Vince then asked “… Can anyone tell me why this is true, if it even is? …”.

In this era of globalization, I share Vince’s puzzlement with respect to USA policies.

If it is OK to send manufacturing jobs from the USA to China, and phone service / backoffice jobs to India,
then
why should the USA insist that some future collider be physically located in the USA ?

If USA physicists can work with CERN in Europe and KEK in Japan, then why must they insist that the ILC be located in Illionois at Fermilab?

If the argument is that the USA must protect Fermilab jobs in Illinois, then why is it OK for other USA jobs to go to China, India, etc ?

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

PS - Please note that I am NOT an advocate of sending jobs out of the USA to cut labor costs to slave labor levels, thereby making rich corporate owners even richer. My point is that if it is OK to treat USA manufacturing workers that way, then why should physicists be treated differently ?
Maybe if the USA physics establishment were on the front lines of organizing opposition to outsourcing USA jobs to slave labor countries run by iron-fisted dictators,
then their hands would be clean with respect to a plea to save Illionois physics jobs,
but I have yet to see that happen.

Also, “If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.

“Failure to build the machine, the International Linear Collider, in the United States, the panel said, would force American particle physicists to do their research in Europe, where a major machine is to come online next year, and other places, perhaps Japan.

“The blow to American physics would erode the base of science and technology that has fueled innovation, provided intellectual and cultural inspiration and bolstered national security over the last century.”

Can anyone tell me why this is true, if it even is?

Yes, and the DOE cost estimate of $12 billion (made public in discussion leading up to the Science article) is now that number.

When Barish said “… I don’t buy $12 billion …” without giving any alternative dollar amount, or range of dollar amounts, he just reinforced the $12 billion figure in the minds of people, including relevant people like congressmen and their staff.

If $12 billion is OK politically, then EPP2010 could have said something like:
“The DOE estimate of $12 billion may or may not turn out to be supported by more detailed estimates, but we feel that it is a favorable indicator of the financial viability of the ILC”.

If the $12 billion is really “too expensive” to be achievable politically, then EPP2010 should have attacked it, saying something like:
“We realize that if the ILC cost were to be the DOE estimate of $12 billion, the ILC might be risky financially, but we believe that the DOE estimate is too high, and we are in the process of doing a more accurate estimate that we expect to complete by the end of the year.”
The downside of that approach is that the DOE estimate may turn out to be accurate (or low), and the ILC may really be “too expensive”, but it that turns out to be the truth, you should be prepared to live with it.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

I suspect the reason why Varmus is involved has less to do with his Nobel Prize (although a nice credential to have if you can get it) than his generally thought to be impressive track record leading the NIH for six years and subseuent tenure as the president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer center.

In short this is a guy who has large science credentials but also significant experience directing both large intellectual endevours and institutions with huge budgets.

Kramer

-cvj

Here are some quotes from a September 2001 Physics Today article:
“… as … Snowmass 2001 … progressed, it became increasingly obvious that something of an informal consensus was emerging: Building a high-luminosity linear electron- positron collider … was, for most participants, the obvious next big undertaking of the world particle-physics community. …
How and where should this … linear collider be built?
With …[its]… price tag … it is obvious that the world community would not build more than one such machine. …
There was talk, for example, of putting the … linac at Fermilab, a prairie location that might accommodate an eventual lengthening upgrade … more easily than the proposed DESY site. …
But one cannot see the Pacific Ocean from the Illinois prairie. This geographic truth was pointed out rather bluntly at Snowmass by KEK director Hirotaka Sugawara. He reminded his audience that the joint work on the copper linac design in the US and Japan was undertaken with the understanding that the machine would be sited somewhere on the Pacific Rim, presumably in Japan or California.
Sotoru Yamashita of Tokyo University was more specific: Europe already has the LHC. … he argued, it was now Japan’s turn to build an energy-frontier machine. …”.

I know that article is 5 years old, but I doubt it the geopolitical position of Japan has changed, and they could easily say “build it here in Japan and we (rich creditors) will pay half of it, but it you build it in Illinois we won’t contribute anything”.
That would then bust the USA budget calculations, and put the international status of the ILC into a turmoil similar to the mess that led to the cancellation of the SSC under Clinton.

Only about a year ago a Science magazine article said:
“… To remain active, Fermilab’s Butler says, “a large number of U.S. physicists at the Tevatron are already planning to work at the LHC; they have exit strategies.” But Butler isn’t
happy about the new venue. “This field is being outsourced,” he says. The one big hope for U.S. accelerator physics is the ILC. …
the cost, estimated by DOE at $12 billion, of which the host country would presumably
pick up half. … is … too expensive …
Barry Barish … who heads the ILC design group … doesn’t accept DOE’s projected price tag. “There’s no way you can get me to talk about cost” until the design group completes some preliminary studies, he says. “But I don’t buy $12 billion.”
For Butler and other physicists, the projected completion date for the ILC in the middle of the next decade is another huge obstacle. “The schedules put up are frankly incredible and don’t do justice to the effort,” Butler says.
But a timetable that puts the ILC at the end of the next decade or beyond would leave an entire generation of physics students without access to an accelerator in the United States. …”.

As you may have noted by reading the EPP2010 report, it takes Barish’s approach of deliberately omitting ANY specific cost estimate, only calling the ILC a “multibillion-dollar facility”.
Maybe such an obvious failure to acknowledge the giant purple elephant in the room is “precisely the type of language from the type of people it takes to be noticed in the hallways of Congress”, but it is not clear to me that such notice will be favorable on the part of key congressmen (or their staff) who can remember back to the days of the SSC.
After all, a major part of being a congressman (or staffer) is to deal in dollars, and a blank check stands out like a red flag to such people.

If Congress insists of some sort of cost cap, and if such a cost cap involves half the money coming from outside the USA, then it seems to me that Japan will have a de facto veto power over the project.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

Also–with respect to the concerns over pushing for the ILC over smaller, complimentary projects: HEP in the past decade has blossomed beyond the “bigger, higher energy machine” paradigm to include smaller and medium scale experiments (including B-factories), cosmological/astroparticle experiments (such as WMAP and SNAP–which seems to be having its own funding concerns), and neutrino experiments. However it sounds like the direction of Beyond the Standard Model searches will be so heavily influenced by what is found (or not found) at the LHC that it seems premature to be be saying much about whether the “second priority” is the ILC or other projects Perhaps this is because I do not understand the time scale of preparing for a project or, as noted in Bill Fosters resignation letter, the steps that can be taken before full funding is committed.

At any rate, if the ILC is built and if it is built in Asia or somewhere other than the US, what does this necessarily mean for the EPP2010 goal of US leadership in HEP? Presumably, as with the LHC, US institutions/scientists/funding would play a major role in the machine and its experiments no matter where it is built. What are the concrete benefits of having such a facility in one’s own country? Would the scenario be different if the US was instead the hub for some of the other complimentary HEP experiments that were mentioned? (e.g. Super B-factory, etc.)

Thanks!