Lurking behind the debate over the high energy physics budget is a meta question that rarely gets addressed head-on: in a world with many things that we would like to do, but limited resources to do them, how do we decide what questions are interesting enough to warrant our attention? This question arises at every level. If we have a certain number of dollars to spend on particle physics, how much should go to the high-energy frontier and how much to smaller-scale experiments? Within fundamental science, how much should go to physics and how much to biology or astronomy or whatever? And it’s not just money: within a university, how many faculty positions should go to historians, and how many to archaeologists? Within philosophy, how many logicians do we need, and how many ethicists? It’s not even an especially academic question: which book am I going to bring with me to read on the plane?
There are a number of issues that get tied up in such considerations. One is that certain activities simply require certain resources, so if we judge them sufficiently interesting to be pursued then we need to be prepared to devote the appropriate resources their way. A colleague of mine in condensed-matter physics was fond of complaining about all the great small-scale physics that his community could do if they only had half of Fermilab’s budget. Which is undoubtedly true, but with half of Fermilab’s budget you wouldn’t get half the science out of Fermilab — you wouldn’t get anything at all. If that kind of particle physics is worth doing at all (which is a completely fair question), there is an entry fee you can’t avoid paying.
But more deeply, the problem is that there is no intrinsic property of “interestingness” that we can compare across different academic questions. Questions are not interesting in and of themselves; they are interesting to somebody. If I happen to not be interested in the American Civil War, and a friend of mine thinks it’s fascinating, that doesn’t mean that one of us is “right” and the other “wrong”; it just means that we have different opinions about the interestingness of that particular subject. It’s precisely the same kind of personal decision that goes into preferences for different kinds of music or cuisine. The difference is that, unlike CD’s or appetizers, we don’t consume these goods individually; we need to make some collective decision about how to allocate our intellectual resources.
People pretend that there are objective criteria, of course. The standard battle lines within physics are drawn between research that is “fundamental” and research that is “useful.” I was once in the audience for a colloquium by Steven Weinberg, back in the days when we were still planning on the Superconducting Supercollider, and he was talking about why particle physics was worthy of substantial investment: “People sometimes object to the way we speak about particle physics, objecting that we give the impression that it’s more `fundamental’ than other fields. But I think it’s okay, because … well, it is more fundamental.” Contrariwise, I’ve heard condensed-matter physicists wonder with a straight face why anyone in the general public would be interested in books on string theory and cosmology. After all, those subjects have no impact at all on their everyday lives, so what is the possible interest?
In reality, there is no objective metaphysical standard to separate the interesting from the uninteresting. There are a bunch of human beings with different interests, and we have the social task of balancing them. A complication arises in the context of academia, where we don’t weigh everyone’s interests equally — there are experts whose opinions count for more than those on the streets. And that makes sense; even if I have no idea which directions in contemporary chemistry or French literature are interesting, I am more than willing to leave such questions in the hands of people who care deeply and have contributed to the fields.
The real problem, of course, is that sometimes we have to compare between fields, so that decisions have to be made by people who are almost certainly not experts in all of the competing interests. We have, for example, the danger of self-perpetuation, where a small cadre of experts in an esoteric area continue to insist on the importance of their work. That’s where it becomes crucial to be able to explain to outsiders why certain questions truly are interesting, even if the outsiders can’t appreciate all the details. In fundamental physics, we actually have a relatively easy time of it, our fondness for kvetching notwithstanding; it’s not too hard to appreciate the importance of concepts like “the laws of nature” and “the beginning of the universe,” even to people who don’t follow the math. Making a convincing request for a billion dollars is, of course, a different story.
Sadly, none of these high-minded considerations are really at work in the current budget debacle. High-energy physics seems to be caught in a pissing match between the political parties, each of whom wants to paint the other as irresponsible.
The White House and congressional leaders exchanged barbs Tuesday over who was to blame for the Fermilab impasse. Lawmakers said the Bush administration’s tight overall budget targets tied their hands, while a spokesman for Bush’s Office of Management and Budget said the Democratic leaders could have met the targets by cutting back on other discretionary elements of the budget.
