Whew! There are a lot of different perspectives here, all of which are interesting, and I just have a few comments…

1) I agree with David in that accelerator physics and high-energy physics are not one and the same. Accelerator physics indeed does include much more than one would naively think. And an accelerator physicist needs to know physics, as well as have engineering skills, in order to actually develop and build an accelerator that will do what is needed in order to study the desired phenomenon. Technology helps to further science and science helps to improve technology.

2) If funding is being cut in the U.S. and other countries, is there any way to combine funds in order to maximize the amount of money that can be used to run experiments?

That issue aside, one can still try to answer the question. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the research mentioned by David has other applications, but I don’t know so much about those issue in particular. One answer is that a beam of charged particles can behave like astrophysical systems interacting gravitationally. Also, the study of non-linear dynamics in general is quite advanced in beam physics and I would be surprised if it didn’t find applications elsewhere. Actually, beam and light optics have much in common and I believe there has been some fruitful interplay.

Just because Dissident (and many others) are not interested in accelerators and beams as an end in themselves, doesn’t make work in trying to understand them not science. Is a biologist’s studies of some obscure animal’s endocrine system not science just because most people don’t care (or know) about that animal? I think that what people don’t appreciate is that accelerators take on a life for themselves. They are objects existing in the world with phenomena that are not necesarrilly well understood. The exploration and modeling of these phenomena is science in the same way that biology or chemistry or plasma physics is science. Whether or not a given person finds the subject interesting or not is not a good criterion to judge whether an activity is a science.

So, overall, accelerator/beam physicists should continue working to apply what they learn to other systems in the world. This isn’t required in order for what they are doing to be the same sort of activity as is standardly considered science, but it is probably necessary (barring some wide-spread love affair with accelerators for their own sake) in order for it to be recognized as science by many others.

My main point in #1 is not that LEP was a few times more important than SLD, but that it seems that US physicsts like to believe that the opposite is true, and started Tevatron RunII a few years before LHC. Clearly, the hope is anticipating some discovery by a few years. From a “sociological” point of view, this seems a good (maybe unavoidable) choice. But, in any case, from the point of view of physics, a lot of money could have been used in better ways.

I was not defending building every machine that can be drawn up. I was simply responding to the statement that accelerators were just engineering. I have nothing negative to say about SNS or any other facility and neither was I implying that the accelerator field was in trouble. I’m fully aware of the different projects on the horizon like the conversion of the linac at SLAC to LCLS and I was not advocating that accelerators should only be made for studying high-energy particle physics. I’m also not the type to get on a pedestal and say what deserves funding and what does not. I just wanted to share my experience in the field as I saw it.

Anonymous:

Your link to the Fermi web site: I didn’t claimed that science wasn’t useful. Because it says “Fermi” do you just take it as scripture (they don’t have any self interests, nah)? Are other people (taxpayers) allowed opinions?

I want to reassure you that the training of scientists at accelerator labs isn’t in jeopardy. There are many accelerators in the US.

BTW the www may have been created for HEP but the internet was created for national defense. No internet–no www

The Spallation Neutron Source is an advanced accelerator that doesn’t have any problems getting funding. It’s not a giant high-energy machine but it will provide useful science, technology, and accelerator technology.

This is the direction accelerator physics is going in; smaller but more specialized machines. Accelerator Physics is doing fine without building every machine that you draw up.

If the rewards are so great I suggest YOU and your buddies get some money together and build yourself a SSC. I’m sure the physicist will pay you to use it.

The taxpayers don’t need to fund your little pet projects. There are other ways to train scientists.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

Arun – I couldn’t agree with you more and I hope that at least some of our more theoretical colleagues have given some thought to this.

Gee, I guess you could try the standard definition, based on the TECHNOLOGY being spun off, rather than on something happening to came out of an organization which also FUNDS utterly unrelated activities. By your logic, it would be perfectly valid to describe Tokamak reactors as a spin-off of Siberian dissident camps; after all, both were funded by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

I have no problem believing that somebody capable of such breath-taking conceptual leaps must also find the conventional distinction between science and technology “narrow minded”. Personally, I’ll stick with Feynman’s line to “keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”.

It was an effort by two employees….to come up with a better way to organize, cross-link and disseminate the large numbers of documents which was being generated by the CERN community

If that’s not the definition of a spin-off, then I don’t know what is. It’s true that other people/places could have done it, but the fact is nobody else did.

Given that CERN is financed for the building and operation of accelerators (presently the LHC, LEP at the time of the WWW), I think it is perfectly legitimate to say the WWW is a spin-off of accelerator development.

It looks like we just disagree. On the definition of what does and does not constitute science as well. I cannot concur with what I see as such a narrow minded view.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel/alfred-nobel/biographical/will/index.html

The transistor is obviously an invention, thus a technology. Given its enormous importance, this Nobel prize has to be one of the least controversial ever. BTW, feel free to note that it came out of a commercial lab.

So the development of the transistor by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 is considered technology and not science?