US Particle Colliders In Need of Funding 133
DevotedSkeptic writes "When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland seized the world record for the highest-energy collisions in 2010, it also sealed the fate of the leading US particle collider. The Tevatron, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, was closed the following year to save money. Now, physicists at another US physics facility, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, are trying to avoid a similar end. On 13 August, researchers at the ALICE heavy-ion experiment at the LHC at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, announced that they had created the hottest-ever man-made plasma of quarks and gluons. This eclipsed the record temperature achieved at RHIC two years earlier by 38%, and raised uncomfortable questions about RHIC's future. Tribble still hopes to avoid having to close any of the three facilities. In 2005, he notes, a similar crisis was averted after an advisory committee laid out the dire consequences of flat funding for the future of US nuclear science. In the end, Congress came through with the budgetary increases required. 'What we want to do here is to spell out what will be lost under different budgets,' he says. His committee is planning to hold a final meeting in November, in time to influence the budget requests from US funding agencies for the next fiscal year."
One word (Score:5, Funny)
Kickstarter
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing they're looking for more than a few million dollars* - crowdfunding is probably not their best avenue, even if putting it on kickstarter or - and more likely because of the type of project it would be - indiegogo could bring it a lot more exposure (similar to the Tesla museum project).
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collider#Financial_information [wikipedia.org]
"fiscal year 2007, requested: 143.3 million U.S. dollars"
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that the Tevatron was built with US$ 120 mio of 1983, meaning something about half a billion today? And that there were significant upgrades since then, costing another half a billion? And there are operating costs and much more. And it will never turn a profit, being a purely basic research facility. I don't know if you will get enough money for that on kickstarter.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh that depends on entirely on what benefits are offered, like you know how that Neil Stephenson sword fighting thing would give you a sword if you gave them a ton of cash?
Well maybe this fancy new accelerator should offer stuff like "for donations over $1.000.000 you will get to place an object of your choosing in the path of the beam, for donations over $10.000.000 you will get to place yourself in the path of the beam, hopefully developing superpowers (and hopefully not supercancer or super radiation poi
Re: (Score:1)
for donations over $10.000.000 you will get to place yourself in the path of the beam
There are some people I can think of...
Re: (Score:2)
...for donations over $10.000.000 you will get to place yourself in the path of the beam, hopefully developing superpowers (and hopefully not supercancer or super radiation poisoning)".
I think that the outgassing from the vaporing flesh would ruin the vacuum containment system.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad they need millions not thousands.
It would be a great way to show the government that the people care though.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Three words: move to Switzerland
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:One word (Score:4, Funny)
And lose the "made in the almighty US label*? Oh, the horror!
*Label Made in China
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, they've got them [chinadaily.com.cn]too [tsinghua.edu.cn].
Re: (Score:1)
Latest top hit @ CERN:
We don't collide in America - but we're not - sorry!
Re: (Score:1)
Kickstarter
But I already pledged all I could afford on the Mars project :(
Re: (Score:1)
Win for everyone!!
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe we can fund it all with the central banks (and politics) instead.
Let them kick the can out into space rather than down the road.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but people sometimes seriously suggest donations/fundraising as a way to run facilities like DoE labs... but it's usually a bad idea.
Specifically, it's not sustainable. Massive science experiments such as those run by the DoE need decades of commitment. Donations and fundraising are simply too variable and capricious to support them. Constantly shriking and growing budgets is wasteful, because you have to cyclically fire/hire personnel, mothball equipment and then pay to rebuild it, an
Re: (Score:2)
The sad thing is that taxes are starting to become a capricious and variable way of making science budgets too.
Kickstarter is certainly a joke for things like this, but I don't think the idea is completely off-base, if it was done correctly and on a sufficient scale. I bet you could make a case to enough people to get this off the ground.
Hell, you could make a kickstarter to simply raise a budget for a Stage I mass media project to support a later fundraising project. Your goal is to get X congressmen or
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, you joke. But private funding is the way to go. If these things are really going to produce results, let's let them sell the rights to raise funding. Would keep them from closing, at least.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Companies pay for the right to name sports stadiums because that gets their company name talked about in the news constantly. The LHC gets talked about a lot too. They might well go for something like the Exxon-Mobil Large Hadron Collider or something. Stranger things have happened.
Crisis? (Score:2)
But, there's absolutely nothing in the article which makes a compelling case. The best they can plead is "We can still do useful work here, even though we can't do anything unique."
Re:Crisis? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah 'cause the republitards are so invested in science eh ?
The Dems had full control of Congress and the WH for 2 years, and they still have the WH and the Senate. They spent staggering amounts of other people's money.
