Austria To Pull Out of CERN

andre.david notes an AFP report that Austria has announced its intention to withdraw from CERN, citing budget concerns, adding: "Austrian particle physicists are not happy with this. From HEPHY, the Austrian Institute for High Energy Physics: 'All of a surprise Johannes Hahn... announced that he wants to terminate the Austrian membership at CERN... This [would] affect spin-off projects like the planned cancer treatment center MedAustron... which is dependent on collaborating with CERN... Strangely enough this intention just arrives at a time where scientists are about to harvest the fruits of LHC...' Will other countries follow suit?" "Austria is pulling out of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Science Minister Johannes Hahn announced Thursday, citing budget concerns. The €20M ($26.9M) yearly membership in CERN... makes up 70 percent of the money available in Austria for participation in international institutes and could be better used to fund other European projects, he said. Hahn said he hoped Austria could find 'a new kind of cooperation' with CERN and described Vienna's withdrawal from the project as a 'pause,' noting that some 30 states were already working together with the Geneva-based centre without being members. The newly-available funds will now allow Austria to take part in new European projects, boost its participation in old ones as well as help the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the country's main organization funding research."

Comments

That's ok...

[TheRealFixer]

I guess that means more particles for the rest of us!

Re:That's ok...

[Red Flayer]

I know, right?

I mean, whoop-de-doo, Austria's all "put another shrimp on the barbie, mate" and "crikey! we've got killer spiders mate" and "go root yerself, we're pulling out of CERN!".

The rest of the nations participating in CERN will be just fine without them.

Re:That's ok...

[digitalunity]

Fundamental science is good, but the LHC is a huge and expensive project. By my calculations, they have about $38 million annually to spend on projects of this nature. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall cost of the LHC, so the international community is unlikely to really feel a large effect.

That $27 million they have to spend now could be put to much better use domestically or on smaller scale projects.

Re:That's ok...

[Xest]

Austria and Australia are different countries.

Australia is the one you describe, Austria is the one that's given us such gems through the years as Adolf Hitler and Josef Fritzl.

But they also have given us the likes of Gödel, Mozart, Schrödinger and his cat I suppose ;)

not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no biology here, so no diseases to cure so in the minds of the ignorant it is wasted money. I'm not surprised but definitely annoyed.

Science for science sake is worth while no matter the cost or the expect benefit. The US stimulated its economy by a factor of 10 more then what it put into landing on the moon. One of people who help the British economy the most was a guy named Michel Faraday who thought his discovery of electrical induction was neat but useless. And that isn't even touch on things we take for granted every day, i.e. transiters and LCDs to name only two.

Re:not surprised

[Man On Pink Corner]

It's been difficult to really calculate such, especially compared to alternatives such as *direct* funding of technology research.

Direct funding of directionless research has a pretty terrible record by any metric you can think of. NASA spent about $25B total on the Apollo project, which yielded numerous useful spinoff technologies and companies, inspired countless numbers of engineering and science students, and put men on the moon. Microsoft spends roughly $6-$7B per year on their in-house research budget, which has yielded, well, let's see, Microsoft Bob(tm) and Songsmith.

Admittedly I'm comparing 1960s dollars with current dollars, but still... Bill, just give the money to NASA, for Chrissake.

Even when you're talking about pie-in-the-sky "pure research," people don't tend to appreciate the amount of tangible technology that comes out of those efforts. If you need to do some leading-edge photonic RF work, the papers you read are from NRAO. If you're working on next-gen MRI machines, you're probably interested in superconducting magnet tech developed for accelerators. There are any number of other cases where things you use every day came from applications you wouldn't have cared about at the time.

Re:RSS?

[drinkypoo]

SLASHDOT TO PULL OUT OF HTML

Does slashdot not have testing servers, or what? Hey guys, you shouldn't make changes to live servers until you test them first...

OTOH, perhaps this is their response to everyone's bitching about the front page. Don't like the way slashdot looks? Write your own interface, bitches.

Obvious Economics of Small Intellects (OESI) ...

[foobsr]

Bank rescue ~90-billion-Euro: big worthy chunk

CERN Euro 20M: too small a particle to care for

As we can learn, big mountains do not help much to gain perspective.

CC.

*coff*

[Maury Markowitz]

> Strangely enough this intention just arrives at a time where scientists are about to harvest the fruits of LHC.

Uhhh, which are what, exactly? The mass of the Higgs? Yeah, that's worth 16 billion.

Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.

Still waiting for my top-quark amplifier...

> Science for science sake is worth while no matter the cost or the expect benefit

I call BS. Demonstration please, using the example above.

> The US stimulated its economy by a factor of 10 more then what it put into landing on the moon

No it didn't. If you look at this claim, made by NASA of course, the reality of it comes crashing down. They include things that had absolutely nothing to do with the space missions, including Tang and Velcro. The primary direct outcome was engineering

> transiters and LCDs to name only two

Transist_o_rs were invented as part of a very focused and practical development program at Bell Labs, which you can read about in "Crystal Fire". The key advance was discovered by accident. They had to develop the theory of how they worked as part of the program.

LCDs were developed over a period stretching about 100 years, all of it experimental up to the 1960s, when it became a major practical development effort. There's very little pure science involved. The wiki article covers it fairly well.

