Slashdot Mirror
Big Science has a Twenty-Year Plan
Earlier this week, Energy Secretary Spence Abraham laid out the Office of Science's 20-year plan for building and upgrading the U.S.'s "Big Science" facilities. Twenty-eight programs got the nod, in all. The top priorities -- fusion, and a massive supercomputer. Other goals on the wish list include studying dark energy, high-speed atomic-scale imaging with an electron laser, and fulfilling several particle-physics dreams, including a collider to rival CERN's LHC. Here's the press release and the full list (PDF). Your grandchildren may write school papers on the discoveries these tools will make...
...is Spencer Abraham.
Tie for 7 the CEBAF upgrade. Hopefully we will be able to get higher resolution and decern the nature of the Nucleon, w00t
Sorry, every one here at UVa is pretty excited since CEBAF, or JLab, is one of our primary projects, along with conributions to the D0 experiment at Fermi Lab, and the PI-Beta experiment at SLACK.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
I like this proposal, however I'm not putting much stock into it ever being completed. It's real easy to trot out these kinds of "wish lists", the real trick is getting funding. The release even notes that these projects are their priorities, not neccessarily the President's. With a rapidly balloning deficit, I would be very surprised if more than a couple of these projects got any serious kind of funding.
An what happened to the research on solvent-refined coal?
Apart from the pollution and contamination problems everybody had big expectations. Or? All the research in this area lying dead?
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Except that those aren't omissions, because this isn't a research project list, it's a facilities list. You don't need multi-billion-dollar dedicated research facilities to study batteries, biodiesel, fuel cells, or microturbines. Therefore they won't be on a list of major new research facilities.
It was scrapped because of budget deficits back in the early 90's.
Do we have more budget deficits ? yes.
We could also build a distributed network supercomputer using plain regular desktops. It might rival the BLUE GENE.
The what and why of the SNS
But this PDF file from the "Office of Science" seems to be something straight of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Just weird Big Science apparently mostly driven by the need to Spend a Lot of Other People's Money.
Then, on page 5, there is a picture of the Secretary of Energy, and if he is not a dead ringer for Cuffy Meigs in the book, I can't think of a better candidate.
Plus, the spell Feynman's name wrong. Death is too good for them.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
At least credit The Onion if you're going to blatantly paste them around.
Actually, we have been pouring money into it. In fact, IIRC, we ahve spent somewhere around 30B so far on fusion since the 70's. And yes, we are a lot closer.
The problem has not really been one of funding but one of science trying to determine which approach works. Each one costs literally billions to experiment with.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.