Via Andrew Jaffe and Not Even Wrong, news that the UK will be withdrawing a massive amount of investment in large physics projects.
A funding crisis at one of the UK’s leading research councils has forced the country to pull out of plans for the International Linear Collider (ILC). The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) says in a report published today that it does not see “a practicable path towards the realization of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale”. The report also says that the UK will stop investing in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, withdraw from the Gemini telescopes, and cease all support for ground-based solar-terrestrial physics facilities…
“This is one whole great big bombshell,” says particle physicist John Dainton from the Cockcroft Institute at Liverpool University in the UK, which is involved in planning the ILC. “How can administrators in government departments and the STFC get this so wrong? There must be a reason and incompetence comes to mind. We are furious. You are killing off the exploitation of years of investment.”
Andrew also notes that they will be:
“revisiting the on-going level of investment” in gravitational wave detection, dark matter detection, the Clover CMB experiment and the UKIRT telescope. The UK will pull out of the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes.
Terrible news for particle physics, astrophysics, and solar physics. The ILC is certainly on shaky ground; if countries start dropping out, the LHC might very well be the last particle accelerator at the energy frontier built in our lifetimes.
The country of my birth is descending into the dark ages. As a chemist I have been appalled at the shutting down of UK chemistry departments. At least the one I used to work and my old unit has survived. I have grave worries about the future of science in Britain. The situation was worrying enough when I left 18 years ago but it appears to have got worse ever since.
“Of course UK has all kinds of space astronomy programs, but just about all are participating in *someone else* programs. In this mode, you operate as the follower.”
In the case of NASA projects that is true, but how exactly do you define the leadership of ESA? The UK is the 4th largest (2nd if you exclude optional contributions to say human spaceflight) contributor to ESA, but because France is number 1 does that mean by your definition that France is the leader in everything ESA does? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that, I’m also fairly sure that in almost all space missions the make up of the analysis of the data generally depends on where the best people are, not who put in the most money. Also of course the data is freely available to everyone else with an internet connection usually after a year, so I don’t see that it is a major disadvantage not to lead a project.
I’m not exactly sure what your point is anyway, the UK has an economy a fifth of the size of the US, are we meant to be spending on research at the same rate as the US despite this?, is it not worthwhile in your opinion to be involved in international collaboration? Or should anyone that can’t afford to run a whole project themselves not bother and leave you to it? That would have been a great idea for the likes of ITER or the Human Genome project.
“BTW, the science cut is only one part – UK is also cutting the military, principally the navy, deeply. The days of large British naval power is finished.”
Thats not surprising, we have the worlds 5th largest economy but spend (officially) the second largest amount on the military. I would say our priorities need to be reorganised.
Lets be clear, what happened with the STFC was the result of a series of factors that mostly boil down to unforseen circumstances and incompetence on their part, they had the opportunity to go to the government with the increased costs for Diamond and they didn’t until it was too late. They also miscalculated the costs of implementing Full Economic Costing. The net effect will be the loss of several useful present and future capabilities, and quite probably several physics departments at UK universities (due to a cut in grants), as well as many jobs in the materials science section. If this was the private sector someone in the STFC would be falling on their sword right now, but being government of course this won’t happen so we get to look forward to them having to repeat the procedure 3 years from now.
I also agree with Stuart that astronomy and particle physics are being punished for decisions that they had no influence over, completely counter to the way things worked back in the PPARC days, where to a certain extent they had the right of veto over each others projects if they could negatively affect each other. They did however agree that the risk for the budget when agreed was shared between astronomy and particle physics on the understanding that debts would be repaid if one got into trouble and needed to be bailed out by the other.
dark-matter, I don’t think having vehicle and launch capabilities is such a huge necessity given the number of commercial launch opportunities. Italy doesn’t have its ‘own’ launch facilities either but they manage to lead development of space craft too. However you would be hard pressed to know about Italy’s achievements because ASI don’t have the marketing budget of NASA, their first language isn’t English and reporting tends to be biased towards the achievements of the country in which the media is based (except in the UK where there is a preference towards saying how bad everything is).
By the way, astronomy isn’t just about space telescopes. You can do a huge amount from the ground.
Pingback: UK young physicists speak up against STFC funding cuts « An American Physics Student in England
My question is whether the funding agencies have started killing particle physics, or whether particle physics has shot itself in the foot by starting planning for the ILC before it was clear that a new accelerator was warranted by discoveries at the LHC.
Hopefully, if a new accelerator really is warranted, one will be built, despite all the handwaving now.
And of course I meant handwringing and not handwaving in my last post.
Oops.
Peter, it takes a really long time to plan and build one of these machines. If they had put off thinking about the ILC (it’s not like huge amounts of money were being spent) until interesting physics came from the LHC, there wouldn’t be anyone around still doing particle physics by the time it came online.
I don’t think that more money would be flowing to particle physics if they hadn’t started planning for the ILC.
I still think the particle physicists may have shot themselves in the foot. The only figure I could find for how much the Brits were going to spend was $28 million. Looked at one way, that’s pretty small compared to the eventual cost of $6 billion total for the machine. Looked at in another way, that’s a fairly large amount of money for something that may be just be wasted effort if the LHC finds the wrong physics.
And anyway, if the LHC finds new and interesting stuff, there would presumably be lots of things for particle physicists to do while waiting for the ILC to come online. If the LHC doesn’t find any new and interesting stuff (meaning it finds the Higgs and not much more), then looking at it realistically, I don’t see how the ILC is ever going to get built.
Mark, Stuart, Peter – all of your views are correct and contribute to understanding of the situation. Appreciate.
UK is wealthy enough to do just about any science in a leadership role if the government and people desire so. But have chosen not do. Indeed having a launch capability is not essential to do the science. But it is very important for public support, funding, and secondary benefits. France has a world class launch capability you know – second only to the American. And she can design advanced space crafts. Therefore it is a small jump to play a lead role in space science, which will likely expand now that UK is out.
Peter — construction of an ILC with a given specific set of design parameters has always (or at least in the last 8 years, once it became entirely clear that the LHC would start up well before the ILC began construction) been dependent, in the minds of most of the involved physicists, on what the LHC would find. It would indeed be fairly crazy to build a 500 GeV machine knowing that the interesting physics might lie at 600 GeV and above. People knew this and know this. Nevertheless, most of the development work (for example, on the superconducting cavities, the beam injection system, and on the basic parts of civil construction), is entirely independent of whether the machine is set to start up at 500 GeV, 700 GeV, or 1 TeV (or even a little beyond). A 500 GeV startup is not mandated by the design, it could certainly be higher if more cavities are added. The “wrong physics” really only means one’s energy is set too low, and it is known that the ILC can be pushed higher if needed. So cutting off all funding for development in Britain doesn’t open up options, it just works in the direction of closing them. Nevertheless, it is clear that physics will, as it always does, win in the end, and if (when) the LHC sees something interesting, I’m sure Britain will resume funding for ILC work.
C’mon, Singularity. . . .
Reminded me of this:
http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001025.html
There’s a campaign afoot to protest the proposed STFC cuts and lobby the UK government to reverse this decision. Find out more at
http://www.saveastronomy.org.uk/.