Don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of purely theoretical research that makes it into everyday life. Quantum is a good example. But in the VAST majority of cases the science was discovered as a part of basic research and had to wait on the theory. There's many, many products in daily use today that we still have no idea how they work.

Maury

Re:*coff*

[Red Flayer]

Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.

Why so short-sighted? Why is it so important that something pay off tangibly within 25 years? Some of the great strides in medication today are applications of HEP-ph of the 30s and 50s that we continue to refine. Who knows what the future holds?

That's the great thing about knowledge. Sometimes the quest for knowledge is the most important part; sometimes the Answers are the important part; sometimes incidental discoveries are the most important part. But we'll never know unless we go for it.

Re:*coff*

[key.aaron]

> Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.

That's an easy one: The particle accelerators developed for research in HEP have directly resulted in the accelerators used in hospitals for radiation therapy.

Re:*coff*

[MrMr]

You never know what comes out of these projects. I vaguely remember this guy from CERN in 1990 playing with two computers.

Re:*coff*

[habig]

Can anyone name a single discovery in HEP in the last 25 years that has led to a practical improvement of anything whatsoever? The only thing HEP has generated is paper.

Still waiting for my top-quark amplifier...

25 years is pretty short-term here. How long was it after Franklin defining charge and Thomson discovering electrons was it before you got your run-of-the-mill electron-based amplifier? And lightning bolts were much more obviously potentially practical things to be investigating.

Will ignore the obvious comment that without HEP in general and CERN in particular we wouldn't be writing this in html, as that was pretty tangential to the whole process :)

Re:*coff*

[key.aaron]

Thing is the point of the LHC isn't really to find the Higgs boson (the God particle name really is oversensationalized). For most physicists the existence of the Higgs boson is a foregone conclusion. When they see the experimental proof it will be little more than a hmm, well looky there, what we knew all along is true.

The true purpose of the LHC is to uncover the unknown by probing energy ranges that have never been seen before. The LHC will payoff when they find a result that they have no idea how to explain which will push for new physics.

All of these things may or may not have a direct practical application. When they started building accelerators they had no clue that it would later be used for cancer treatments. Does that mean that just because practical benefit is not immediately obvious that pushing the boundaries of experimentation is a waste of money?

I think not.

Disclaimer: IAAP (in training, no Ph.D. yet) and have studied with a professor that is directly involved in the LHC.

Re:*coff*

[smaddox]

Show me "many, many products in daily use today that we still have no idea how they work" and I will show you many, many engineers that, in order to design that product, consulted thousands of research papers that were funded directly as basic research, or relied on the understanding brought by basic research. Just because you don't understand how something works doesn't mean there isn't someone out there who does.

Basic research is behind everything you enjoy in your modern life. Those accidents made during "very focused and practical development" would not have led to anything if basic research had not laid the foundation for understanding. Imagine trying to design transistors without knowing anything about atoms, electrons, and quantum mechanics. It would be impossible.

Just because you are too shortsighted to see the benefits of the LHC to future humanity doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re:*coff*

[mzs]

I'm am not sure I am parsing you correctly but PET and MRI are direct benefits of from HEP research. The positron part of PET is pretty clear. The high gauss magnets in MRI are direct descendants of the powerful magnets used to steer and focus beams in HEP.

Also the detectors used in things like nuclear stress tests are descendant on HEP track detectors.

That is just medicine and over the past 25 years. In the last five or so, it is actually becoming feasible to detect neutrinos in a facility the size of four or so semi trailers. The application being detecting nuclear materials (read bombs) in ports. (Enough material will stop the neutrons, nothing stops the neutrinos.) Expect to hear about that publicly in the next ten years or so.

Also HEP needs lots of amps, in the last 25 years the electric grid has adopted technology pioneered at CERN and Fermilab to make long range utility transmission lines more efficient.

Then there are is all the technology that was driven by HEP that you take for granted today. First supercomputers, then big fast clusters. Also fast huge data storage and retrieval, first tape based, now disk based. How about gate arrays? HEP needed that and drove it in the beginning. How about PCI? Fermilab was one of the early members since it needed an alternative to the old IP standard. High speed digitizers are now used in many applications outside of HEP, at first labs made their own and licensed the tech to the companies that manufacture them now. That continues to this day where labs make ever faster digitizers that eventually get used in industry.

Even color NTSC TV is a descendant of tech at Fermilab. At first there were many competing proposals, but eventually simple scheme employed for the monitors there became the accepted standard.

Easy to say, not to do

[DesScorp]

"Science for science sake is worth while no matter the cost or the expect benefit."

That's nice and all, and true, but it still ignores fiscal realities. This kind of research is expensive, and there's an economic slump going on right now. What should the Austrian government cancel to pay for this research? Roads? Schools?

Its easy to tell them to keep up the good work, when you're not footing the bill.

Sensationalism?

[hh4m]

Why are we overreacting over this? Austria will cease to be a member of CERN but it WILL continue cooperating with CERN as other non member countries do. Science is a relevant expense but the world is facing tough economic turbulence and some things need to be restructured. The benefits of science can be reaped by everyone at the end of the day, i mean i wasn't part of any of the great inventions yet i sit here benefiting from them.