Funny how the "Party of Science!!" didn't see fit to bother spending any of that loot on these projects.
Heck, they still could. There's billions of (un)Stimulus money still unspent that Obama could use Executive Orders to direct a tiny fraction of towards these projects and fully fund them.
Actions speak louder than words, and the Dems through their actions are screaming that their political pals getting a boatload of our cash is far more important than science, despite what they say in their talking points on TV.
Truth be told, *neither* party really gives a rip about all that "science stuff" when it comes right down to it, if it doesn't give them some kind of political advantage and/or funnel some cash to an ally.
Stop being so blinded by (D) and (R) partisan distractions. It doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look like a mind-numbed drone.
Strat
Re: (Score:2)
The Dems had full control of Congress and the WH for 2 years
Democrats did not control congress for two years. For most of 2009 democrats did not have a filibuster proof majority in the senate and almost everything that the democrats attempted to pass was threatened with a filibuster. 60 seats are needed to defeat a filibuster. In January of 2009, after the 2008 elections, Democrats had 59 seats in their caucus..57 democrats and 2 independents; the republicans 41. On January 20, 2009, after suffering a seizure during Barack Obama's inaugural luncheon, Senator Ken
Re: (Score:2)
And that the Democrats should have been able to do most of what they wished. All they needed was a few Republican defectors and they had plenty of political capital with which to make those bribes.
Instead
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
than considering that maybe one side of the political aisle actually is better for them.
What makes you think that's an issue? I find in these claims that people conflate their interests with the interests of other people or of society in general. What's good for my interests, isn't necessarily what's good for yours.
I also find it interesting that people ignore the camel in the tent, the US's financial situation. Something has to be cut.
Re: (Score:3)
When it comes to cutting edge particle physics research, "We can still do useful work here," sounds like a pretty compelling case to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes... so what do the scientists who can't work in the US because there's funding do? Move elsewhere. And with them goes the scientific edge, so technological, military and economic ones will soon follow.
Research is no dick-contest (Score:1, Informative)
Sadly, politicians do not realise that.
Research is about finding new things about the universe and this accelerator does not compete with that. They are different machines, made to examine different pieces of the universe and by adding the findings we learn more than if we had only one or two accelerators.
Sadly, funding is tied to "highest energy", "longest tunnel", "highest temperature" and those who cancel the projects do not get that it actually is not about "Hehe, now we showed them damned europeans/ame
Re: (Score:3)
That's why I like the LHC...
Everyone chips in and it's up to them to decide how to use their money. They don't have to keep going back every year to re-interview for their jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course they realize it. That's why they're letting the Europeans do all the heavy-lifting at LHC. Why duplicate their efforts when they've agreed to foot the bill and share all the research?
Re: (Score:1)
like he said... it's not competitive, therefore also non-duplicative. just because it can be done in two places does not mean it *will* be done in both places. LHC is concerned with a whole lot that the RHIC isn't capable of. So, a lot of work the RHIC can do just fine will not be done at the LHC as it's got "better" things to do.
Exactly. Its the different installations and methodologies that are important when someone has as "I'm not sure if this is something real or a problem with our instruments" [bbc.co.uk] moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you cannot duplicate the results of an science experiment independently, then it didn't happen.
That's not true. Experiments are indeed considered to happen despite not having been reproduced.
Point of fact: the RHIC cannot exactly reproduce experiments done at LHC, and vice versa, because they are different machines colliding different particles with different detectors. The "reproducibility" actually occurs within each of the distinct colliders, as they collect more data from more runs of the same experiment to verify that they continue seeing the same results.
However one can check if the results o
Flag waving (Score:2)
They are different machines, made to examine different pieces of the universe and by adding the findings we learn more than if we had only one or two accelerators.
Actually in the case of the Tevatron and the LHC that is not true. Once the LHC started up there was very little that the Tevatron could do that the LHC could not do a lot better. The two machines have a huge overlap in their physics programs. I am not sure whether that is true for RHIC as well since I am not a heavy ion guy but it would not surprise me. While it is true that electron-positron colliders have different physics programs we are comparing hadron colliders to other hadron colliders so the overl
Shortsighted (Score:1)
And this is why it was shortsighted to close down the SSC project before it was completed. All of this research could be taking place here in the US
Re: (Score:2)
What does it matter where it's taking place, as long as it's shared?
Re: (Score:2)
What does it matter where it's taking place, as long as it's shared?
Because it's not just about knowledge sharing, but also about obtaining first-hand build-shit-of-uber-magnitude know-how (and the middle/upper-middle engineering/scientific jobs created in the process.)
