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...
The fusion powered supercomputer can take care of everything else by itself.
....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...
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
What happens if the Earth stops spinning?
How silly!! Of course, we send a crack team (or a team on crack) to detonate some nukes down there and restart the core
There haven't been that many "ties" since the running of the 100 meters in the special olympics.
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...
Congress voted Monday to cut federal funding for the superconducting monkey collider, a controversial experiment which has cost taxpayers an estimated $7.6 billion a year since its creation in 1983.
The collider, which was to be built within a 45-mile-long circular tunnel, would accelerate monkeys to near-light speeds before smashing them together. Scientists insist the collider is an important step toward understanding the universe, because no one can yet say for certain what kind of noises monkeys would make if collided at those high speeds.
"It could be a thump, a splat, or maybe even a sound that hasn't yet been heard by human ears," said project head Dr. Eric Reed Friday, in an impassioned plea to Congress. "How are we supposed to understand things like the atom or the nature of gravity if we don't even know what colliding monkeys sound like?"
But Congress, under heavy pressure from the powerful monkey rights lobby, decided that money being spent on the monkey collider would be put to better use in other areas of government. Now, with funding cut off, the future of our nation's monkey collision program looks bleak.
Congress began funding the monkey collider in 1983, after Reed convinced lawmakers that the U.S. was lagging behind the Soviet Union in monkey-colliding technology. Funds were quickly allocated so that Reed could spend a week procuring monkeys on Florida's beautiful Captiva Island. Though Reed returned with a great tan and a beautiful young fiancee, he reported that there were no monkeys to be found on the sunny Gulf Coast island. Congress funded subsequent trips to the Cayman Islands, Bora Bora and Cancun, but these searches also yielded negative results.
Two years passed without a single monkey being procured, and Congress was close to cutting the project's funding. It was then that Reed got the idea to utilize monkeys already being bred in captivity. The Congressional Subcommittee for Scientific Investigation was enthralled by the idea of watching caged monkeys copulate, and increased funding by 40 percent.
With a steady supply of monkeys ensured, construction of the monkey collider began on a scenic Colorado site. Despite environmental pressure, a mountain was levelled to facilitate construction of the seven-mile-wide complex. Huge underground tunnels were dug, at a cost of billions of dollars and 17 lives. Money left over was used to build resort homes, spas and video arcades for Reed, his colleagues and several Congressmen.
Construction of the collider's acceleration mechanism was delayed for years, as scientists couldn't decide how to get the monkeys up to smashing speed. Last month, it was finally decided that the collider would employ a system in which the monkeys run through the tunnels chasing holographic projections of bananas. "Monkeys love bananas," Reed said, "and they're willing to run extremely fast to get them."
But now it seems the acceleration mechanism may never be built. With the monkey collider placed on indefinite hold, the huge research facility in Colorado lies dormant. To keep the space from going to waste, Congress Monday voted to convert the empty underground tunnel into a federally funded drag-racing track. The track is expected to create hundreds of jobs in the form of pit crews and concessions workers, and will allow President Clinton to impress important foreign dignitaries with America's wheelie technology.
Despite this promising alternate plan, most involved with the monkey collider project feel the sudden cuts in funding are inexcusable. "It is a travesty of science," Reed said. "I remember the joy I felt in college when I would launch monkeys at one another with big rubber bands, and this project would have been even more enlightening."
The top priorities -- fusion, and a massive supercomputer.
Whatever. I'm still waiting on the flying cars.
The coolest voice ever.
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)
No Battlemechs on the list?
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.
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
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.
No silly. They right hand books has an entry for particle accellerator. The left hand book has the same entry as "Particle Projection Canon". Don't you know the art of ambidextrous accounting?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Your grandchildren may write school papers on the discoveries these tools will make...
Hello?!? This is Slashdot, the chances of readers being able to find a 'mate', let alone produce offspring is a 'Big Science' matter that really needs to be funded IMHO.
The what and why of the SNS
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.
