Life as a Physicist

I’ve been reading What’s New on-and-off for years. This is written by Bob Park and is a sarcastic take on the non-science crap that goes down (usually) in Washington. Sadly, the first entry of this week’s issue was:

1. FURLOUGH: WHAT’S NEW WILL HAVE TO TAKE A BREAK.

It will start next week. Issues of support need to be resolved. Except for the week the tree fell, it will be the first break WN has taken in 25 years. We’ll be back when we can. I appreciate all 1274 opportunities I’ve had to share my concerns with you - there is much to be concerned about.

I’ll definitely miss you Bob — I hope the support issue is worked out. And he temporarily exits the room with a bang (i.e. typical style):

2. OTHER DIMENSIONS: THE GOVERNMENT’S UFO COVERUP.

I was invited this week to join a panel of “experts” on “It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle,” an Emmy Award-winning, viewer-interactive news talk show on the Comcast Cable Television Network. The subject was “Are we alone?”

The object was to increase advertising revenue by pandering to a public that lives in a mythical world. I was the token scientist; Ted Schick, a philosophy professor from Muhlenberg, was the other rationalist. Then there was a delusional M.D. who saw lights she couldn’t explain over Phoenix, and the delusional head of the Paradigm Research Group, devoted to exposing the imaginary UFO cover-up. But the “experts” hardly mattered; the stars were the callers, with tales of strange lights and space aliens who can walk through walls. Is that really possible? “Of course it is,” a caller explained, “quantum physics has proven it.” The aliens, another cautioned, may be in another dimension - “there are eleven you know.” What have we done?

I’ll miss the weekly dose of plain-text depressing science humor. Hope you are back soon!

“The United States is committed to strengthening our energy security and confronting global climate change. And the best way to meet these goals is for America to continue leading the way toward the development of cleaner and more energy-efficient technology.

To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow. Last year Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding. This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge. So I ask Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.”

From last night’s State of the Union text. I have no idea what these things mean — especially given Bush is a lame duck now. But he did mention the dropped funding. Some of us have been hoping that something might be connected to the stimulus package - but I also agree with the point that funding science is not the right way to make a short term cash infusion into the economy - but it is good for the long term health of the economy (as he mentions).

The word science occurred one other time in the speech, and its context must aggravate most medical researchers:

On matters of life and science, we must trust in the innovative spirit of medical researchers and empower them to discover new treatments while respecting moral boundaries. In November we witnessed a landmark achievement when scientists discovered a way to reprogram adult skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. This breakthrough has the potential to move us beyond the divisive debates of the past by extending the frontiers of medicine without the destruction of human life.

It is hard to disagree with the statement “respecting moral boundaries”, at least in the abstract. Unfortunately, it is a codeword for all the stem cell research battles.

To put this in some context I looked back at his last three addresses. The American Presidency Project, among other things, keeps many past state of the union addresses in its archive. I looked back at 2007 - science is mentioned once, in the context of the no child left behind law. In 2006 it is mentioned in the context of education and also the proposal of the American Competitive Initiative - which includes doubling the science budget (which got killed). Code words also appear in the context of medical science. In 2005 the word science didn’t appear once. So 2006 was a banner year…

My Dad’s latest issue of Scientific American (Feb) just arrived. The cover carries the title: Special Report: The Future of Physics, with the short underneath it:

Hidden natural laws? Unseen dimensions? Two new particle colliders will search for answers at unimaginable energies

“Two!?” was my first thought. The first is, indeed, the LHC. The second is the ILC — the one for which all the funding was just cut. Ops. Reading the editorial I see no mention of the funding cuts, so I assume this went to press before that was known. Still, to be excited about something that has its funding slashed shows how out of touch science and politics are. For what it is worth, the authors of the articles make me think they will be good reading - I’ve not read it yet, but I’d suggest picking it up!

As a side note, I was listening to a pod-cast of Science Friday the other day and they had an interesting bit on the MESSENGER satellite’s return to Mercury. James Head, a professor from Brown University, was the guest. Early on in the interview he made the comment “science funding in the USA is at its lowest point in my lifetime.”

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) was given a 30 million dollar gift from a fund run by Charles Simonyi (20 million) and Bill Gates (10 million). The proposed telescope will scan the sky night-after-night providing time-lapse pictures at a scale and detail not previously available. It is a proven technique that has been used on a much smaller scale previously. This experiment looks to me, actually, a lot like a high energy physics detector, aimed at the sky (perhaps that is part of the reason I like it). And, perhaps, the fact that members of the UW physics department and astronomy department are involved in it.

This is old news, especially if you read other science blogs (I first saw mention of it on the 4th). But I wanted to post it for several reasons. First - this is great. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see private money like this flowing to science. I suppose it always has - especially for applied research. But the LSST is about as pure as it gets: there are no products coming out of this - this is a search for dark matter/dark energy. There are lots of ways to donate your private cash to research efforts. The one I’ve been aware of for the longest is to donate your computer time: Rosetta@Home, SETI@Home, LHC@Home, etc. But getting cash in isn’t easy - especially when you realize that $30 million is only part of the LSST’s budget (something around 170 million)!