Two strageies (Score:3)
(1) have the RHIC invade another country. It's the easiest way to spend several hundred million dollars "off the books"
(2) spread the management and construction out over the territory of no less than 51 Senators and/or 220 Reps. Why do you think NASA is scattered all over the country? It's not because there are prime launch sites in TX, OH, and MD, among others.
The USA is losing interest in science... (Score:5, Insightful)
... it seems to me as an outsider. Which is ironic that it was science and engineering that created the USA as it is today. I don't know if its a dumbed down education system, lack of political direction or just a slowly growing luddite mentality. If it doesn't want to be an also-ran following in Chinas heals (as it already is in the manned space race now) then it better do something about it fast. But I won't hold my breath.
Re: (Score:3)
I won't say that it's a dumbed down education system that is causing this, but I will say that our education system is suffering. I don't know where along the way we decided to value hedge fund managers, investment bankers and stock traders over the people who teach our children, clean our streets and put out fires, but we're there.
I do honestly believe that it has quite a bit to do with the undying stereotype of the bookworm. In recent months there has been quite a bit of coverage on the presidential race
Re: (Score:2)
I totally agree - and it's not just the US.
I might also add that the technology helped quite a bit in dumbing us down in the sense that it enables us to know what's going on anywhere on the planet almost immediatly. Most (online) newspapers scramble to get those stories out as fast as possible which then leads to the situation where all news outlets present the exact same story by Reuters. I remember when newspapers still did their own stories. Now I even get live feeds from, say, the Apple-Samsung trial: "
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the "we've wasted too much money buying votes from the poor, the elderly, and the scared to fund science" mentality.
Not to mention the considerable gulf between funding science and actually doing science.
Re: (Score:2)
Dumbing down of education, standardized testing, homogenized media, the rise of religion based politics, an ever narrowing political spectrum in which science is nothing but a talking point... It's all of the above.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your government started ruling for corporations rather than the people. Eg. Creating faux wars to enrich a few sociopaths thus stripping money from the lower and middle classes.... Using 9/11 to strip away fundamental rights.. Plus you have become a lazy consumer society. The USA is on a slow slide to corporate fascism.
Re: (Score:2)
FRIB not fully funded as well (Score:3)
One of the new projects, announced just months before CERN opened was the Federal Rare Isotopes Beam project in Lansing, Michigan. Since congress committed to funding it fully in 2008, it's only received a small portion of the full funding -- with the current congress kicking the pledges down the road year after year. Funding has been augmented for this facility by private investors, but that will also dilute the type of research this facility will be able to do once it is complete..
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
No funding for science. Poor education standards.
I bet Mitt Romney even gets elected.
I blame ubiquitous television.
I don't blame television.
First I blame the politicians that don't give a flying fuck about the future of our country, and second I blame those idiots citizens that think that voting is some kind of multiple choice game. All choices are equal. Well no, not all choices are equal, and yes there are people/polticians (from both sides) that care for the future. And you as a citizen have to care enough to vote for them, even if some of them are outside the mainstream political establishment. This congress is not
Just went on RHIC tour (Score:2, Interesting)
I just went on a RHIC tour on August 5th with my son. The tour guide said that one of the things that was special about the RHIC was that it can smash atoms of different types. For example they said that they could smash a gold atom into a uranium atom which is not possible at any of the other particle accelerators. I am just a layperson so I don't know if this is really unique but the tour was absolutely awesome. I thought that I would only be able to see this from a distance. But the tour guides (grad stu
Kickstarter or something? (Score:2)
Get rid of the TSA, problem solved (Score:4, Insightful)
The TSA budget is $6.5 billion. Get rid of the TSA and their security theater and that will go a long way towards funding these scientific endeavors.
I realize defunding the TSA will immediately allow the hordes of terrorists lurking in our country to go into action, but that is a chance we'll have to take if we want to slow or halt the downward spiral of science in this country.
Re: (Score:2)
The TSA budget is $6.5 billion. Get rid of the TSA and their security theater and that will go a long way towards funding these scientific endeavors.
I realize defunding the TSA will immediately allow the hordes of terrorists lurking in our country to go into action, but that is a chance we'll have to take if we want to slow or halt the downward spiral of science in this country.
But Michael Chertoff has 25 scanners on his dresser.
He got to get paid.
