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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...
What happens if Democrats assume power in 2005?
We had one of those projects going: the Superconducting Supercollider. That went tango uniform as quick as you can say "policy shift".
All kinds of things can be announced for all kinds of reasons. Mostly the announcements are so you can hear the politicians make announcements and see what forward thinking people they are.
I don't even believe it when I'm told I've gotten my own grants -- not until I see the check has cleared the bank.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hmm, maybe we shouldn't have killed off the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), after 14 miles of tunneling were already completed and two billion dollars were spent.
The eco-dumbasses talk about it alternatively as an unnecessary geek-scientist's playground, or as a wasteful front for the military-industrial complex.
What it would have been is a window into the most fundamental building blocks of the Universe. And now apparently we want to try again, even though we should have finished it the first time around...
It's heartening to note that the report gives so much importance to fundamental research unlike most of the research that happens today which is so geared towards creating marketable products or intellectual property. While the latter is also good for all, science will stagnate in the absence of fundamental research . This 20 year outlook is definitely a pat in the back for schools all around the country.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Same with supercomputers. Supercomputers are so 80s/90s. Decentralization is the thing of today, but, say, creating a grid network of 10,000 computers is not so easy to compare to some Japanese mega-thingie.
I sometimes wonder, if you took just 0.1% of that money and gave it to a random bunch of OSS developers, how much progress would come out of that.
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Why they would ignore such a field, I can only speculate: perhaps there is too much of a stigma of "mind altering" to neuroscience (though I do recall Bush senior declaring the 1990's to be the decade of the brain). Or perhaps the present administration has a vested interest in keeping the populous away from mind improving developments. Or perhaps they just don't think it's necessary; after all, you don't have to be a genius to become president these days.
Not likely. I'm all for research, but most of the stuff on this list is "big science" only in terms of the money that will be spent, not the knowledge that will be gained. There's tons of biotech, materials-science, computing, optics, and other research that would be more rewarding. The most appalling omission is that the Department of Energy doesn't seem to think that battery technology - the thing holding back deployment of many other technologies - deserves even one project. Nothing on portable fuel cells, microturbines, biodiesel, wave power, or other energy-related technologies either, except fusion. What is the Department of Energy thinking?
There might be a few things in there to write papers about, but if we spend all of the money to fund these projects there won't be any left over for schools...or paper, for that matter. The only way my grandchildren will be writing papers on this stuff is if I or my children move somewhere with a sane science policy.
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We should have been going balls to the wall on fusion since the energy crisis... of the SEVENTIES! Maybe we wouldn't have had it by now, but maybe it would be a lot closer.
Academics in the 50's (!!!) were writing about how US dependence on foreign oil (specifically Persian Gulf/Arabian oil) was just asking for trouble. Then OPEC bites us in the ass. We freak out a bit (price controls, wear more sweaters), but when the "crisis" (largely self-inflicted; read some economics books) abates, we go back to business as usual, just waiting for our dependence on foreign oil to bite us in the ass again... as it has several times to varying degrees.
A 20 year plan for facility development is different than the 5 year plans the Soviets were doing. On one hand are developments that will take many years to bring up to operational status and then have many years of fruitful use, and on the other we have long range determinations of how many razors will be needed. Projects can be and should be planned for the long haul; budgets can rarely be predicted beyond a month, let alone a year. Much of the Soviet 5 years plans were not long-term projects, but simply very long range budgeting.
That aside, the Soviets were fairly successful when it came to large scale projects. Granted, when it came to Soviet construction projects, especially under Stalin, the policy was typically placing a small army of poorly trained and poorly equipped men together and telling them to work or get shot, but the projects were still eventually completed. However, when skilled scientists and engineers were in charge and given adequate resources, the Soviets were able to create both atomic and fusion bombs as well as a highly competitive space program.
[For more information, as well as an analysis of the long-term decline of Soviet science and engineering, I can recommend "The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham.]
Projects, as opposed to budgets, are more resilient to daily fluctuations and can be quite useful.
Now, whether the government should be doing 'big science' at all is a different argument.
Supercomputers are going to be a critical component of many scientific advances in the next hundred years.
If you haven't noticed, professors and researchers are moving away from scribbling equations on notepads and hoping they remembered to carry the '1' to trying out their theories in a numerical environment and seeing how close it matches reality.
They are also using supercomputers to solve with the brute-force method. What used to take hundreds of grad students slaving away for decades now takes a couple of clicks on a keyboard because of brute force.
One of the limiting factors to particle accelerators is the rate at which they can model the results that they read and determine if it is interesting or not and therefore worthy to store in the database. Having really big iron is a critical component of all particle acceleration and collision detection equipment.
Not only that, but perhaps we can use big iron to help solve complicated problems where we understand the theory very well already. Something like sustainable fusion reactions comes to mind.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Why build another supercollider when there is one in Europe? What a waste of money!
Little Science could have a much grander impact. Here are some worthwhile projects the DOE could pursue:
1. Microbiology research for dissolving nuclear waste.
2. Fuel Cells
3. Engineering atoms/molecules using a small Linux cluster for the purpose of creating more lightweight, durable materials. The applications range from space travel to camping gear.
4. Building the proton computer and loading an older version of Slackware on it. By the time this is built, you won't want to put Windows on the computer, since the OS will be so bloated it would take too long to download a page with java applets.
What amazes me is that there is no talk of nanoassembly. It is now widely accepted that it would be possible to come up with the first nano self-assembler within about ten years, given enough funding and research. google for primitive nanofactory design study big peer-reviewed (84 pages) white paper that'll blow yer socks off...
Not to choose sides and call names... but, perhaps OSS needs a reinventing of the wheel to clear the hurdle (read: MS). No, I have no specific things to change, if I did, I would be part of this growth effort.
Note, as it is, I have no problem with nix. But, nothing is perfect and everything can be better. Just think the contributions that could come from reinventing as they usually produce slick stuff in the past.