Anyway, don’t think that the Austrian scientific community is taking the news well.  They are getting organized and already have a petition online.  Please take a minute and sign it:

http://sos.teilchen.at/petition/

It came as a surprise when Federal Minister Hahn announced that he wanted to discontinue Austria’s membership in CERN.

This “wrong historic decision” (quoting Prof. Dr. Herbert Pietschmann) must be stopped before Austria’s reputation as a nation of high-tech and modern research suffers irreparable damage and our country excludes itself from future developments.

CERN – this is research in elementary particle physics and comology. CERN is a brilliant example of excellence by European cooperation. CERN is the vision of our young scientists.

By signing this petition I urge the Austrian parliament not to agree to this proposition of minister Hahn.

(And I hope no-one missed that ATLAS slide in the AP article!)

(Thanks, Heinz and Paul!)

A nice article on the changing of ATLAS leadership in the CERN Courier.   It really gives a sense of the sustained commitment that it has taken to make a huge project like ATLAS become a reality.

I am very proud to have helped the collaboration to construct ATLAS. Twenty years ago we could only imagine the experiment in our dreams and now it exists,” says Jenni. “I could lead the collaboration for so long because I was supported by very good ATLAS management teams where the right people, such as Fabiola Gianotti, Steinar Stapnes, Marzio Nessi and Markus Nordberg over the past five years, were in the right places.”

It’s also interesting to find out in the CERN courier that your own experiment is a lot larger than you might have realized (i.e. it’s officially 3000 people!  I can’t say I’ve ever met even a fraction of them myself…).

President Obama addressed the National Academy this morning.  I missed the telecast but I’ve been reading the transcript.

Federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of our gross domestic product has fallen by nearly half over the past quarter century…We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which supports a wide range of pursuits – from improving health information technology to measuring carbon pollution, from testing “smart grid” designs to developing advanced manufacturing processes. And my budget doubles funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science which builds and operates accelerators, colliders, supercomputers, high-energy light sources, and facilities for making nano-materials. Because we know that a nation’s potential for scientific discovery is defined by the tools it makes available to its researchers.

He also finally officially announced ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.  And new commitment to improve science education. Exciting times in we are.  And not one to miss an opportunity, I bet he left a lot of the audience misty-eyed with this (worked on me):

At root, science forces us to reckon with the truth as best as we can ascertain it. Some truths fill us with awe. Others force us to question long held views. Science cannot answer every question; indeed, it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world, the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics, our values, our principles, or our faith, but science can inform those things, and help put these values, these moral sentiments, that faith, to work – to feed a child, to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this earth.

We are reminded that with each new discovery and the new power it brings, comes new responsibility; that the fragility and the sheer specialness of life requires us to move past our differences, to address our common problems, to endure and continue humanity’s strivings for a better world.

“The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.”

Finally, at least the possibility is official.  Considering that I had never heard management mention a year for first ion collisions, this is music to my (and probably all of my heavy ion friends’) ears.

Of course while the return of the LHC was a forgone conclusion, the details were certainly not — so good news all around!

Like, all of it if I read this right:  Both NSF and the DOE Office of Science (already cut hugely from the House version)…

Who are these people?

But no art (nor science) comes to the public without some misunderstanding:

“As with the creation of the real ATLAS detector, Kristofoletti faced a few setbacks along the way. Approached by a policeman who thought he was covering the wall with graffitti, he explained what he was doing and that the painting was of one of the particle detectors at CERN. The policeman had heard of CERN and the LHC, and let the painting continue, but not without a quick discussion of much-publicized doomsday scenarios.”

