Particle Colliders and the Politics of Taiwanese Science at the End of the Cold War
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Abstract：
This article examines Taiwan’s abortive bid to participate in constructing the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1990s. To help pay for the construction of the $8 billion particle accelerator, slated to be the world’s largest, project organizers and the US government solicited the help of numerous foreign governments, including Taiwan. Partly through the mediation of Chinese-American scientists like the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist T.D. Lee and head of Academia Sinica Wu Ta-you, Taiwan’s government initially expressed its intent to participate by producing a crucial component: the GEM Central Tracker. However, this quickly ignited a public firestorm over the project’s costs and scientific contribution, ultimately resulting in the cancellation of Taiwan’s participation in February-March 1993. This article uses archival materials from Academia Sinica to excavate the roots of this controversy, and to articulate the politics of science in late-Cold War East Asia. I argue that the collapse of the project reflected new instabilities in Taiwan’s scientific policymaking caused by three factors: the rise of Sino-US scientific cooperation, the decline in the prestige of high-energy physics, and the erosion of technocracy caused by Taiwan’s recent democratization. Within a new and volatile mass-media landscape, personal and professional grievances were publicly aired, preventing the formation of policy consensus.
This article examines Taiwan’s abortive bid to participate in constructing the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas in the early 1990s. To help pay for the construction of the $8 billion particle accelerator, slated to be the world’s largest, project organizers and the US government solicited the help of numerous foreign governments, including Taiwan. Partly through the mediation of Chinese-American scientists like the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist T.D. Lee and head of Academia Sinica Wu Ta-you, Taiwan’s government initially expressed its intent to participate by producing a crucial component: the GEM Central Tracker. However, this quickly ignited a public firestorm over the project’s costs and scientific contribution, ultimately resulting in the cancellation of Taiwan’s participation in February-March 1993. This article uses archival materials from Academia Sinica to excavate the roots of this controversy, and to articulate the politics of science in late-Cold War East Asia. I argue that the collapse of the project reflected new instabilities in Taiwan’s scientific policymaking caused by three factors: the rise of Sino-US scientific cooperation, the decline in the prestige of high-energy physics, and the erosion of technocracy caused by Taiwan’s recent democratization. Within a new and volatile mass-media landscape, personal and professional grievances were publicly aired, preventing the formation of policy consensus.