And that brings me to the second reason I have been wanting to post to this. The LSST is marked as one of Astrophysics top priorities. Numerous reviews of the field since have all put LSST at or near the top of the list. This is one of the experiments that would likely have benefited in the doubling of the science budget that was supposed to start this year but is likely now put off (for who knows how long). The LSST is high priority enough that eventually it will be funded - though if science funding in America continues to remain very tight who knows what other smaller experiments will suffer - in a similar way that science at NASA has suffered at the hands of the Mars program. Though, for me personally, this is very different - I don’t think of a manned mission to Mars as having much scientific value and I definitely think of the LSST has having scientific value.

Finally, I used to think of large private donors as being perfect for funding things that government won’t for political reasons. Cheap drugs because they are beholden to big-pharma, for example. Disease prevention in Africa because a government doesn’t think the continent is important enough (though I note that is finally starting to change). I have always thought that funding of pure research was the duty of a good government - it isn’t something that a company should be expected to shoulder and it is obviously important for the future of the country. So I find this a bit galling as well.

The director of particle physics, Steve Kahn, at SLAC commenting on the budget cuts and the BaBar program:

As you all know, one of the consequences of the budget cut we face here at SLAC is the early conclusion of the B-factory run. Persis mentioned in her all-hands meeting that BaBar started operating in a different mode just before Christmas to make the most of the shortened run. The PEP-II accelerator team and BaBar physicists have put in a huge effort to adjust their program so rapidly to the changes imposed on us and it is testimony to their resourcefulness that this plan could be implemented so quickly.

Because they are turning off early a number of other science programs will go forward (the Tevatron, for example). What a pity!

Bob Park, a physicsit from the University of Maryland, releases What’s New every week — a pithy one-pager of the crazy things going on around Washington involving science (well, crazy from a scientist’s point of view). Sort of like a weekly posting blog that started long before blogs (he has been doing this for 20 some-odd years). What he wrote about the budget cuts is exactly correct:

2. BLINDSIDED: APS PRESIDENT ASKS MEMBERS FOR HELP.

Why did the basic science budget, which was sailing smoothly six months ago, hit an iceberg? And why was high-energy physics thrown overboard? We can worry about laying blame later, but nothing is ever quite final in Washington. Right now we have to start swimming. Yesterday, APS President Arthur Bienenstock issued an urgent appeal to members to write to their congressional delegation and to President Bush to urge emergency supplemental appropriations. He included a sample letter making the connection between basic research and economic growth - even as the morning papers were using the word “recession.” My advice is not to agonize over language. Your letter is more likely to be counted than read. Just make it clear what you want in the first sentence.

Have you sent yours yet?

The night before my flight out to New Jersey I woke up at about 3am and couldn’t go back to sleep. I had an idea that wouldn’t let me get back to sleep: send the presidential candidates a list of questions and then post the answers, unedited. This was mostly motivated by a comment left in one of my posts.

AIP beat me to the idea. You can see their list of questions here. I have summarized them here:

• What would you do to improve K-12 science and math education?
• Would you teach evolution in public school classes?
• Discuss the future of our nuclear arsenal
• How would you pay for an increase in funding science
• The future of energy policy - what should the mix be between conventional, new types (solar, etc.), nuclear - and what sorts of investments would you make?
• What would you do to address global warming?

If I didn’t get the tenor of the questions right, that would be my paraphrasing mistake.

First, I’m glad they did this. It is great, and I hope they get good answers back!

But I don’t like some parts of the survey. The way the questions are setup seems to guide the answer. I’d rather give the candidates as much rope as possible so we can see how they would answer. Also, putting the evolution question on there — which is the “pro-life v pro-choice” question for scientists — doesn’t serve any obvious purpose. We already know the answer to that question because of the first republican debate.

I would have also like to have seen some more open ended questions - like “How do you see basic science research fitting into the economic future of the US?” (with examples, etc.).

Now — the answers are in already for most candidates (but not all). And they have a nice page setup - though it means clicking on lots of web pages; it would be nice if you could download them on a single page for each question.

I’m home babysitting my kid. I’ll try to read these over the next two days and summarize, but if someone beats me to it — let me know!

[UPDATE: I mistakenly credited this to the APS, not the AIP. Sorry!]

I’ve been reading various blogs that mention the budget cuts. I’m very happy to see many people complaining about the budget cuts. But all of them are HEP bloggers - and this leaves the impression that only HEP got cut (and I think some people leaving comments picked up on that). This, sadly, is not the case. For example, contained in a letter from the HEP section of the APS is the following paragraph:

Congress wrapped up the Fiscal Year 2008 (FY0 budget just before adjourning for the year. The budget, which wipes out $1 billion in increases approved last summer for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE Science) and the NIST laboratories, does irreparable damage to science and abandons the Innovation/Competitiveness initiatives of Congress and the Administration.