Dennis Overbye wrote a lovely piece for yesterday’s Science Times on this, thoughtfully explaning the connection between scientific method and democratic values.  In particular, science is “not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth”.  That is to say, it is an approach towards finding truth which implies a worldview based on values of “honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.”  Overbye goes on to discuss how this pragmatic activity, this behavior which “evolved because it worked”, is often squelched in authoritarian societies such as China.  There, any contradiction with Marxist dogma (which while anti-religion, does all those things that orthodox religions do), including advocating the Big Bang theory, leads to imprisonment or worse.  But even nominal democracies like ours can stray, as it has in recent years:

But once you can’t talk about one subject, the origin of the universe, for example, sooner or later other subjects are going to be off-limits, like global warming, birth control and abortion, or evolution, the subject of yet another dustup in Texas last week.

What still surprises me, in this optimistic new era, is that science can still remain under attack — but the techniques get more and more insidious.  To my eyes, the doomsday crowd plays a similar role as the same gang of politically-motivated thugs who try and squelch actual science.  But rather than claiming that certain science is immoral (e.g. stem-cell research), they object to it on the grounds that it is somehow dangerous for humanity on scales that we can barely imagine — based on “scientific” arguments which can be proven false.  Seriously, I could accept their concerns, but only if they had a point and they took a consistent scientific approach to the problem, allowing all relevant evidence to bear upon it.

But check out this Onion-worthy headline Fox News ran today (pointed out by fellow blogger Seth): “Scientists Not So Sure ‘Doomsday Machine’ Won’t Destroy World.’” from an article by Paul Wagenseil.  It seems to start out in the right way: here is a scientific paper which says something, and I’m telling you the conclusion.  But he isn’t.

Instead of quoting the actual paper, an unrefereed (it’s arxiv, natch) preprint by Casadio, Fabi, and Harms (yes, Harms), Wagenseil quotes a blog post merely about the paper on arxivblog.org.  Arxivblog is  anonymously written by a blogger named “KFC” and is unrelated to the actual arXiv.org website.  I personally think KFC is an amusing blogger, as do many others, and seems to know something about physics.  However, the conclusion drawn from the last sentence of the paper: “Whoa, let’s have that again: these mini black holes will be hanging around for seconds, possibly minutes?” has two serious problems.  First, it has no obvious connection to the destructive power of said black holes.  Second, it is completely at odds with the conclusion drawn by the authors of the paper, who most-likely know their assumptions and results far better: “We conclude that, for the RS scenario and black holes described by the metric ([6]), the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible” (which is the second-to-last sentence.)

If you’re going to use a paper’s conclusions to support an argument, the scientific method requires you to cite the full conclusion, not just the part that you need.  All of the estimates in the paper, based on quite relaxed assumptions, tend to work against a doomsday scenario, but this doesn’t seem to make it into either the arxivblog post — nor into the article by the putative science journalist who doesn’t bother to read the original paper, or simply call the authors.

Instead, all you get is a punchy headline, which can only add fuel to the fires raging against doing actual scientific research.  We can only hope that in the Obama era, Overbye’s imagined “wild and beautiful” garden of wide-ranging scientific research is properly protected from those fires.

So expectations will probably be quite high today, when Secretary Chu (no more mere designate, he) speaks to the DOE community today by video.  I will update this later today after watching.

[Update: I couldn't get my RealPlayer settings sorted out until just before the end, so I basically missed it.  BNL will post video soonish, but in the meantime, I found a nice set of notes posted on Cosmic Variance.

Some things jump out: Energy is priority #1. The national labs are crown jewels.  The US needs to replace the great industrial labs that have closed down.  He expects lots of young-to-middle-age scientists to shift their careers toward energy to develop the transformative technologies needed for US energy independence...more later when I see the video.]

… it would provide $10 billion for science facilities and research…

Ten billion dollars.  I wonder who exactly is going to get a piece of that.

One answer I’ve heard is that the DOE office of science (a major source of particle and nuclear physics funding) will get $5.9B — that’s nearly 50% more than the current funding provided by the FY09 Continuing Resolution (CR).  Now who is going to get a piece of that?  Anyway, it won’t matter until it gets farther along in the process, but wow.

