Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800 from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a “streak in the sky” just before the crash. This led to the “missile theory” of the crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tank by the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor of sufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we are starting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:

However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

“Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds,” the captain wrote.

Obviously for any given flight the chances are very, very small that a meteor will bring down an airliner, but as Hailey and Helfand pointed out in a letter to the NYT in 1996, the correct question to ask is this: “What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?” They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen…let’s use their logic, brought up to date somewhat, for 2009, for Flight 447.

Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that “approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earth”. This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast does it need to be moving? But let’s assume that this number is correct; it translates to 125 meteors per hour.

Next we need to know the total number of flight hours at altitude for all commercial planes. In 2000 there were about 18 million flights per year. Clearly in the past 20 years (which we’ll take as our reference, since it spans 1989-2009, with both flights 800 and 447) it was not always so…but let’s take a guess that the 18 million figure is roughly correct for that 20 year period. That would yield 360 million commercial airline flights from 1989-2000. Hailey and Helfand assumed that each flight was two hours in duration. Again, a tough number to find on line, so we’ll take it at face value, giving us 720 million flight hours in our reference period.

They also claim that if there were 3500 planes in the air at any time, this would correspond to covering two-billionths of Earth’s surface. Now the earth’s surface area is 5×10¹⁴ m². Using my trusty HP-15c, I get that this would imply an average target area for a commercial airliner of 291 m², which is reasonable. Each plane, that is, covers 5.7×10^-13 of Earth’s surface. If a meteor hits the earth it has that probability of hitting a given plane on average.

So, in our reference 20-year period we have 720 million hours of flight time, times 125 meteors per hour, times 5.7×10^-13 = 0.051, which we can take as the average number of airliners struck by meteors in the period 1989-2009. That’s a one-in-twenty chance of some plane going down for this reason in that 20 year period. Extrapolating to all flights ever would require a better estimate of total flight hours, but it’s not twenty times the number in the past 20 years, for sure - that is, it’s not yet close to one.

Obviously there are a lot of uncertainties in this estimate; perhaps a factor of two from the number of meteors of sufficient mass per day, the average flight duration and number of flights?

Anyway the meteor idea is not crazy, though not likely. The weather seems more likely to be at the root of the tragedy…but we may never know. One thing, though, is clear: if we keep flying big planes at high altitude, eventually one will get hit by a meteor.

All the signs are pointing to a major announcement by the University of California, possibly as early as tomorrow, in response to the large cuts in state funding in its next fiscal year, which begins July 1. The UC total budget of $19 billion includes core state funding which will be reduced from $3.3 to $2.8 billion, representing a 10% cut in state funding, which was 17% of the total university funding this year. On the table are furloughs, pay cuts, and staff reductions, some mix of which now seems inevitable.

The UC system has ten campuses, centrally administered from the UC Office of the President in Oakland. Earlier this spring the UCOP paved the way for legal authority to enact emergency measures in the face of fiscal emergencies such as this. Every department in the the entire system has been struggling to meet large budget reductions already, but the demise of the state ballot Propositions 1a and 1b meant that the reductions for the 2009/10 year were greater than hoped.

Then, on Friday, UC president Mark Yudof announced a 5% pay cut for senior management, down to the level of Vice Chancellors at each campus. It therefore seems rather likely that a general 5% reduction in some form is in the offing. The 23-campus California State University system faces a similar situation.

Overall, this is not that bad when you consider the fact that 235,000 California state workers will face a 14% pay reduction, and the the US economy as a whole is still shedding well over half a million jobs per month. But then, as the Chronicle of Higher Education asks, will higher education be the next bubble to burst?

CERN announced today that the final replacement LHC magnet was lowered into the tunnel, and is making its way to Sector 3-4 (between collision points 3 and 4). Last September’s incident led to 53 magnets - about half a kilometer of the 27-km ring - having to be removed, repaired or cleaned, and replaced. Check out the video of the final dipole going in on April 16.

New systems are being installed to better detect incipient magnet quenches, and the helium pressure relief systems are being upgraded. My understanding is that this will be done on the greater part of the LHC magnets this year, but not all of them.

The plan is to complete the installation of the replacement magnets, and then cool down all sectors. At present, half the machine is being held at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and the other half is at room temperature. It will take a couple months, once they start, to cool the whole machine down to superconducting temperature, about 2 degrees K.

So, by late summer the LHC commissioning can begin where it left off last September. Assuming all goes well, physics collisions are foreseen at 10 TeV by late fall. The machine will not run at the design energy of 14 TeV at least until the entire machine is retrofit with the new quench detection and pressure relief systems. And, the beam intensity (and hence collision luminosity) will not be anywhere near the ultimate goal during the first physics run.

The usual running pattern at CERN is to start in the spring, and collide beams through the late fall, and do machine maintenance, etc. during the winter when electric power is more expensive in Europe (they heat with nukes, basically; we burn fossil fuel in the US in winter).

But a decision was reached earlier this year to run the LHC through next winter, with only a brief two-week shutdown for Christmas and New Year.

What we can reasonably expect is that if all goes well, we can accumulate something like 100 inverse picobarns of collisions by spring 2010, and perhaps 200 pb^-1 by the end of the run in fall, 2010. Now, pb^-1 this is a strange unit - it has dimensions of inverse area. Formally we call it integrated luminosity. Basically it tells you how many collisions you’ve had, in essence. To get the number of some type of interesting events, you need to know the cross section - which has units of area - for producing that type of event. Then you simply multiply the cross section times the integrated luminosity.

Once the machine shuts down in late 2010, and if we do have a sample of about 200 pb^-1, there will ensue a long shut down in 2010-2011 to complete the magnet retrofit. The LHC will then not run until late 2011.

