Budget Problems facing the U.S.

Budget Problems facing the U.S.

If it seems that the news lately has been grim coming out of the U.S…it is because it is. In a talk yesterday by the director of Fermilab Pier Oddone laid out some very bleak circumstances for the coming year that Fermilab and many scientific ventures face.
See Pier’s talk here (http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/Lectures/AllHands/presentations/110215AllHands.pptx)
The short of it is the budget put forward by the Republican congress would slash domestic spending in view of the fact that the U.S would see 1.5 trillion dollar deficit in Fiscal Year 2011. Now that being said, these proposals actually only effect < 20% of the total budget and definitely don’t fix the total problem.

However, the impact would be very real! Since the U.S government has be acting on a continuing resolution (basically saying keep 2010 spending and appropriations since Congress didn’t pass a new budget), getting a 20% cut now actually amounts to a 40% cut for the rest of the year! This fact has DIRE impact on Fermilab

As Pier said in his talk

Impossible to accommodate such cuts without major disruptions:

1) Stop operation of all accelerators immediately

2) Slow down projects to barely keep-alive levels

3) Prepare layoffs of 20% of the staff or 400 employees

4) Furlough staff for roughly two of the remaining six months

This coming on the heels of the announcement that there would be no extension to the running of the Tevatron in 2011 means that things would slow down in the US High Energy Physics area very quickly with no clear signs of when they will pick up again.

Frankly, for a government that is purporting not wanting to miss “their sputnik moment” the idea of drastically cutting funding to fundamental research seems just plain stupid! Innovation does not happen in a climate where people are worried if the lab they work at is going to be there tomorrow…nor will “job creation” and “a balanced budget” happen by cutting spending to a small fraction of the overall budget that actually generates jobs and opportunities in the United States. The best quote I’ve heard to describe this sort of approach to budgetary problem solving was in an article in the Washington Post (linked here)

“Making the government lean by cutting the most defensible (and productive) federal spending is akin to making an overweight aircraft fly by removing the engine!”

So what do we do? Write your congressman/congresswomen and tell them that gutting science is no way to the future! There are instructions on the webpage of how to get this letter written. I encourage all readers to write to help save such great scientific programs such as Fermilab!

http://www.congressweb.com/

cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/

APSPA/action/TakeAction.Contact

/lettergroupid/90

LHC to Run Through 2012

An important announcement was made today by CERN indicating that the Large Hadron Collider will run through 2012 choosing to put off a previously long term shutdown to repair known problems that exist with the magnets.

This announcement comes on the heels of the announcement that the Tevatron will shutdown sometime (September?) of this year thus ending the High Energy Physics program at Fermilab.

Part of the announcement I found interesting was:

“With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there’s a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year,” Said CERN’s Research Director, Sergio Bertolucci. “For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC’s current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp."

That is of course providing the Higgs isn't light as has been suspected by many. If nature chose that as the possibility then really the Tevatron was the right game to be playing...but only time will tell.

Granted I am a little sore still about the Tevatron not getting the funding I think it needs to finish on the strong note it deserves...but there are really a lot of physics questions left.

Additionally, while the LHC was showing major improvements in the last weeks of Proton/Proton collisions (nearly doubling their data set in one week) particle accelerators are tricky things and previous results does not predict future performance. There is still a lot of tuning to do before this machine is ready to do the monumental stuff it promises.

There is a good deal to be optimistic about as was outlined in a talk I attended from CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) given at Fermilab this last week. (See Link Here w/ link to talk to come...)

Tevatron to Shutdown!

As was announced today by the director of Fermilab (see here) there will be no extension to the running of the Tevatron beyond 2011.
As stated:

"The present budgetary climate did not permit DOE to secure the additional funds needed to run the Tevatron for three more years as recommended by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel."
This marks a very sad day for me to hear that the experiment I am working on and have grown to love will be ending after this year.
It is especially hard to hear considering that this choice is being made (at least publicly) by budgetary considerations and not by the recommendation of the science that drives field.
I'll probably have more to say on this in the coming days...but for now I have a PhD to finish and thought it would be worth while to post briefly on this.

See more related articles here:
From the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2011/jan/10/1
From Chicago Buisness: http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/3242019-418/tevatron-fermilab-funding-accelerator-energy.html

Super-B Accelerator Moves forward (does the US move back?)

As described in the following press release (see here). The Italian government has confirmed that they will be moving forward on the construction of the high intensity electron/positron collider known as SuperB.

Expected to produce 1000's of B-Mesons and Tau particles every second this will allow physicists to study the very rare decays of these B mesons as well as study CP violation to a much higher degree of accuracy than previously possible.

The U.S. meanwhile is still holding in the background awaiting word if we will even have a say in the future of particle physics. With the awaiting word of the Tevatron extended run (see P5 report recommending the extension of the Tevatron here) and knowing that many of the components for the SuperB will come from the short lived PEP-II experiment at SLAC just reinforces that while the rest of the world is looking forward to the future of science the US is increasingly looking like it playing a "wait and see" game.