UPDATE: fellow blogger Rene has pointed me to a nice set of links:

• Press summary
  Highlight: “Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences including high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences and improvements to DOE laboratories and scientific facilities. $400 million is for the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency.”
• Full bill

Anyway, what better way to enter 2009 than with this fascinating set of slides from the new Director General of CERN, Rolf Heuer?  There’s even a video of his talk online.

Heuer covers a lot of ground here, particularly the plans for the LHC in 2009, but also the budget, and quite a bit of forward thinking about the future of CERN, both scientifically and geographically (particularly slide 26 and following on “Global Collaboration”).  Enjoy.

I’ve written about “soft” physics before, both as “day 1″ contributions to the LHC physics program, and something fascinating in its own right (but heck, I’m biased).  The idea is that the low-energy particles, which are generally seen as “gunk” to be cut away by analyses looking for new high-mass particles, have very simple features if one compares different energies and different systems (e.g. collisions of protons or heavy ions).  RHIC has been interpreting the heavy ion data in terms of a hot, dense thermalized medium, but treating the very similar p+p data as “reference”.

One interesting thing I learned this week was from a talk by my colleague Mike Lisa from OSU that one can systematize the differences between the transverse momentum distributions in p+p and Au+Au simply by accounting for the basic fact that momentum and energy have to be conserved in detail in every event.  Doing this one finds that both systems have the same parent distribution, and the observed differences are merely from the imposition of conservation laws.  This has two immediate reactions based on people I spoke to: 1) the “trivial” interpretation that all systems are “nothing but phase space”, and 2) the “deep” interpretation that heavy ions both show indications (nearly identical ones!) that the system is similarly hot and dense and “flows” like a fluid.  Unfortunately for those who buy in to #1, #2 has much more experimental evidence supporting it, as Mike and his student point out in their papers.  Interesting stuff and very much worth a look.

And unsurprisingly, I’ve posted photos.

You may have already been watching this all day but the LHC inauguration is being webcast live — but if you weren’t, you’ve already missed alpinekat and crew, who rocked.

And it just occurred to me that alpinekat and the Canettes Blues Band are all ATLAS people.  Needless to say, I’ve been to some pretty good ATLAS parties over the last couple of years…

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR14.08E.html

Interesting reading, especially the full report posted here:

https://edms.cern.ch/file/973073/1/Report_on_080919_incident_at_LHC__2_.pdf

It includes a detailed primer on the LHC configuration and layout, which is essential for understanding where the problem started (an electrical bus between two magnets) and how it spread to the cryogenic system.

For more information, there’s a Times article this morning and MSNBC’s Alan Boyle posted the PDF of the decision and a run down of the current situation.  Boyle also has a pretty wild posting on the legal activity in early September that’s worth a look, if only to make one sympathetic for Judge Helen Gillmor and her dealings with the various sides.

Before I discuss the order, an interesting issue which arises, as one reads the various accounts, is the disparity between the various construction costs of the LHC reported in the articles, e.g., the $5.8B by the Honolulu Star Bulletin and the $8B reported by Overbye.  Just last night, at a family dinner, I found myself unsure of a “single” number, always fumbling between $5B and $10B — and now I realize that it’s not completely my fault.  Boyle writes:

Cost: $6 billion to $10 billion
Why the wide range of estimates?
Europe’s CERN research organization says it’s investing $6 billion. Adding the value of other contributions since 1994, including the detectors, boosts the total to as much as $10 billion. To some extent, it depends on who’s doing the counting and what the currency rates are.

But today I’ve been struggling reading through the District Court Order to try and understand the various arguments leading to dismissal.  The main issue seems to be whether or not the U.S. participation in the LHC is a “major Federal action” as defined by NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), which might require it to file various safety reports.  This is including construction, operation, and control of the project.  Even the lower range of the construction costs was sufficiently large for the judge to deem that the fraction of the total budget the $531M the U.S. contributed to LHC and detector construction (a useful number to keep in mind, if anyone asks) was too small to count as a “major Federal action”. The issue of future funding for operations involves support of U.S. scientists (e.g. us!) and is in the noise of the LHC project, and is thus no issue.  Finally, the U.S. role in the LHC project from now on is spelled out clearly (full of useful cocktail party facts for those of you who collect such things):

According to the evidence before the Court, the United States has minimal control over the LHC project. The 1997 Agreement provides that the construction, operation, and management of the LHC is the responsibility of CERN, an  intergovernmental European agency whose governing council is comprised of 20 European countries. (Strauss Decl. ¶¶ 5, 12.)