Durbin said the $196 billion required for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left little room for budget maneuvering.
“We were left with stark choices: reduce funding for high-end physics or cut money for veterans; reduce spending at Fermilab or eliminate funding for rural hospitals,” Durbin said in a statement Tuesday.
Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the administration’s Office of Management and Budget, said Congress could have chosen instead to take more money from the $9.7 billion worth of earmarks designated for lawmakers’ projects.
“The choices were up to the Congress,” Kevelighan said.
As annoying as academia can be, politics is infinitely worse.
Or maybe you defund the giant sucking whole called the “War in Iraq!”
Sean:
What you describe here is what in my field(s) is known as “budget theory.” Some great minds have worked on it at length (Aaron Wildavsky and Gary Wamsley to name but two).
So far, the tentative conclusion is this…you can’t compare buying jet fighters to paying for accelerators. You just can’t. We aren’t that rational. All you can do is largely tie it to last year’s thinking. Now, a lot of folks disagree and view it in different ways (trying to apply theories of biological equilibria, etc.) But the net is, it cannot be rationalized. Governments aren’t rational; they are political. Politics is emotion, bias, corruption, etc.
Your best bet is to form foundations related to what you want and go after long-term stable funding from the wealthy. That’s what the universities you have criticized (like Harvard) have done rather successfully. Foundations are the way to depoliticize a government-funded entity, or at least to make it secure in the face of politics.
I spend my life on such theories. Don’t envy me. (Good blog by the way).
Ryan
I don’t think Weinberg ever argued that fundamental physics is more “interesting” at a metaphysical level. In “Dreams” he just said it was more *fundamental*, which is a very different claim, having to do with the tower of theories, but not the inherent worth of specific problems.
Within fields, of course, we have decadal surveys and competitive grants to help with weighing interestingness.
I think a big issue here is consistency. If Congress decides that particle physics deserves, say, $1 billion a year, then it should hold to that amount, rather than pump and dump. The inconsistency results in huge waste.
George
“We were left with stark choices: reduce funding for high-end physics or cut money for veterans; reduce spending at Fermilab or eliminate funding for rural hospitals,”
So, in these here modern times “high-end physics” is playing a zero-sum game with “rural hospitals” for 100 million USD while all the air is sucked out of the room by the 196 billion USD required this year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, after all, cost ‘only’ 1% of GDP.
There must be something in the water mains inside the beltway. Where’s Fox Mulder when you need him?
I think you’re right: “Interesting” is irrelevant here. You need friends in high places, plain and simple. You need sell it shamelessly to get their attention, basically. It’s cynical, it’s dirty, it’s against everything a serious academic in search of the truth is probably motivated by, but if American politicians ever really responded with action to the notion of intellectual pursuits for their own sake, they sure as hell don’t seem to now. If money is going to other fields like biomedical/tech, it’s because it’s dispersed in many districts where it generates plenty of capital, and hence has plenty of advocacy where it counts to rack up the votes. Plus, everybody thinks it’s all practical. You know, in ten years cell therapies will let you eat like Henry VIII and stay slim, grow a new brain, and increase your gender-specific endowment with real flesh. B.S.? Sure, but it’s tangible B.S.
You look at things the Pentagon has funded, the amount of “you just can’t make this shit up” kinds of things. Gay bombs. Antimatter weapons. Gravitomagnetic propulsion.
It’s a zero-sum game, as far as I can tell, which is sad. But that’s life. So somebody has to get that money. What fundamental physics really needs to get to the bottom of is “Why not us, when crap like X does?” I’m guessing the answer is probably pretty simple, just like the mentality of those who set the policy. I’d like to think a loftier approach could prevail in the end, but the evidence isn’t encouraging.
“As annoying as academia can be, politics is infinitely worse.”
Academia is politics, it’s just that the Calvinball rules are in a different state at the moment.
what is “relevantly absurd” is the continued funding of the nuclear missle defense program which even if you believe in it’s goals has no chance of ever operationally meeting them. One of it’s key assumptions, that decoys can be distinguished from the real target via infrared signitures has been shown to be just plain wrong. This is completely wasted money that could go elsewhere and shame on Congress for not cancelling the program entirely.
