by Marla Houghteling

DR. MALCOLM DUNCAN saw his career as a theoretical physicist die along with the demise of a big machine - the SSC, the Superconducting Supercollider. It was while he was associate professor of physics at the University of Iowa in 1993 that he decided to switch from physicist to lawyer. He was stunned by the news of the abandonment of the most ambitious science project ever undertaken. The SSC, already famous for its planned 54-mile tunnel circling Waxahachie, Texas, was to house 10,000 superconducting magnets, which would act as proton accelerators. It was predicted that the energy produced by beams of protons colliding would approach the energy that resulted from the Big Bang. Physicists were banking on job creation from this pure-science project. "When it was cancelled, there was a feeling among both experimentalists and theorists that high-energy physics was finished in the U.S," says Dr. Duncan.

He arrived at the University of Michigan in 1983, having just earned his D. Phil. (the British version of Ph.D.) in theoretical particle physics from the Oxford University. The two years spent in Ann Arbor gave him the opportunity to work with Martinus J.G. Veltman, who was a Nobel laureate for physics in 1999. "When I first came to the States, I got involved in some of the early calculations for the physics that would happen at the Supercollider." Early on, part of his career was "invested in this machine in Texas."

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