Symmetry factor

I usually stay away from discussing politics in this blog. However, it appears that current political decisions are very unhealthy for US science. Case in point: current Omnibus bill that the Congress is about to send to the President.

Amazing thing happened: only several months ago, both US Congress and the President were in total accord with increased funding for US physical sciences. National initiatives such as America COMPETES Act were prime examples of the fact that US science and technology research and education are important for healthy development of the Nation. Fastforward to today: the bill that will soon be signed into law assumes ~10% cut to the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. Funding for ITER is zeroed out – now, this is after all of the international-agreement-signing-at-highest-levels. Funding for ILC is given at the level of $15M (nice, huh? well, not so: those $15M are already spent, so no funding for ILC either), no funding for NOvA (a neutrino experiment at FNAL). University programs are largerly intact (if you can call a 2% reduction of our WSU base grant “intact”) — and this is the only good sign. We learned all of it during our recent DOE site visit (when a DOE oficial visits a University to check on the progress of a research program) two days ago.

Interesting: imagine you are building a house which is financed by a bank. You have a contract with that bank to deliver money for your construction in several installments. Now imagine that the bank decides not to give you one of your installments. What do you? You never work with that bank again, right? Hint? ITER? ILC?

See APS reaction to this here.

Yesterday CERN appointed new Director General. Rolf-Dieter Heuer will succeed Robert Aymar as CERN’s Director in January 2009. See CERN press-release here. Also, according to the current Director, the LHC is on-track for the promised  start of operations in the summer of 2008. Incidentally, my WSU experimental particle physics colleagues are at CERN this week, talking to CMS collaboration about future collaborative work. Our nuclear experimentalists are already part of the ALICE collaboration, so in the nearest future WSU would be one of the handful of US universities with participation in both high energy particle (CMS) and heavy ion (ALICE) physics activities at CERN. Very exciting!

Ouch! What a news from the UK! PhysicsWorld reported that due to a funding crisis in the UK science (aren’t we always in crisis when it is about funding science? It’s much easier to give out subprime loans and then moan about the crisis when peoople default on those), the country is pulling out of the International Linear Collider project. And not just pulling out because of the lack of funds — here is the exact text from the Delivery Plan, the document that is produced by the UK’s Facilities Council (which is “… [the organization that] operates world-class, large scale research facilities and provides strategic advice to the UK government on their development. It also manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community. The Council also directs, coordinates and funds research, education and training.” — see the website):

“We will cease investment in the International Linear Collider. We do not see a practicable path towards the realisation of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale. “

How about that? And this is with all the ideas and plans that are already on the table (including projects that were chopped because of the ILC)… The International Linear Collider just became a chunck less international… This is really bad timing — as we learned recently, the real cost of ILC would also likely to go up…

P.S. One can find the complete text of the Delivery Plan here.

As I predicted here, Persis Drell has been named the fourth director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She is a great physicists and, I’m sure, will lead SLAC to a brighter future (which can be read as you wish — especially since SLAC will soon have no on-site particle physics experiements, but will have a very bright X-ray source). We interacted a bit what I was a postdoc at Cornell (she was a professor there for 14 years). She helped turn SLAC into an active astrophysics lab and resisted attempts to argue for building of a super-B factory there.

Hmm… maybe I should do predictions for money… wait, I actually do that — I’m a theorist…