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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...
....something like 13 or 14 years ago, when Japan was starting to make a technological comeback in the world from an industrial society, they came out with a plan that almost parallels this....on a much different scale. Japan had plans to buid many, I think in fact 20-something, "science cities", which rapidly accelerated them into the 21st century.
What's happening here is important, because the U.S. could use a serious technological R&D upgrade, in my opinion. Moving to Linux is one thing, and I suppose, particle-physics and dark energy, along with a "massive supercomputer" are another. So long as they stay within the budget...
It's nice to see that the US government cares about supporting future technology and 'science facilities'.
In France our government is doing major cut in funding of many science labs and projects and that means that we will soon be unable to keep up with America's technology.
Anyway I wonder why building a new collider where the US government could have helped funding the construction of the LHC (allowing it to be even larger) ?
I would also like to know if you think that these fundings are military related. I mean do you think the US government is putting money in because most of these technologies could have military use ?
Unfortunately it seems nothing goes to the space elevator...
Iraq: war to save the U
I don't know why this was considered offtopic, the US constitution specifies maximum terms for the Presidency of 4 years, and no more than two terms in all. So barring a change in the consitution or a second controvertial ruling by Renquist and co there will be at least 3 and more likely 4 or 5 changes in administration in that time. And that is only the executive, the Congress holds the purse stings.
The US has already started to build one collider to compete with the LHC at CERN and abandoned it after spending a billion or so on it. This is a wish list, not a final decision.
Quite why anyone thinks the linac is worth building is beyond me, by the time the machine is finished the LHC will have done all the interesting work at this energy scale. Also note the comment about the world wide web being created by the high energy physics world, but without mentioning it was actually their competitor at cern who did that one.
The wish list is of course compiled by the people who do this type of big science so the priorities given to the projects is likely to be more indicative of the representation of the various factions on the comittee than a disinterested comparison. At the end of the day these projects will get funded according to the amount of pork they divert to certain districts.
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I don't really keep up with politics like I should, but I've been hearing the Bush pretty much raided the piggy bank. Where's the money going to come from for all of these projects? The senate just spent $87B USD for that Iraq thing. I know Congress will spend lots of money they don't have, but will they actually do that for something useful, like advancing science?
Don't get me wrong. As a budding scientist, I'm excited by all these plans. I just don't want to get my hopes up and then crushed.
I used to live in one of those science cities (Tsukuba - home to KEK, mentioned in the PDF), which was mostly constructed in the early '70s. Japan hasn't put forward a big-money scientific program in ages, mainly because they have a high risk of no return.
A good example of this is the Fifth-Generation Computing project that the Japanese government launched years ago - it cost big bucks but produced very little.
The supercollider wasn't killed because of a bunch of whiny liberals. There were two main reasons it was cancelled. The first is that it was discovered that the design aperture was too small to support 20-on-20 TeV operation as originally envisioned. The choice was made to increase the aperture, with an accompanying large increase in cost due to larger magnets, rather than live with lower-energy operation. That's the main reason the original $4 billion projection soared to $8 billion. The second reason was the pathetic performances put on by Lederman & Co. at the Congressional hearings. Those people acted like it was their God-given right to spend as much public money as they damn well pleased, now just give it to us and leave us alone. It was really disgusting and not at all surprising that their act didn't go over very well. Now, the fact that the ISS was spared at the same time despite having no scientific value and even worse cost overruns made it a little hard to swallow, but the SSC really was a badly-managed project and blame for its death can be laid squarely at the door of its proponents.
A funny thing happened on the way to building the SSC...
Actually, it's what happens AFTER the SSC is completed in a parallel timeline that's the subject of one physicist's (fictional) novel of how the SSC came not to be in our timeline. The book is called Einstein's Bridge and is by John Cramer. I haven't read it myself, but Cramer's earlier book Twistor is pretty nifty. I suggest it for anyone who might be interested in what happened to our SSC - Cramer takes a lot of the factual happenings from that time period (1987-1997) and folds it into his storyline, giving a flavor of what happens when politics and high-energy physics collide...
A 20 year plan? If the Communists couldn't get their 5 year plans to work, how much success will a 20 year plan have? It is much more plausible that an independent college, research center or corporation will come up with such discoveries, not because it's interesting, but because they actually have a vested interest, and have to pay the bills. A 20 year plan will either fizzle out into nothing, or just grow into a larger and larger government bureaucracy while achieving less and less. Let's leave billions of dollars back with the people who earned them, the taxpayers, and there is no limit to what they may do.
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It's been said before, I'll say it again: Grid Computing and distributed clusters are a nice on a small budget, but are not a suitable replacement for a real vector supercomputer in all applications, particularly simulation applications. Note the current Top 500: The "Japanese mega-thingie" is whomping the next closest competitor by a factor of about 2.5. A cluster with about 1.5 times as many processors. And thats been around for over a year now.
Why?
The short answer:- not as much as you think, as a matter of fact.
While I have no first-hand idea of how things work in the US, let me give you an Indian example of science-policy continuity (guessing from your nick that you are Indian, of course):- India's nuclear effort.
Broadly speaking, I understand the events before the blasts went along these lines:- as soon as it was apparent that the BJP would assume power in the aftermath of the 1996 elections, the then PM, PV Narasimha Rao, apparently sent a note to Vajpayee simply saying "Talk to Dr Kalam. He will tell you about it", or something to that effect. He was, of course, referring to India's botched attempt at conducting a nuclear test in 1995, about which the American spooks, apparently, found out (through their spy satellites) and promptly leaked to the Washington Post to put pressure on the Government, and stop it from proceeding. Which it did in the next three days actually; the Ministry of External Affairs (if I remember correctly) promptly issued a denial and the matter was "explained" as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory.
