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...
....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 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.
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?
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.