Strat
Obvious Solution (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Obviously (Score:2)
Appeal to sense of pride (Score:2)
If there's one thing politicians of all flavors love it's jingoism. Maybe what we really need to do is reignite the sense of competitiveness by pointing out how the Europeans are leaving the US in the dust when it comes to making new discoveries like the Higgs Boson, and give them something to harp about to their voters when the US wins the race to make the next big discover.
yeah? so does my lab (Score:2)
I think I speak for a lot of scientists when I say we all could use more funding. This isn't to say there isn't enough money out there for us to do great things, but we all need to think hard about what we're doing and why.
I know I've moved out of some research areas because I couldn't really make a compelling argument that society needed to invest in them right now.
Maybe particle physicists should think about how many billions each year we really need to spend smashing things together at near the speed of
Do it the Apple way (Score:3)
1. Get a patent for a round underground object
2. Sue CERN
3. Don't really need this step, it's just here for formatting.
4. Profit!!!
Who doesn't need better funding? (Score:2)
US Particle Colliders In Need of Funding
Get in line.
Simple solution (Score:2)
Install one of these [zoltarmachine.com].
Is this science or a competition? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
On the
Re: (Score:2)
In the scientific interest, I think it's good to have a second collider.
One key aspect of the scientific method is that experiments are repeatable, preferably on a different machine. This to make sure there are no systemic errors, where you think you see something but actually it's an artifact of your machine. That artifact shouldn't be there on a different machine. So having a second one can be very useful, if only to confirm results, which while not as sexy as making the discovery is also important.
That, at least, is valid. But it doesn't mean the USA has to build it and certainly doesn't mean there's any scientific merit in doing it alone.
On the other hand, COOPERATION is good, it's what drives people forward. It's what got people to the moon some decades ago.
Fixed that for you.
Now the problem of these colliders is of course the huge cost of building, maintaining and operating them. As a European I think it's cool that the biggest one is now in Europe, though it'd be even cooler if the US would be building an even bigger one. Or have some matching ones. Even if their power is less, I can't imagine that everything below the power levels reached by the LHC has been researched already.
Or we could just keep Tevatron on line in that case.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I've seen, competition between accelerator projects leads to better machine performance. The SLAC B-factory / KEK-B competition resulted in both machines operating well above their design performance. I'm seeing similar effects with the new X-ray FELs. When there is no competition it is too easy for a lab to take an overly conservative approach.
There is an advantage to having the cutting edge machines in your own country to attract the best scientists and engineers.
In many ways the technology de
Re: (Score:2)
There is an advantage to having the cutting edge machines in your own country to attract the best scientists and engineers.
I think that advantage might be outweighed by the cost of building and maintaining another $8,000,000,000 collider.
These may seem somewhat esoteric devices, but there is $10s billion invested in them world wide and they are valuable for a variety of materials, biological and energy research.
I can see that there was some materials and energy research involved, but biological? I think the biological implications of getting hit with a TeV proton are pretty clearly understood.
RHIC has higher luminosity (Score:2)
while LHC has higher energy. LHC will alays have to contend with bound free pair production which will limit its luminosity. RHIC can also do research with polarized proton collisions.
Of the three projects, the Mich St FRIB is most likely to be cut as both RHIC and CEBAF have upgrades underway or nearly complete and have significant backlogs, up to a decade, of users with experimental plans. FRIB is still on the drawing board and thus can wait until better times.
Re: (Score:2)
no, they should just make up a story that people are causing the universe to expand and we need to find a way to slow it down
you need a scary story about how people are at fault to play on guilt feelings and the fear of change and the unknown
Basic Research Needs Gov't Funding (Score:1)
China is not your #1 creditor, it's the largestforeign creditor.
The US is its own largest creditor (states, cities and various funds like Medicare).
http://lmmartin.hubpages.com/hub/Who-are-Americas-Creditors-or-Debt-Economics-for-Beginners [hubpages.com]
The innovation at CERN came from government funded money. You cannot dispute that.
Re: (Score:2)
The innovation at CERN came from government funded money. You cannot dispute that.
All high energy experimental physics since roughly 1940 has been government-funded research.
Re: (Score:2)
I once heard a story about a very early demonstration of electricity. I believe it was in France, though I can't recall exactly who the scientist was. But anyway, he was giving this big demonstration about how he could connect two coils of wire, wrap one around a compass, and then by moving a magnet through the other, it would make the compass needle move. After the demonstration, a woman approached him and basically said 'this is all very interesting, but what _use_ is it?' to which he replied 'of what use
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that was Michael Faraday, in London. If you search you will find various versions of this quote and its setting (that he said it to the Prime Minister, for example), but I heard that he said it at the Friday Evening Lectures at the Royal Institution, which he started and was very popular at. These included demonstrations, and it wouldn't surprise me much if that was a regular question, to which he had a regular answer.