'This will be the crown jewel of high-energy physics,' Energy Secretary John Herrington said January 30 in announeing President Reagan's decision to go ahead with it. It would be the largest and most expensive scientific machine ever built В— a racetrack-shaped ring of 10,000 super-magnets 53 miles in circumference В— carrying a price tag of at least $4.4 billion and conceivably closer to $5.3 billion. Seven blocks away, in the Energy Department headquarters building overlooking the Mall, are some of the people who understand how cyclotrons work and who want to go to the frontier in high-energy physics: the superconducting super collider (SSC). Replied her companion, 'How do they get one atom? I don't understand.'

'We just had a test on this,' one teenager said during an Eastertime visit to the atom smasher display. Visitors tend to pay more attention to the display behind it: a full-scale model of a 1936 cyclotron that used a massive World War I surplus 70-ton magnet and a 27-inch vaccuum chamber that looks like a large, hollow metal pancake. It is small enough to fit comfortably in a man's hand. late in 1930,' says the description next to the hockey-puck like 'tube,' which is four inches in diameter and one inch thick. 'The first successful cyclotron 'tube,' constructed and tested. There is the Friendship 7 capsule that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the earth, the Hope diamond, one of the lead tractors from the farmer tractorcades of the 1970s and, easily overlooked between 'Textiles' and an 1865 telescope from Vassar College at the National Museum of American History, a relic from the early efforts to take atoms apart.

The Smithsonian Institution, renowned for its museums along the Mall in Washington, is sometimes nicknamed America's attic, a comfortable place where visitors can wander about and rummage for knowledge. Super competition for superconducting super collider

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