Science and Politics

One of the nice things that governments do is support basic scientific research — work that might help us better understand how the world works, but doesn’t have any direct technological or economic application. Particle physics and cosmology are great examples. In the U.S., much of the funding for these fields comes from the Office of High Energy Physics within the Office of Science at the Department of Energy (DOE).

Now that support is crumbling — drastically. In the last couple of years, the DOE has radically changed how it carries out reviews of different university theory groups, to decide how much grant support each will get. All for ostensibly good reasons — leveling the playing field and all that. But, without much fanfare, the actual result has been a significant drop in funding for almost every major theory group in the country.

Laurence Yaffe of the University of Washington, a respected particle and nuclear theorist, just released an analysis he informally carried out after serving a temporary assignment at the DOE. Here is his abstract (emphasis mine):

Impacts of Recent Comparative Review Cycles on DOE-funded High Energy Theory
L.G. Yaffe, University of Washington
February 19, 2014

A summary is presented of data obtained from a grass-roots effort to understand the effects of the FY13 and FY14 comparative review cycles on the DOE-funded portion of the US high energy theory community and, in particular, on graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are beginning their careers. For a sample comprised of nearly all of the larger groups undergoing comparative review, total funding declined by an average of 23%, with numerous major groups receiving reductions in the 30–55% range. Funding available for postdoc or graduate student support declined over 30%, with many reductions in the 40–65% range. The total number of postdoc positions in this large sample of theory groups is declining by over 40%. The impacts on young researchers raise grave concerns regarding continued U.S. leadership in high energy theory.

A 20% cut in funding in one year is kind of a big deal. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here are two of them; overall funding changes for all the different groups:

and changes specifically in support for graduate students and postdocs:

Obviously this is unsustainable, unless as a society we make the decision that particle physics just isn’t worth doing. But hopefully things can be rectified at least a bit, to restore some of that money. Everyone I know is bemoaning the cuts, complaining that they have been turning away prospective grad students and postdocs more than ever before. I’m not necessarily against decreasing the number of postdocs (as opposed to grad students); the pipeline has to narrow somewhere, and there’s a sensible argument to be made to do it at that point. But we should do it deliberately and after thinking and talking about it, not as the haphazard result of some new bureaucratic procedures. It would be a shame to destroy our future prospects in this centrally important area of science.

Back in the day (ten years ago), I served on a NASA panel charged with developing a long-term roadmap for NASA’s astrophysics missions. At the time there were complaints from Congress and the Office of Management and the Budget that NASA was asking for lots of things, but without any overarching strategy. Whether that was true or not, we recognized the need to make hard choices and put forward a coherent plan. The result was the Beyond Einstein roadmap. We were ambitious, but reasonable, we thought, and the feedback we received from Congress and elsewhere was generally quite positive.

Hahahahaha. In the end, almost nothing that we proposed is actually being carried out. Our roadmap had different ingredients (to mix a metaphor): two large “facility-class” missions comparable to NASA’s Great Observatories, three more moderate “Einstein Probes” to study dark energy, inflation, and black holes, and more speculative “Vision missions” for further down the road. The Einstein Probes have long since fallen by the wayside, although the dark-energy mission might find life via one of the telescopes donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office. If we don’t have the willpower/resources to do the moderate-sized missions, you might suspect that the facility-class missions are even more hopeless, and you’d be right.

But never fear! Word out of Europe (although still not official, apparently) is that the ESA has prioritized missions to study the “hot and energetic universe” and the “gravitational universe.” These map pretty well onto Constellation-X and LISA, the two facility-class missions we recommended pursuing in Beyond Einstein. The former would have been an X-ray telescope, while the latter would be a gravitational-wave observatory. Unfortunately the likely launch date for an ESA gravitational-wave mission isn’t until 2034, which is like forever. Fortunately, China has expressed interest in such a project, which might move things along.

For anyone following the news of last year’s Higgs discovery, it’s a familiar story. Here in the US we had a big particle accelerator planned, the SSC, which was canceled in 1993. That allowed CERN time and money to build the LHC, which eventually found the Higgs (and who knows what else it will find in the future). The US makes big plans, loses nerve, and Europe (or someone else) picks up the pieces.

Personally, I could not possibly care less which country gets the credit for scientific discoveries. If we someday map out the spacetime geometry around a black hole using data from a gravitational-wave observatory, whether it was launched by Europe or the US or China or India or Dubai matters to me not one whit. But I do want to see it launched by somebody. And the health of global science is certainly better off when the US is an active and energetic participant — the more resources and more competition we see in the field, the more benefits for everybody. Let’s hope we find a way for US science to shift back into high gear, so that we are players rather than merely spectators in this amazing game.

Sorry to bump Julianne’s fun post further down the page, but lots of news today. This particular piece of news is not fun: NASA is abandoning LISA, the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, as well as IXO, an X-ray satellite observatory (formerly “Constellation X”). Steinn has some of the ugly details. Short story: money is tight, and the James Webb Space Telescope is taking all of it. (Not that JWST is completely immune from danger itself…)

LISA is not completely dead: the European Space Agency will keep the planning alive. But this is a serious step, not just a feint in a budget negotiation; the LISA International Science Team is being disbanded, told to pack up and go home. Hopefully the ESA will continue to push forward, and individual researchers in the US can somehow find money to still think about gravitational-wave astrophysics from space. It’s possible that a smaller mission could be put forward, but it’s not as if NASA has extra money they’re looking to spend right now.

Of all the concepts for big astrophysics missions in space, LISA is my favorite. Unlike LIGO, which strains as hard as possible and hopefully will detect something once its upgraded, LISA would be bombarded with gravitational waves, and the trick will be picking out the interesting signals from above the ambient noise. (That’s a problem we don’t mind having.) I was part of the original Beyond Einstein roadmap team (pdf) that packaged LISA and Constellation-X together with a dark energy mission to create an ambitious but realistic plan for NASA cosmology that Congress and the OMB could get behind. That was in 2002, before wars and tax cuts and financial catastrophes sapped the government of its ability to pay for anything. The best-laid plans of mice and men and NASA panels, as the saying goes.

LISA’s science is not just achievable, it’s incredibly interesting. It would detect thousands of binary systems within our galaxy, as well as numerous inspirals of middleweight black holes into supermassive ones in other galaxies, giving us incredibly detailed access to the spacetime metric near a black hole. As a side benefit, the wavelength is just right for looking at gravitational waves that might be produced in the early universe if the electroweak phase transition is especially violent. I remember giving a talk to particle physicists planning the International Linear Collider (another possibly doomed endeavor) back in 2003. It was great to see their eyes light up when I told them about this connection between satellite observatories and particle accelerators — at a meeting dominated by budget worries, it was a tiny oasis of actual science.

Hopefully things will somehow work out, but there’s not a lot of reason for optimism at the moment. We’ll see how things go.