Another sign of the apocalypse: It was the week of the Open House for prospective graduate students at MIT, and I met about a dozen of the best and brightest undergraduates interested in Experimental Particle Physics. At this time when there is a peak in interest in the LHC, we are hitting a nadir in funding necessary to bring the new students on board and I had to tell them that were in not for the funding situation I would be happy to bring them into the group, but because of funding I have to turn the majority of them away. I hope they find a spot in another top notch institution and become my collaborators anyway, but am not confident that given the overall situation in Fundamental Research at the frontiers of knowledge that all institutions are not in the same boat, more or less. At a recent meeting of the MIT faculty of the School of Science, MIT President Hockfield (who is working hard to make things better in this direction on our behalf, which I appreciate greatly) opened the discussion with “I don’t need to tell you why we need to increase Graduate Fellowships” which tells me that this problem is endemic.
Tags: funding
Speaking of the apocalypse, what are your thoughts on the slim but nevertheless viable chance that Hawking radiation will prove only theoretical and the nano-scale black holes created in the LHC annihilate our planet and therefore all living creatures therein?
As my English friends would say, I think it is bullocks. Consider that the Auger experiment has recorded a few dozen cosmic rays impinging on our atmosphere with energies a million times higher than that which will be sampled at the LHC in just the last few years. Now, given that they look at only a part of the Earth and the Earth is a few billion years old, you can extrapolate that these sort of interactions at these energies have happened maybe a few billion times already. (It is only recently that we’ve built a 3000 square kilometer detector array which catches some of them.) The point is we’re still here. The LHC is a much less energetic system, so my impression, with all due respect, is that the doomsday sayers are full of it.