The then BJP cabinet met and apparently did talk to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam (who was then the then Scientific Advisor to the Cabinet) and found out that the nuke fraternity needed a 15 day notice to conduct a comprehensive nuclear test, preferably a thermonuclear thing (or whatever the test for the Hydrogen Bomb is).
As fate would have it, the government collapsed in 13 days, and the new United Front government had too many coalition partners and too little consensus to show leadership on such issues (remember, nuke blasts need vision in foreign policy terms as well)
The rest of the tale should be pretty obvious to Indian observers by now of course; the United Front government fell, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP vaulted back to power, and presto, one of the first directives by the new government was to actually conduct the tests. Not that they thought over it thoroughly of course; most dis-interested observers agree that the foreign policy response was astoundingly poor (while the actual technical, and moreso, operational, details were brilliant:- the Indian Army actually studied sand dune patterns around the blast site, and "simulated" artificial dunes to hoodwink American spy satellites into complacency)
Three points to note in this narrative:-
a) The actual nuclear policy was actually a core Congress initiative; remember, the initial enthusiasm and support came from Ms Indira Gandhi, one of the last "real" leaders of the (now opposition) Congress party. Despite his government's support of economic liberalisation and free market reforms, Mr PV Narasimha Rao was, all said and done, belonged to the Indira Gandhi School of Thought. It is, therefore, very interesting to note how he collaborated with Mr Vajpayee, his core enemy in a sense (and certainly, the core ideologies of their respective parties are poles apart), to give continuity to the nuclear effort.
b) Despite the obvious patriotic spin, India's nuclear policy was actually almost a failure in systemic terms, mainly because there was no continuity between 1974 (or whenever Pokharan I took place) and 1998 (when Pokharan II took place). Political support waxed and waned throughout the period, often in contradicting terms.
c) We're a nuclear power now despite all that (which is not to wave flags in support of nuclearisation, but merely to assert the fact that we have da bomb).
That is to say, while politics did, or does, play a part in science, scientists have, over the years, gotten around it even in over-politicised nations such as India, occassionally by convincing some politically-significant individuals from all parts of the political spectrum. I don't know if it's applicable to the US as well,
More than mere navel gazing.
How the hell is this modded Insightful? Your children aren't going to be paying interest on these projects, they're going to be paying interest on this fucking war that little bush is waging. Take a look at the budget and get back to me--these projects are CHEAP compared to the $100bn that we're spending killing people. How about the cost of a new B2 bomber? The DoE budget for fundamental science research is such a pittance in this country. We barely have the money to keep our labs staffed, buy new computers, and pay for the electricity. Compare with the Japanese and European National Labs--these cats have nice machines that are well staffed and positively leaving us in the dust. If you want some figures on this, I'll be glad to oblige you.
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.
Battery technology is an engineering problem, and is being actively worked on by corporations all over the world. The purpose of direct funding from the DoE is to do research that does not have an immediate commercial application.
Nothing on portable fuel cells, microturbines, biodiesel, wave power, or other energy-related technologies either, except fusion.
All of those are engineering problems, not science. We already know how to make wind turbines, for example, and we already know how to make fuel cells, extract wave power and so on. Actually doing them is merely a matter of implementation. Actually, it is a matter off implementing them in an economically viable way. Solar cells are a classic example of this problem - they take so much energy to make that when you account for that, they actually aren't very efficient at all, despite solar energy being "free"! We don't know how to do fusion practically yet, and that is why it's being funded. And fusion, when it works on an industrial scale, will make all other forms of power generation irrelevant apart from for niche applications.
Sadly, our society has been one of politics derailing all of our big projects with admin changes.
Nixon started the slow death of NASA, with every admin behind it trying to move NASA to its' own political gain.
Likewise, Bush started the SuperCollider. Admittaly, Texas was the worse state to build it in (available power was low, hardest to dig at, land $ were higher than all but california, not an attractive state to recruit top notch science ), but it was started. Clinton came along and killed it which was an absolute waste of money and a good project.
While I was no fan of Reagan's, what was proposed for the space station was worth doing (skylab approach; low costs). Clinton took it and created a nightmare.
W. has killed off a large number of Clinton projects of which a number of them were useful (X33 was close to tests; L-Mart even wanted to continue the project on their own dollar but W. would not allow it).
Looking at these projects, these are good ones that will hopefully continue without any future medaling by any politics. It would be nice if W. would get input from the current democrat nominations to agree that they will continue these programs iff they win.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bull. Maybe they're not "pure science" at the "fundamental nature of the universe" level, but they are squarely on the science side of the fence. There's still a lot we don't know about things like proton exchange, for example, or about how mitochondria or chloroplasts work so efficiently, or what's really going on in different types of solar cells. That knowledge is being sought by scientists, in academic labs, not engineers. The DoE actually funds some of it, but at a level that can only be described as a pittance compared to the items on the list. They're warped priorities. Maybe there should be two or three atom-smasher type projects, but not ten. The other money should go to other areas of scientific research that are currently resource-starved, and the fact that projects in some of those areas might have medium-term commercial applications should not disqualify them from consideration. Science should be funded without regard for commerce, not in a manner that's actively inimical to commerce.
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