Elliot
Sean, your comment about condensed matter physicists presents a misleading caricature which I think many condensed matter people like me will find quite annoying (and watch out: we outnumber you by a lot!) Many if not most of us believe that issues that arise in what’s called ‘condensed matter’ are absolutely as fundamental or ‘interesting’ as, say, quantum gravity. For instance, all the questions of order, symmetry, dimensionality, topology and criticality in phases and phase transitions; questions of decoherence and the measurement principle; questions of the emergence of effective theories for all kinds of many body system; and so on. Many of us who love physics also chose to do condensed matter studies because we feel a close link and strong feedback between theory and experiment is fundamental to good science, and in what you and Weinberg call fundamental physics the links are too fragile to be appealing nowadays. Many (but not all) of us would never say that the likely impact on everyday lives is much to do with why we do what we do.
DaveC, it wasn’t a misleading caricature, it was simply a true story. As was the story about Weinberg. The post did not take sides about what is really fundamental or interesting or useful, nor stake out any claims in the tired particle-physics-vs-condensed-matter arguments; to do so was the opposite of my point.
Sean states “the problem is that there is no intrinsic property of ‘interestingness’ that we can compare across different academic questions.” How can he be so sure? Has anyone ever really looked into the issue? Why don’t some of those brilliant high energy physicists that are about to become jobless develop a “science of interestingness” while awaiting their next physics gig?
Sure, it’s a far-out idea. But is it really that much further out than string theory? To start things off, I suggest a new fundamental unit, called an Interestingness, designated by “I” and defined as 2.8e9 earth cycles per second. Take ‘er from there, gals & guys.
Of course budgets are a zero sum game. The problem with physics is we don’t have many high powered lobbyists arguing our case, nor does many people even understand what we are doing.
If every university physics department across the US put in say .1% of their budget into a lobbyist and PR group, I can more or less guarentee that the returns on investment would be considerable.
We actually might wish this to be true, but it’s certainly not for the federal budget. We didn’t have the money to invade and occupy Iraq, but did anyway. National debt is a weird thing.
As for Weinberg, he has gone to great pains to emphasize that he does not think particle physics is the most interesting or most important field when he says that it’s the most fundamental. (See, for example, Facing Up.) Sean does not indicate anything to the contrary, but I did have that impression until I read his comment, then reread the passage. Probably because Sean assumes “fundamental=interesting”, and the natural (but irrational) leap is to “most fundamental=most interesting”.
hi,
i have the impression that all the talk about accidental cuts done at the last minute by overworked congresspeople is simply wishful thinking on the part of physicists. leaving all the masquerading and words aside, the plain and simple truth is that 3 projects got axed. this is a very narrow target and does not look at all like the usual “let’s safe 10% in the last minute” action.
first, there is the ilc. it was essentially cut to 0. this means, lhc is currently the last big hep project in the pipeline and will probably have no successor.
second, nova got axed, eliminating the second future line of hep-ex research.
the message can’t be clearer i guess. hep has no future. at least in the us. everything else is wishful thinking.
It saddens me when science is cut because science is the one of the few parts of life that actually advances. Not to hate upon reading, but every book can be categorized in about 20 ways. People behave the same way now as they did a thousand years ago. The only thing that CHANGES anything is the technology.
Science is exploring, and every year we know stuff that NOBODY knew before. This has the benefits of allowing us to build stuff today that we did not know about yesterday.
I agree that the path from accelerator physics to gizmo is indirect at best, but considering cancer treatments and other medical techniques directly use accelerator technology, I wish people wouldn’t dismiss it outright.
I wish science didn’t have to fight for what amount to scraps when compared against the defense budget. I can’t help but wonder what we’d discover if the billion/day Iraq expenditure was funneled into science.
Ryan Lanham,
Thankyou for stating the obvious. As with natural selection, it is never about what’s most “valued” by others, it is about those that exhibit behaviours more viable than their peers – a 180 degree flip. Universities have developed reliable sources of funding, so scientists / theorists / labs / facilities should hire away successful developers of university foundations to develop similar structures for themselves.