NIST, for example, has little or nothing to do with HEP. This is a global science problem. It is just the set of blogs I tend to watch are HEP oriented (they don’t call the blogo-sphere the echo chamber for nothing!). It is the case, however, the fusion physics and HEP were cut the hardest, however.

And then, there was something I was confused about. I had thought that science funding was cut 1% across the board. Turns out that is incorrect. DOE got a 2.5% increase, but after you factor in inflation that is the same as a 1% cut. The NSF, however, only got a 1.2% increase — so all of it will be hit hard when you factor in inflation.

Another aspect I didn’t even realize was pointed out to me when I visited the Subway sandwich store near Fermilab last week for some owl-shift-snacks. The guy working there said “what if all those people fired eat at Subway?”

There is an ongoing letter writing campaign to get congress to reconsider the science cuts - if you feel so inclined, please send a letter in!

David Pace has an excellent posting on ITER funding. I was going to leave a comment but his comment engine doesn’t want me to “command can’t be processed.”

One thing I would note is that the “don’t re-program” statement sounds like it is in the explanatory language. That would jib with another comment I heard that that fact, plus that the treaty is the law-of-the-land would give the DOE enough lee-way to pay off this years obligation.

David uses logic to follow the sign posts and concludes that the US is out of ITER forever. If that is the case for all the projects that got canceled or zeroed out, then that is a disaster: major science policy decisions were made over the course of several days without any apparent consultation with the scientists. This is a perfect way to run our country’s science program into the ground.

So, I hope many of these projects have been “delayed” for a year rather than de-facto canceled!

As a commenter pointed out, of course, I can’t really know what happened - and the actual  decision process will probably not be known for a long time if ever.

P.S. David — sorry your comment took so long to be posted on my blog: it got marked as spam, and I don’t check the spam bucket often enough!

Well, first some facts (and then onto more speculation). As a result of the omnibus budget agreement that cut science hard - and particle physics as well:

• BaBar and the SLAC b-factory will be shutting down early - in February (see video of the all hands meeting where this was discussed). They are basically being sacrificed so that the Tevatron can keep running. I believe their normal shutdown was the end of the year. As a member of an experiment on the Tevatron, all I can say is “thanks” and “sorry”. What a waste.
• SLAC and Fermilab will both have to fire a bunch of people. I’ve heard numbers like 10% and SLAC and similar numbers at Fermilab but I don’t know for sure.
• International Linear Collider accelerator research has been basically zeroed out for this year. Actually, they said we could spend 15 million. The problem was they told us to spend something like 85 million several months ago for the whole year - so we started to burn through it and now we are told we could only spend 15 million. So there is effectively nothing left.
• NOvA was put off at least a year. This is the off axis neutrino experiment that was to measure, among other things, theta13.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science’s Kovar put it well when discussing the most significant possible impacts of this:

This loss of skilled and highly trained personnel will be difficult for our community and will have impacts beyond the delays in NOvA and ILC R&D since many laboratory staff work on multiple efforts.

What makes this so painful for us is that all signs pointed towards increased funding - and then the rug was pulled out from under us. Indeed, even the direction from the agencies was to increase our funding. Since congress the white house and persons blue and red were all pointing in the same direction we thought we were home safe. Turns out that may have been exactly what got us in the end.

So, the next part is speculation (well, some of it). Some pulled from conversations and also from an email the American Physical Society president sent around (I can’t find a copy of that email online). I think we got screwed because of some stupid high school bathroom brawl. Seriously! These people in Washington are supposed to be professionals and even if one group wants to be a set of idiots the others should rise above it all. As far as I can tell, here is what happened:

• Congress just about finishes the omnibus spending bill. [Snark: exactly how late was this!?]
• At the last minute Bush says he will veto it unless it comes at his number. [Snark: Presumably this is to prove that he is a fiscal conservative.]
• Democrats and Republicans in congress go round and round. They do not have the votes to override a veto in the end.
• Democrats give up and say “he wants it 22 billion cheaper? OK, we’ll do it”. [Snark: how did we not miss this big big warning sign that something bad was about to happen!? 20-20 hindsight!]
• 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!!!

On a more rational note. So, what can we do to prevent this from happening next time? There are several people in congress that are very interested in science, perhaps they need to be closer to the appropriations process? I have no idea. But I’d love to know what we need to do.

I’ll close with a short quote from an APS press release urging a revisit of the bill:

The American Physical Society, representing more than 46,000 physicists in universities, industry and national laboratories, regards the fiscal year 2008 omnibus spending bill as extraordinarily damaging to the nation’s science and technology enterprise. The bill fails to fund appropriately the research and education programs authorized in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, which President Bush signed into law only four months ago. The consequential layoffs of scientists and engineers throughout the nation will discourage American youth from pursuing these fields, just as the country needs their participation to sustain economic growth and national security.