions under a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship. “This will probably be my final book,” Riordan says, “at least on science.”