Comments on: Funding Crises

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 21:21:44 +0000

Folks – interesting set of comments. After sitting through 4 days of meetings on possibly pulling the plug on the major US experiments in high energy physics (on which there are about 1500 collaborators, world-wide), I reserve the right to be melodramatic. No, it is not the most pressing issue in the world today, but it is systemic.

By: Alexey Petrov

Alexey Petrov — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:30:09 +0000

>It’s not to say the Tevatron can’t do very good and important
>physics, but it may be that the most useful physics will be done in
>smaller, more efficient, and more innovative collaborations not
>operating in discovery mode.

Hmm… like BTeV? …
It’s very unfortunate that flavor physics gets “voted off the island” in the US HEP program…

By: Perks of the Job | Cosmic Variance

Perks of the Job | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 03:52:03 +0000

[...] It is true that we live in very difficult times for science. Funding is hard and science is under attack. Certainly, my co-bloggers and I have written about these problems many times. However, it is equally important to point out and remember the great things about life as a scientist. [...]

By: collin

collin — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 21:33:04 +0000

Adam — my comment about Southwest was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek… But I will certainly defer to you on this point…

By: LM

LM — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:00:19 +0000

Looks like you’ll have to serve Charles Shaw at the next Slac Summer Institute. I doubt if most of the grad students will notice the difference.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 15:37:53 +0000

Collin:

I can’t see a strong argument for the support given to the airlines after 11/9, particularly given that many of their problems predated that event. SouthWestern would, in any case, have been prevented from achieving monopoly by the purchase of competitors, wouldn’t it, in the normal way? It’s not as if the support achieved anything very much anyhow, if you look at the fates of those airlines since the bail-out. I don’t see capitalism as a competitive environment until you get really big, at which point you have an effective gun to government’s head. The Chrysler bailout of long ago was a mistake too, I think. Hopefully, GM won’t be the lucky recipient of a large wodge of taxpayer’s money to keep them afloat, either.

By: Arun

Arun — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:10:11 +0000

That Pandora’s box item, hope, is a essential of life. It is best when it is rational. One should not have to evade reality in order to be optimistic. If reality doesn’t provide it, then people turn to religion, astrology and the like to find cause for optimism.

By: JC

JC — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:29:38 +0000

Arun,

Could you elaborate further?

By: Arun

Arun — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:07:51 +0000

Strange things can happen to a country when its people don’t think their kids will be better off than themselves….

By: collin

collin — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 23:54:36 +0000

…we have big problems…

Oh, I don’t disagree. And I do think the article you link to gets it generally right. The budget is in miserable shape, and if we’re lucky Katrina will force the current administration and congress into rethinking its patently absurd pork barrel politics. Now, I have little hope of this actually happening, but the US is still (by far) the wealthiest country in the world, and there’s no sign of that changing soon, Katrina or not, pork barrel politics or not, China and globalization or not. I just think posts like this need this sort of perspective. Things today might not be as good as things were last month, or before Bush arrived, but that doesn’t mean we’re toeing the line on some cliff of great despair, sure to fall off, never to recover.