At least this physicists may end up having to look for jobs in Europe and add to the potential brain drain (all though in my case a very small drain) facing the US.

Why I love my wife

My wife saw a box at work and said to her co-worker "I'll bet I can fit into that box"

So this professional and elegant women decided to climb into a box in front of her boss during the workday to demonstrate her ability to fit in a box!

This is what love is for me!

Getting to meet some academic hero's!

It the past few months I've been very lucky/fortunate to get to meet/ask questions/listen to talks by some of my all time academic hero's. I thought I would share a few of those encounters/people here and include a chance for people to find out more about them:

Raman Sundrum
In September I got to attend a Fermilab Colloquium given by Raman Sundrum entitled "Warped Dimensions".

This was a really great talk about the possibility of general relativistic "warping" of higher dimensional space-time (don't worry if those words didn't mean much...they don't to most...but his talk would have you feeling like you maybe understood). The best part of his talk was how through simple illustration and explanation he gave access to the complicated and often misunderstood work of higher dimensional space-time and what this manifestation of this would be in accelerator based physics experiments.

I include and example image from his talk to show how a simple picture often is worth a thousand words.


Steven Levitt
The next academic hero of mine I got to meet and ask questions from was professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Steven Levitt. This was during a screening of the new movie Freakonomics that the U of C put on. Interestingly, they made this a "Pay-what-you-want" experiment as part of the screening process. Turns out that people paid basically what you would for a movie ticket (around 7 bucks if my memory serves) with some people paying as much as $100 dollars.
Not only am I a huge fan of Freakonomics books, and follow the blog (found here) and the new'ish podcast (found here) and have had the good fortune to see many lectures given by Prof Levitt, but I am also a fan of the method.

The extreme curiosity that Prof Levitt exudes through his work and when meeting him in person is something I myself strive for in life. To me his ideas of pursuing what is from data and example instead of the way we would like to think it is, is a wonderful approach for all scientists and curious minded people.

Also see the movie, even if you've read the book the visualization of the ideas and filmwork done is really good. An interesting side note: Prof Levitt during his Q&A at the screening revealed that very little of his own work went into the movie and in fact great portions where it seems that he is narrating was actually cobbled together from old lectures and he never actually gave his voice to that portion of the film

Peter McIntyre

Now this academic hero is kind of a cheat on my part because this is one person that not only have I got to meet and see lectures from, but I've also had the good fortune to work for and take courses from. Prof McIntyre is a professor at Texas A&M (my current school) and is by far and away one of the most brilliant people I've ever met.

One colloquium that I attended of his while at Fermilab was about a 100 TeV Proton/Anti-Proton Collider that he wants to see built in Texas. (Just for scale the best the LHC is going to do is 14 TeV....that is like saying if the tallest building in the world in 140 stories that the next building should be 1000 stories tall)

This is a man of great physics vision. He was one of the first people to imagine building a circular collider and to use Anti-matter for its collisions. From his mind (and that of many others) was the birth of Fermilab.

But his amazing-ness doesn't stop there. He works on 16 Tesla superconducting magnets, puts together plans for Thorium driven nuclear power, designs wave breaks to protect the Texas coast from hurricane driven waves, and manages to teach and inspire new generations of physicists.

He was a leader in proposing the now failed SSC tunnel at Texas...which would have pushed the US to the front of the world of particle physics for many years...instead of battling the LHC for years.

I took a introductory Quantum Mechanics course from him my first year in grad school and it was the hardest thing I've ever done...and the most rewarding course in terms of what I learned.

My hope is to be as well rounded, brilliant, and influential in my career as he has been in his.

Doing less bad is still no good (Final in the series)

Well, here are the results after 41 weeks I have driven 8945 miles and averaged around 218 miles per week.

This number is about 100 miles more per week than I thought and driving has cost me around $900 in gas this year (not including other car related expenses).

I drew a trend line on the graph to see the thing that I realized myself, namely that I am cycling less and relying on my car more. Part of this has to do with the fact that we've been trying to (and now successfully) sold my wifes car, so we've put more miles on mine that was originally getting split between the two cars. The other side of this is that I've haven't been biking to the lab and instead opting to drive every morning.

So I am laying down a challenge to myself, starting next week, for 4 weeks I want to give up my car! It is going to be an interesting challenge especially since we've been enjoying a weird break in good weather that I am sure will crumble during my biking trial. But I want to try to reverse my trend and set a good example for commuting without a car.

The significant down side is the added time. Driving to the lab takes 30-40 mins. The train + bike takes about 70-80 mins. So it means waking up early/leaving early/ and more planning of my days. But, I want to try it...so we'll see how it goes.

Hopefully I'll be able to post miles biked vs miles driven in the coming days.