Oh, and scientists should also quit whining and compete in the real world.
‘Interesting’ is not a good criterion on the level you are talking about. You explanation above sees an expertise problem because you’ve started at a level with already many details. Decisions should generally be made by people who are well qualified. This usually constrains the circle to those that have a certain expertise. Since this doesn’t work too well with democracy, you should give them a guide that comes from a larger group. E.g. you don’t just elect people into the parliament because you like their nose, you elect them because they represent a certain direction that you expect them to pursue – doesn’t always work, but that’s the idea of representative democracy. If you write down a new law, may it be about grass cutting on Sundays, you’ll have it to be in agreement with the constitution — ideally I’d want it to be derivable 😉
Either way, to come back to the budget problem, you don’t ask a group of non-experts do we want more funding in string theory or American history, you don’t ask them do we want to spend some billions on the planned missile number soandso or on a space shuttle to Saturn, here are the construction plans. You will ask for guiding principles, internationally competitive? technologically advanced? intellectually free? well educated? being called stupid by the rest of the world? globally integrated? this might sound trivial but it’s not because you’ll have to set priorities, and find a balance. where do we want our society to go? what is more important to our so-called civilization, competition or collaboration? new developments or fixing present problems, studying our past or projecting the future, creativity or technical skills, learning or inventing, understanding or applying.
So. Now that you have decided on a direction you can pass on to a group with more expertise to figure out how to distribute the money to best realize that. It’s not a question of what person A finds interesting, but why person A thinks spending money on Fermilab isn’t optimal for being called stupid by the rest of the world. It’s essentially the same procedure of why taxes aren’t set by a people’s vote. It would be a disaster. Instead you ideally ask your people what they want the whole society to cover for, and then you leave it to the elected representative to realize that, and distribute the expenses for into a tax (needless to say, that’s not the way it actually works).
How it seems to work in practice however is nobody really cares what the guiding principles, the societies ‘interests’, are. Instead some people make a decision, supported by lobbyists, guided by career considerations, and then try to justify it with nice words that are currently fashionable but empty. Since I generally believe people mean well, I guess most often they just forget what their task is (restrictions apply — good politicians exist). You can see it happening on many levels, large and small, the result is governments and administrations that repeat mistakes because they base their decisions on the wrong basis, i.e. interests that come to arise within the small circle of people they are in constant contact with. The problem is very much amplified by a public that is not well informed about what is going on, by bad media coverage, and distorted reports. The result is that the ‘well informed’ people can say correctly, that the public doesn’t know what’s in their own interest, and their opinion can’t be trusted. Smart move, eh?
Best,
B.
Well, I rarely have heard the condensed matter community acknowledge that cancelling the SSC did great things for their funding. Never, in fact.
The heart of the matter, or matter, perhaps, is that we’ve not had a breathtaking discovery in experimental HEP for a long, long time. Not even breathtaking within community of physicists, that is, something that the best condensed matters guys look at and say `Wow’. Perhaps the last were the W and Z, which now even our string theorists yawn at.
When the condensed matter community comes up with something as pedestrian as giant magnetoresistance they don’t need `Wow’, they have an applied community that loves it and gets it into the latest hard drive.
Unfortunately we in experimental HEP have long ago settled into a kind of complacence. People viewed the SSC as an addition to the program, not a successor to Fermilab; we didn’t step forward and offer cuts and lateral moves from FNAL to Waxahachie, and I think that was noticed.
Once the LHC was fully approved, did we need *two* experiments at the Tevatron? After all, the LHC will cross check. Note that with the budget cuts, the Tevatron run will still go on. That’s programmatic, not discovery-oriented.
Discovery-oriented would be to cut to the max to get the ILC, or Nova, or even Project X. Bet the farm on the future.
Speaking of bad media coverage, why isn’t this front-page news on the New York Times web site? Why don’t I even see this in their science section? You’ve got a celebrated Nobel laureate calling this the worst funding crisis he’s ever seen at Fermilab, and the only major news outlets that seem concerned are in Chicago, who appear to be somewhat focused on the jobs (and hence tax revenue) angle.
