The newest budgets in the US call for a substancial reduction in funding for high energy physics. Specifically, about 200 faculty/staff at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (http://www.fnal.gov/) may have to be cut, and the US funding for the Internaitonal Linear Collider (http://www.linearcollider.org/cms/) (ILC) R and D will be reduced by 75% or so. The US has also pulled out of the International Fusion experiment (ITER).

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32312

I don't think that this is a political decision, or if it is, it is the democrat controlled Legislature which has proposed this budget.

Further, the UK has pulled out of the ILC as well.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32163

What is the ILC?

Well, first we have to figure out what it does. The Large Hadron Collider (http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/) being built in Switzerland is a proton-proton collider. This means that they work by taking protons, accelerating them to near light speed in a huge ring, and crashing them into other protons that are speeding in the opposite direction.

This produces a collision with a HUGE amount of energy, which is great, because we can probe physics at these very high energies. The problem is, though, that the proton is more or less a bag of shit. There are three quarks which we all know live inside a proton, but there are also gluons (which are the force carriers of the strong force), and there are the so-called ``sea quarks''.

The sea-quarks are quark/anti-quark pairs which pop out of the vacuum (just like an electron/positron pair popping out of the vacuum). If these sea quarks pop out of the vacuum at just the right time (and they do), then they can participate in the collision with the other proton.

All of this means that it is hell to try and calculate things. You have to know the momenta of all of the quarks and gluons inside each of the protons, and this is a priori unknowable (quantum mechanics). The best analogy I can find is that you are taking two bags of jelly beans, and throwing them against each other, except you cannot know which fraction of the total momentum is carried by each of the jelly beans in each of the bags.

This is an absolute mess if you want to do precision experiments. In order to do precision experiments, you would like to have a very clean initial state. and it turns out that you can use a beam of electrons to do the same thing. You can know (relatively accurately) the momenta of the electrons. And because you know the momenta very accurately, this makes doing precision experiments very easy.

So the short story is: if you want to discover stuff, you need the LHC. But if you want to measure stuff, you need the ILC. The funding cuts by the US and UK make the ILC's future doubtful, which is very scary.

The US has also pulled out of the International Fusion experiment (ITER).Really?! Hopefully it's because they are going to fund their own version but somehow I doubt it. In almost any 1st world country billions of dollars/pounds/euros can be found at the drop of a hat if you want to go to war or there's oil to be dug up but it takes several dozen industrialised nations years to agree to spend €10 billion on taking a step to get off oil.

If global warming caused LA and New York to flood tomorrow, the money to fight global warming would appear. If terrorists blew up the Saudi oil infrastruture tomorrow (though considering they get considerable funding from Saudi Arabia that's not going to happen), hundreds of billions of dollars would be made available to get the oil flowing again, we can't function without it. :bawl:

The UK government constantly complains there's not enough technically skilled people in science, yet when asked for £80 million to fund particular projects, it can't find the cash. Northern Rock is about to go under and £25 billion appears.

A lot of emails have been bounced around my department since the announcement about science funding. We're one of the larger physics departments in the UK, so we won't close but we'll certainly feel the pinch and a number of other departments around the country will end up closing.

AN---

Welcome to a Physics Forum which isn't run by crackpots. (I assume you're the same AlphaNumeric.)

I think that the pullout of ITER is only temporary, and the US commitment was not very large anyway. I think this is only temporary unless someone like Ron Paul gets elected (God save us all). IF oil prices stay around $100 a barrell, we'll see the US commitment to alternative energy sources/fusion increased quickly.

Our DOE (Dept. of Energy) grant was cut by something like 3% this year. This basically means that MY position as a Research Asst. got downsized!!! Now I have to teach.

There has been a lot of response to the HEP budget cuts in America.

From http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/screwed-by-the-democrats/:

Perhaps 4 days later the bill is ready. They (the democrats or more likely the staffers) when through the bill looking for things that Bush wanted and cut them. ITER, which got nailed, was a presidential initiative. America Competes? Something Bush wanted. I am positive that no one involved would claim this is how it was done, but all fingers I can see point in that direction. [I have no snark here: sad] ...

What the hell were they thinking? They cut these programs just because they are pissed off at the White House? We elected them there to be intelligent about this. I don’t care that the White House is being a total idiot about this (i.e. not working with congress) — two wrongs don’t make a right!!!

The sad thing is that this looks like purely partisan politics. This is the same reason why the SCSC got killed early in the Clinton administration---there it was young Republicans and their ``Contract with America''.

Sigh.

This is the same reason why the SCSC got killed early in the Clinton administration---there it was young Republicans and their ``Contract with America''.
Democrats are more to blame than Republicans for the death of the SCSC, and physicists and other scientists are more to blame than either party. The biggest proponent of the SCSC was Ronald Reagan. The only person who did a good job selling the project was Ronald Reagan, and when he left office the project was left without a cheerleader.

The biggest opponents of the project were Illinois Democrats, egged on by the physicists at Fermilab. Illini physicists worked above and below the table to tank the SCSC. They finally succeeded in 1993.

Scientists of all kinds and from all over the country bewailed the huge expenditures on the SCSC. They saw the SCSC as taking money away from their beloved projects. Scientists can be pretty dang stupid when it comes to politics. They thought that the termination of the SCSC would mean increased funding for their projects. Congress doesn't work that way. When the SCSC was finally killed, that money did not go to other science projects. It just went away, period, and even took other science funding with it.

The biggest culprits of all were incredibly bad management, an initial high cost, and cost overruns that more than doubled these initial high costs. The incredibly bad management certainly helped to contribute to the overruns. Initial cost estimates for the project were $4 to $6 billion. By the time the project was finally cut, cost estimates had risen to over $12 billion.

The biggest culprits of all were incredibly bad management, an initial high cost, and cost overruns that more than doubled these initial high costs.

Absolutely, but I always understood the contract with America to be the driving force for cutting funding in the first place (aside from the fact that the project was way over budget).