posted
Back in the day, Churchill summarised a dispute in Britain over how many Dreadnoughts to build thusly: "The Treasury wanted four; the Admiralty insisted on six; so we compromised on eight." It seems something similar has happened to the budget for high-energy physics this year. Bush suggested a budget with a roughly 10% increase, which was very sensible if anything were to be done with the ILC; we've had some years in the doldrums. Congress sent back a counter-proposal that left the HEP section untouched, but added stuff elsewhere that was too much for Bush to accept. A committee hammered out a compromise... and in the process chopped off 90 million from last year's HEP budget, roughly a 10% drop.
Ouch.
It mainly affects the labs, Fermilab and SLAC; the universities have their own sources of funding. But since it's the labs that run the accelerators that produce data, the universities are going to be left without much to do. People are talking about an end to high-energy physics in the US, and graduate students are looking for postdocs in Europe. The ILC is now gone; so is NOVA.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
I'm guessing this already passed as part of the Energy Bill? If not, where were the authorizing funds?
Also, how can this be the end of HEP research in America if we only cut 10% off the spending? That still leaves roughly what, $810 million?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm not up on the law-making details, I'm reporting what I hear in the corridors.
The budget is still 810 million, yes; but it's a question of what programs that supports. BaBar was due to end in late 2008; that end is now moved up by an unknown number of months. SLAC will continue, but its LCLS experiment is not HEP. (It's good and worthy physics, not dissing anyone here. We are all One Lab, and all shiny happy people together.) That leaves, in effect, Fermilab; and while Fermilab can run its current Tevatron experiments on its portion of those 810 million, it cannot do any work on the upcoming Nova and ILC. In fact, the overall 10% hides that those two projects have had their budgets cut by 75%. And since this budget cut was totally unexpected, and we are already 25% into the fiscal year... ooops. The problem is that you can only do so much physics at a given experiment; at some point there are diminishing returns from adding more data. So you shut down that experiment, and you've got a couple of years to analyse the full data set, and then what are you going to do? Planning new experiments in HEP is a long-term business; ten to twenty years is a good lead time. It's not something you can start up again on a year's notice. If people can't see that there's something for the lab to do when the current run ends, they will move elsewhere. Hey, the LHC has been the Next Big Thing for ten years anyway.
It's perfectly legitimate for the US to decide it doesn't want a HEP program, of course. (I've been saying for years that eventually the public would catch on that we've been scamming them for decades, and stop funding us. I just didn't expect it so soon.) I'm just not sure if Bush and Congress are quite aware of what they're doing here.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
I'd be surprised if either Bush or Congress really knew what they were doing when it comes to science funding, especially Bush.
And I have zero idea as to what all your acronyms stand for in your posts, but if you want to post a short summary and explanation of each I'd be most appreciative. I'd be especially interested in hearing what practical applications you think each could lead to, if any.
posted
Well, that's why I said it's a scam. Practical applications? We don't need no steenking practical applications! Seriously, this is basic research; you don't do it because you know what it will do for you, you do it because you don't know but it's paid off big in the past.
As for acronyms, SLAC is the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the two major HEP (High-Energy Physics) labs in the US, the other being Fermilab in Chicago. ILC is the International Linear Collider, or it will be if it ever gets funding; it's a bigger and better electron-positron accelerator. Nova is a neutrino experiment, or will be if it gets funded. The basic idea is to pass electron neutrinos through a large amount of matter (as in, a good portion of the Earth's crust) and observe how many change into muon neutrinos, which will tell us interesting things like what the masses, mixing angles, and CP-violating phases are. Filling in the corners of the Standard Model, in other words, with the possibility of seeing something New and interesting.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Practical applications? We don't need no steenking practical applications! Seriously, this is basic research; you don't do it because you know what it will do for you, you do it because you don't know but it's paid off big in the past.
My father's usual estimate is about 50 years from theory to practical applications, on average. It can be argued that these are a step past pure theory, so maybe shave 5-10 years off.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Yes, but the theory is relativistic QED, which we've already got plenty of applications of, and its unification in the Standard Model with the weak and strong forces, which was done in the seventies. So there's been 30 years of research already. Now, spinoffs are another matter; we've certainly learned a lot about large magnetic fields, industrial-scale superconductors, computers (I've seen it argued that HEP has been the driver for Moore's law), and so on. But direct applications, nah.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
You are using a very general meaning of "theory." And who said the practical applications had to be direct?
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Seriously, this is basic research; you don't do it because you know what it will do for you, you do it because you don't know but it's paid off big in the past. 