Talk about basic science needing public advocacy. US experimental HEP is being gutted, and it doesn’t even show up in the sci/tech section of Google News unless I dig. Apparently nobody cares. Why not??
James Watson may be a jerk in his presentation, but he did have a point: Avoid Boring People (the verb). What is interesting? It’s more about what grabs attention and holds it at a reptilian level, sometimes. You look over our great democracy, and ask, what grabs folks and sucks ’em in? In general, it’s what’s bloody, sordid, and prurient. People can be wonderful, but they’re also kind of disgusting. Never forget this when you’re asking them to pay attention to you. So, how do you make them pay attention without being steeped in filth? How do you be interesting without being tawdry? Jeebus, physicists are SMART! Really smart. There’s gotta be a way they can figure out. Can you give ’em the ol’ razzle-dazzle somehow without pushing such overhype and hucksterism you make yourselves sick? There must be a way.
Low Math, Meekly Interacting,
The Fermilab disaster is hardly showing up at all on the blogs: this one and mine are about the only two places I’ve seen mentioning it. Not a peep on any of the blogs at the huge Science Blogs web-site. One reason this isn’t getting into the science media coverage is that science journalists figure that if science bloggers don’t thing this is worth mentioning, why should they?
Spear Mark,
“Bet the farm on the future.”
Been there, done that (remember the SSC?). We’re living in that future. Given the politics, shutting down successful ongoing experiments is not necessarily going to provide cash for ambitious new ones, it likely would just mean no money for either.
Where is Representative Biggert? She is on energy committee and her district covers Argonne (not Fermilab) but you would of thought she would be pushing to get this funding. I guess she is too busy voting to spend billions support Bushes war and helping out her insurance industry patrons to focus on this issue.
She needs to get voted out in IL 13 district in ’08.
Elliot
I saw govt. spending at the micro level when I worked at a certain bio-related institute. The rule of money was always have none left at the end of the fiscal year. A small amount of red ink never hurts, actually. Funds saved through conscientious parsimony are rewarded with reduced budgets the following fiscal year, because the bean counters, naturally, assume what you didn’t spend you didn’t need in the first place. If this is a systemic disease, once a level of expenditure begins to decrease, for whatever reason, the new figure gains an incredible amount of intertia, making it far more difficult to increase than if it had been increasing incrementally all along.
Hi Low Math: I’ve seen plenty examples of the same problem, in various shades and different places. Towards the end of the fiscal year money was thrown into everything that could possibly be justified whether or not one needed it, because otherwise the budget would likely have been cut, and one wouldn’t have the money if one really needed it. This usually resulted in technological upgrades (new computers etc), an expense that was easy to justify, just that (not a joke) dozens of brand new unused computers caught dust because there weren’t enough positions for people to actually use them. Other more sophisticated deals included trading money with other institutions/departments, on the agreement they would trade it back the next year (all of which was likely at least partly illegal). It’s so stupid it makes one want to bang the head against the wall, the most annoying thing is that scientists have to waste time thinking about these matters. Best, B.
Charon writes:
Someday, as an experiment, I will write a post consisting of the single letter X, and then see how long it takes before a comment pops up saying “Of course you would say that, since you obviously believe not X.”
Peter,
I think the farm was actually not bet on the SSC, and that hurt
the field. The SSC was viewed as an expansion, not a replacement.
As for the Tevatron, sure keep one experiment operating,
but why 2, when the LHC is just around the corner? Well, the
reason is programmatic; 2 experiments has been programmed in
and expectations are set. For sure, it is better to have 2 than one,
and excellent science has always been done by both of the Tevatron
experiments. But gosh, do we need 2 running right up until the
moment the LHC starts?
When we cling to our assets until our cold dead hands have to
be pried off them, we are no longer fearless discoverers.
I think the best guarantor of future funding is sticking with our
core mission… at the energy or intensity or precision frontier by
any means necessary. When we stick with 20 and 30 year old
experiments which are kind of our versions of the Space Shuttle,
it makes us appear to be entitlees.
You know, it does all make me want to help Bill Foster.
Yes, Dennis, why is this not news?