Quantum Diaries

Steve Nahn | USLHC | USA

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She did her part, did you do yours?

I’m so proud. I told you my Mom was on the job. She’s waiting to hear back from her representatives. By the way, the proposed budget for 2009 just put out looks better (but we’ve been down this road before).

Tags: funding

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

No Responses to “She did her part, did you do yours?”

1. Jacques says:

   February 7, 2008 at 12:20 pm

   Hi Steve,

   Lured to the fascinating world of high energy physics by Monica (my fascination being probably inversely proportional to my -appallingly basic- knowledge of the subject), I am also looking from time to time into other contributors’ posts and was interested by yours. A few queries about related subjects, if you have a few minutes for the dummies:
   . Reading that the British Goverment just withdrew their funding support to the ILC, do you believe such project is in jeopardy and how about US contribution?
   . Is US federal funding secured over the long term, given the nature of the projects or are you at constant risk due to potential swings in annual budget allocations?
   . Is physics research and research in general traditionally better supported by the Democrats than by the Republicans and do you expect anything from the results of the upcoming presidential election and/or changes in the composition of the Congress?
   . In large international cooperations like those formed to run the various LHC experiments, what is the relationship between the effort made by each country and the relative benefits such country draws from it? Are the results of such fundamental physics not “available” to all, be they large or small contributors (or even non-contributors)? What is the “business case” in the eyes of the politicians: the halo effect on applied science?
   . How is funding for international projects generally structured, both for the infrastructure (colliders, detectors…) and the systems and teams analysing the data going forward? Any links to sites shedding light on this, maybe at CERN?

   Regards,

   Jacques

   Reply
2. Steve says:

   February 26, 2008 at 6:52 pm

   Hi Jaques,
   Sorry I’m late. The first and foremost thing to keep in mind is that I am a physicist, not a politician or historian. I call them like I see them, but spend more time worrying about getting the physics right than the nuances of our field. Be that as it may, everyone in our field has to consider these things more and more these days, so here goes:
   1) I don’t think the loss of the British contribution alone is enough to put the ILC in jeopardy (sorry gents).
   2) We in the US are subject to the same funding swings that the British are – a good example is to go back and look at my previous rant about what happened to US funding for High Energy Physics in December. Indeed, if the US pulls out and the British pull out of the ILC, things do look like they’d be in jeopardy. It is an awfully expensive endeavor for just one country alone, although I think some populaces may have the will to see it through. The skeptic in me says that the real problem is that these projects have a longer duration than that of a typical political career, so they have to survive several turnovers, and are cast into question on any potential leadership change. Hard to get work done with all that justifying going on, which then slows progress, which requires more justification…
   3) The party line is that Science is better funded by Republicans than Democrats, but given what has happened lately it isn’t clear how much party lines play a role, at least not to me. I would like to think that the US people may realize that not investing in the future through basic research is a very bad course to take, and that this change in attitude may be reflected in “longer vision” for our politician friends. There is an effort here to start a presidential debate on science to bring the issue to a forefront, but I don’t know if they’ll bite.
   4) The data from the detector is available to all the participants of that collaboration, and the technology from CERN is available to all – they are very careful about that. Although I do not know if there is stated policy, the reality is that it is the same at other labs – every day we collaborate with people from other nations, and they learn and develop right along side us. As for non-collaborators, there are various “data freedom” movements to try to make the data available to everyone, but it isn’t necessarily very practical. I can give you a tape holding a bunch of ones and zeros, but do I have to teach you how to interpret it too? Make sure it runs on your computers, or that you can get an account on some computers on which the software runs? What is the appropriate format for this sort of data for dispersal to a wider audience? The technology that comes from CERN is available – witness the World Wide Web, coming to you for free even though it is worth quite a bit. As for the “business case” from a politician’s point of view, that answer takes a bit longer, but I’ll blog on it soon I promise (prompted from other areas as well…)
   5) The funding structure is different depending on where the project is, but in a general sense everyone pays a certain tax in funds and manpower for support of the detector operations and data processing, and then everyone gets access to the data to do what they want. A particular institution negotiates with the DoE/NSF or their government institution for funds to apply to the project, either by hiring people to do the work, buying equipment, etc. Within the collaboration groups are formed to support different bits of the detector, and you work within that group as part of your contribution. For data analysis, the same holds true. I’m not sure there are any sites explaining how this all works, becuase it is a bit of a rare situation.

   Actually, maybe the best point to take home is this: CERN was originally proposed by I.I. Rabi after WWII, as a place where Europeans could gather and pursue peaceful cooperation on enhancing our understanding of the world. And while it isn’t Utopia, for the most part that is really what happens – nationalities take a back seat to science, at least in the day to day lives of the people who work there.

   OK, gotta go catch a plane. Got a little philosophical there in the end, sorry about that.

   Reply