The 1997 Agreement, entered into between Federal Defendants and CERN, only gave the United States non-voting “observer” status in CERN’s governing council and no role in financial, policy, or management decisions or operation of the LHC. (Id. at ¶¶ 12, 13.)

And from there it’s all downhill for the plaintiffs.  The US contribution fails on all counts to qualify as a major Federal action, and thus is of no relevance of NEPA, and thus precludes the Federal Court from having any jurisdiction to address Wagner & Sanchos complaints:

Plaintiffs’ Opposition and Rebuttal have not provided any substantive information regarding the subject matter jurisdiction of this Court. Plaintiffs appear to believe they invoked federal jurisdiction by simply filing suit in a federal court. They have not met their burden of establishing that jurisdiction exists. Scott, 792 F.2d at 927.

Ouch.

Of course, while we’re out of the woods here, it’s worthwhile highlighting Judge Gillmor’s concluding paragraph of the order, already quoted at length by Boyle, which capture the frustration many of us have felt about this use of the courts against scientific research:

It is clear that Plaintiffs’ action reflects disagreement among scientists about the possible ramifications of the operation of the Large Hadron Collider. This extremely complex debate is of concern to more than just the physicists.  The United States Congress provided more than $500 million toward the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. But Congress did not enact NEPA for the purpose of allowing this debate to proceed in federal court. “Neither the language nor the history of NEPA suggest that it was intended to give citizens a general opportunity to air their policy objections to proposed federal actions. The political process, and not NEPA, provides the appropriate forum in which to air policy disagreements.” Metropolitan Edison Co. v. People Against Nuclear Energy, 460 U.S. 766, 777 (1983).

CONCLUSION

The Court lacks jurisdiction to adjudicate this action.
Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss (Doc. 14) is GRANTED.
The entire action is DISMISSED.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
Dated: September 26, 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii.

I think many of us would have assumed this conclusion from the outset, and that it wouldn’t have required as much legal back-and-forth (and especially wouldn’t require an amici curiae filing from Sheldon Glashow, Frank Wilczek, and Richard Wilson — go figure!).  But Wagner and Sancho seem to have played a tough game and forced a lot of people to spend a lot of time and energy discussing — and defending — the importance and overall safety of the LHC.  In many ways the time wasn’t wasted, as now the world knows a lot more about the physics of the LHC, which was the most important issue all along.  But I speak for many of us who feel that this was ultimately unproductive work for the Court system, our labs, our scientific funding agencies, and their lawyers, and the scientists.

So let’s not let this happen again (I mean, us RHIC & LHC folks have been through this twice now).  Let’s get back to work (and waiting).

Urgent update, September 10, 2008

It is our duty to inform you that as of 7:35:05am UTC on September 10, 2008, the Earth has been destroyed.

The destruction of Earth was first reported by Mr Jonathan Barber of Wisconsin, United States, who spotted that his home-made seismic Earth Detector had ceased to give readings at around 8:00am (2am local time). Several other amateur geocide spotters noticed this at the same time but Mr. Barber was the first to place a telephone call to the IEDAB’s Geocide Hotline (+44 115 09Ω 4127, ask for Other Dave) at which point IEDAB officials performed an emergency check of their own instrumentation and verified Mr. Barber’s report, as well as fixing the exact time of geocide.

Evidence is still being collated, but preliminary results suggest that the Earth was destroyed pre-emptively by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, before the commencement of their experiments to locate the Higgs Boson, as a precautionary measure to ensure that the experiment itself could not result in the destruction of the Earth.

(Thanks, Jo!)