As has been mentioned in various earlier posts, there is a lot of excitement about the stimulus package (aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) passed into law last month, and the new funds that are being made available for scientific research as a result. It’s a substantial sum of money, in the billions of dollars — you can read a description here of what funds have been distributed where for science. By my reading, the Department of Energy Office of Science is getting an additional $1.6B, and the National Science Foundation is getting $2.5B into its “research and related activities” account. (These two agencies provide the great bulk of support for particle physics research in the US.) Now the big question: how exactly will that money be distributed?
Every agency is going to have its own rules and its own set of priorities, and they need to be in line with the stimulus bill’s strict requirements on tracking how the funds are spent. But we now have one set of clues, in the form of a memo from Arden Bement, the director of the NSF. Their approach is to not create new programs that solicit new proposals, but to fund as many of the already-submitted proposals that have gotten excellent ratings from peer reviewers but have gone un-funded due to lack of resources. One explicit goal that is stated is to fund excellent proposals submitted by researchers who have never held an NSF grant before — the young (or at least younger) people who will be the backbone of science over the next ten or twenty years.
I personally think that this is a very good approach. There is currently a surplus of good ideas in science — there is so much more that we could do if we only had the resources. Consider some of the statistics: In 2007, only 26 percent of proposals to NSF were funded, down from 33 percent in 2000. (It’s a little better in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, where 32 percent of proposals were funded in 2007.) If you have never won an NSF grant before, you have only a 19% chance of getting your proposal funded, compared to 30% if you have won before. About 25% of proposals that are rated excellent by reviewers aren’t funded, while more than 50% of those rated very good to excellent are rejected. In 2007, that was a total of 6,297 proposals the NSF and the peer reviewers would wanted to have funded if there were sufficient resources available.
Rejected proposals that were rated as stronger than the average accepted proposal requested a total of $1.8B. ”Over the last ten years, NSF’s capacity to fund these highly rated proposals has diminished. In FY 1997, the ratio of awards to highly rated declines was 5:1; in FY 2007, that ratio had dropped to less than 2:1. NSF is thus supporting a smaller proportion of potentially fundable proposals. These declined proposals represent a rich portfolio of unfunded opportunities, proposals that if funded may have produced substantial research and education benefits.”
$2.5B will go a long way towards clearing this backlog. Our shovels are ready.
Could you guys comment on the discovery of Y(4140)? Is this something you could possibly spot in the LHC?
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/03/09/fermilab-scientists-discover-rare-single-top-quark/
Hi Dominic. We will certainly be able to see single top (as described in your link), but it will take quite some time to get enough statistics and understand our detectors well enough.
The Y(4140) is a different thing, a new particle that was discovered by the CDF experiment at the Tevatron: see here for an informative post. I am not sure if the LHC experiments will ever be able to see that particle, because the discovery was based on identifying kaons using energy deposition rate and time-of-flight information, which are things that are less of a focus for ATLAS and CMS.
This is all very good news! Along these lines I have a question which is somewhat offtopic to this blog, but I’m not sure where else to ask it:
There is currently a surplus of good ideas in science — there is so much more that we could do if we only had the resources.
One thing that I’ve been personally concerned about for awhile in the Federal budget crunches of the last few years is what happens to space-based astrophysics research– i.e. NASA probes to gather information about things like dark energy or gravity waves or black holes. This research seems like it has a lot of unique things it can potentially tell us about fundamental physics, but it also seems to me to be at an unusual level of risk of falling through the cracks since it kind of exists at the intersection of several disciplines. With the budget adjustments a few years back as far as I understand NASA put basically the entire slate of upcoming astrophysics probes (which I believe at the time were collected into a larger program called “Beyond Einstein”, later “Physics of the Cosmos”) on hold, except for those programs that are ESA collaborations. Is there any good way to know whether some of these programs may be able to come back now that science funding is on the rise again, or whether the part of the stimulus going to NASA will enable any new programs in general?
Hi mcc. After a search on good ‘ol google for NASA stimulus, I came across this article. It does not look like there’s any new money for space-based fundamental physics and astrophysics. Unsurprisingly, basic physics has not been a big priority for stimulus funds; most of the Department of Energy money recently announced seems to have gone to research with nearer-term applications.
Seth, makes sense. Thanks
That’s a big budget though..
@Seth Zenz
Exactly you are correct..
Thank you!