Unfortunately, both stereotypes are to a large degree true. Finding politicians of either major party who are willing to champion science for its own sake and the long-term benefits isn't easy. Right-wingers do object to science that treads on their ideology (which, given the pervasiveness of both right-wing ideology and modern science, is a hell of a lot of it) and left-wingers do object to spending money on blue-sky research vs. short-term giveaways. And anti-intellectualism is always a good selling point in anyone's campaign.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Slashdot has killed the Department of Energy's website! Does this constitute terrorism?
This is a really unimformed set of statements on high-energy particle physics which have appeared in several forms throughout this discussion. Let me clarify a couple things.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) which was cancelled here about 10 years ago was competition to the LHC.
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction. (Hence expensive mistakes in design like another poster here mentioned.) Hopefully lessons have been learned from the failure of the SSC.
Back to the SSC vs LHC vs NLC. There are two fundamentally different types of collider. Hadron machines (SSC,LHC, TeVatron @ Fermilab) collide protons against (anti)protons. Lepton machines (LEP @ CERN closed in 2000, NLC, various machines at SLAC over the years) collide electrons and positrons (aka anti-electrons).
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each. So it's hard to get precision information because you don't know exactly what the initial 4-vectors of the interacting quarks were.
Lepton collisions are clean because the electrons are point particles. But as I said, they are a lot lighter than protons. This motivates building the NLC as a linear collider as opposed to a storage ring ala SSC, TeVatron, LEP, LHC, or PEP-II (@SLAC). The energy loss from syncrotron radiation goes as the relativistic gamma to the sixth (!!) power. For a given energy, a lepton machine will have a gamma 2000 times bigger than a proton machine. And so putting really high energy electrons into a ring is very difficult because they lose so much energy.
The general concensus among high-energy physicists is that for the field to progress both machines are necessary (LHC and Linear Collider). The LHC will (probably) find the Higgs boson and measure its mass. It may also find physics beyond the Standard Model. A lepton machine will then be necessary to do precision studies and really untangle what the LHC will (hopefully) discover.
Having the LHC allows us to have an idea what goals the NLC should be designed for. For example, if the LHC discovers some amazing new physics at (say) 800 GeV, then this gives us information about buildng the NLC--it had better not be a 500 GeV machine.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
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...
I was a CERN fellow, how well informed do you have to be to post to slashdot.
The Next Linear Collider (NLC) is not competition for the LHC.
Then why is it described as such in the report?
I'm really too young to know much about the SSC's cancellation, but I have heard older folks say that their big mistake was not putting enough money into R&D before beginning construction.
They had many problems, one was naming the thing after Ronald Reagan while he was still living which did not exactly give the Democrats a huge incentive to fund a monument to him. The fundamental problem was that the original budget was predicated on contributions from other countries, but the US made it plain it would be a 100% US lab. The Canadians offered to provide free power if it was near the border close to their hydro-electric stations... nope gotta give the pork to Texas.
Lack of preparation had nothing to do with the funding being cut. The problem was that the LHC was going to get there first and do the interesting physics. They had the tunnel already built.
The hadron approach is good because a proton is 2000 times heavier than an electron. So it's much easier to get to very high energies. On the down side, protons are not point particles, but rather "bags" of 3 quarks each.
Yeah, yeah, not knowing the distribution of the energy amongst the quarks is not a major problem if you know what you are doing. You just need to compile additional statistics to cut through the mess. At the end of the day you are going to know enough about the energy of the particles you are interested in from the calorimeter and the wire chamber. It is just a computational issue.
The big question is not whether to build the NLC--it is whether it will be here or in Europe, and how long will we have to wait.
The big question is whether there is a point to buiding another accelerator. I got out of the field because it was pretty clear that the LHC was the end of the road.
The fussion types have a much better claim on any funds that might go to physics. But I don't see why physics should have a special claim, we are talking about an experiment that will cost of the order of 3 to 6 billion. There are plenty of research projects that are likely to give bigger returns.
And don't get me started on the Web thing. If we had had anything like the funding for computer science as there was for physics we would be way ahead of where we are now. Computer science has to mostly survive on the handouts from the military program, DARPA funding has skewed the whole field towards a set of requirements that have nothing to do with reality.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/