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Private Donor Saves Fermilab
sciencehabit writes "In what has to be an embarrasment for the U.S. Department of Energy, an anonymous donor has ponied up $5 million to keep the country's only remaining particle physics laboratory operating efficiently."
Next time you use a computer, think: positrons are an unrivaled probe of defects in Si crystals. They make excellent diagnostic tools to see if a particular batch of computer chips is going to go bad.
Next time you or someone you care for gets radiological treatment, think: accelerators make lots of things which are used to diagnose and treat cancers.
The administration asked for increased funding for the DOE Office of Science. Congress instead slashed its budget --- all while fully funding Bush's multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq.
When Congress cuts the budget, there's nothing the administration can do.
If the Democrats in Congress really wanted to end the war in Iraq, they could do it tomorrow by revoking its funding. But why would they end it, when it's their best polling issue?
Sometimes, Democracy just plain sucks.
You are thinking of the Babar experiment. Unfortunately, that has stopped taking data due to funding cuts. Scientists are slowly going through the last of the results, and are leaving SLAC for greener pastures.
SLAC will no longer be doing high energy experimental physics, and is being turned into a enormous synchrotron source. Whilst this will result in good science, I think it is somewhat sad that the once world leader of high energy physics is no more.
The US government decided not to support the international linear collider. That marked the end of high energy science in this country. Discovering the workings of the universe is just too expensive compared to spending our money fighting for part-ownership in some hydrocarbons buried under a far-off desert.
It wasn't too long ago when a group led by hedge fund manager Jim Simons donated $13 million to account for a budget shortfall that would have stopped the operations of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Fermilab is barred from proposing and receiving science funding from the NSF or DOE on its own. Any high energy physics or computing project at Fermilab that gets funded has to be at least co-lead by a University professor. Over the last twenty years or so, as the universities became more and more aggressive about protecting their turf, more and more projects left the lab. When I left there six years ago, the writing was already on the wall. Smaller experiments were slashed in favor of the mega collaborations DZero and CDF, computing was shifted to the "Grid", and both trends were very efficient at shifting power and projects out of the lab. Except for operations, there was very little being done at the lab. One wonders if it was planned that way.