This means that the lower-energy, relatively small sample of physics data is all we will have to analyze until 2012, three years from now! The experiments have already been simulating collisions at the lower energy and retuning analyses.

Though everyone is waiting breathlessly for the LHC to discover the Higgs boson, with lower energy and a smaller sample, I would not bet on the LHC finding it any time before 2012. In fact, a full analysis of the Higgs sensitivity at 10 TeV is yet to be done in ATLAS and CMS. This is a huge task, and will take months, but there is no question that it is more difficult at the lower energy, and it’s already very hard for the LHC to see, say, a 120 GeV Higgs boson. As I wrote in my post in March, this is also very hard for the Tevatron in the same time period. Those of us looking for a standard model Higgs boson have to exercise a bit of patience while working very hard toward the ultimate goal!

Neverheless, there is a ton of new physics that *could* emerge from even the first LHC physics sample from the 2009/10 run. If nature has new high-mass particles giving observable pair-production resonances at energies not accessible at the Tevatron, they could stand out in sharp relief above the standard model. Similarly if there are extra dimensions of space time, we may see excess pair production of standard model particles. If supersymmetry exists, and the experiments manage to understand well the apparent missing momentum transverse to the beam direction (a big challenge) then a first observation of the presence of supersymmetric particles might be possible.

At this point, all you can do is admire the wisdom of the great Zen master Yogi Berra, who said “If this was easy it wouldn’t be so hard!” But then, maybe we’ll get lucky.

Today’s New York Times magazine had a long feature on Freeman Dyson, loosely based on his skepticism about global warming. Dyson, one of the founders of modern relativistic quantum field theory, is skeptical about a lot of things, as a matter of fact.

Freeman spent two weeks at our department at UC Davis last year, gave a public lecture, a colloquium, and was available for a number of very stimulating conversations. We had lunch with him one day, and pressed him on his taste for smaller, lighter, faster experiments in particle physics, as opposed to the dominant large collider experiments such as those at the LHC, the Tevatron, and LEP. In his kind way, Freeman said it was all fine with him that such things took place, but that he simply preferred the more table-top variety, where the individual experimenter could control the variables and the measurement at hand. I do too, but as the NYT article quoted Weinberg as saying, “get over it!”

Anyway, about global warming. I have to say that my own skeptical streak doesn’t simply cave to the present dominant stream of thought on this issue either. As scientists we need to continue to question all of it. It seems to me that the dominant paradigm can be summarized in a number of straightforward notions:

• The earth’s climate is in an overall warming trend. The average global surface temperature, and the average surface temperature of the oceans, is increasing.
• The root cause of the increase in global surface temperature is in large part, or even dominantly, due to the increase of the level of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane in the atmosphere.
• The dominant source of the excess greenhouse gases is human activity: industry, transportation, agriculture and the like.
• If the global surface temperature continues to increase, then drastic and devastating consequences will ensue due to the melting of polar ice and the rising of sea levels, desertification of huge swaths of land, increased frequency and intensity of devastating storms, and other effects.
• By changing our means of energy production and ceasing the use of fossil carbon fuels as soon as possible, there is still a chance that we can evade the above ill effects.

My own skepticism increases linearly as we go down this list. The first two items, that the global surface temperature is increasing, and that it is due to greenhouse gases, seems to be incontrovertible. The extensive measurements and correlations reported by the IPCC are rather hard to refute at this stage. (It is a very great setback for this science that NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed on launch last month, or we would have gotten the mother lode of data on these questions.)

That the dominant source of excess greenhouse gases seems incontrovertible as well, though here the climate models start to differ about the sources and sinks of global CO2, methane, and other gases. And, as the climate changes, not all the models can possibly predict all the outcomes. An example: in 2005, the Amazon experienced a drought which turned the region, with over half the world’s rainforest, from a net carbon sink to a net carbon source.
Was the drought predicted by any (or all) of the models? Was the net effect on carbon predicted?

The best models must combine physics, oceanography, chemistry, and biology all at once. Has it really been done yet? (Enlighten us all, gentle readers, if you know!)

Then the last two: the negative effects. We dwell on these. Clearly ocean levels will rise rapidly in our lifetime if Greenland melts, and it appears to be melting faster than expected by the models.
That would be a bad thing, especially here in the Central Valley of California. My house is 15 meters above sea level, and a lot of the roads around here are lower than that. If Greenland melts, sea level will rise over 7 meters. Well, the Central Valley used to be a sea, and it will be again some day, no doubt. And with so much of the world’s population living so close to the sea, this is a serious, serious concern.

I am less convinced about the severity and frequency of storms with global warming, but my mind is open to being convinced by good science.

Lastly, can we do anything about it? The whole question of whether we’ve reached a “tipping point” seems to be hot right now. The answer lies in the climate models, so let’s keep our skepticism alive here. We don’t understand what causes ice age cold and warm spells. When those are in the models, and we can post-dict the previous glaciations, I’ll start to believe the models. The oceanic thermohaline circulation seems to be key here, but how? What about the Milankovich cycle? Chaotic perturbations in the solar system? Dust lanes in the Milky Way? No one said this would be easy…

And how soon could we wean ourselves from carbon, even if we wanted to? Oil may run out, but there is a crapload of natural gas and coal left to burn. Remember, “drill, baby, drill!” is the same as “burn, baby, burn!” And we have a lot left to burn.

I am not convinced at all that in 10 years we can “Repower America” and eliminate fossil fuels. And the rest of the world certainly won’t. That doesn’t mean we should not try, should not do research into new, non-carbon-based energy sources, expand our use of renewable, clean energy. We should! I am just very skeptical that it could be done even if it became the #1 national priority. It seems to me to violate physics itself, not to mention basic economic facts. Twenty years? Thirty? Eventually it will be clear to every one that we don’t really have a choice.

Sigh…Freeman, what’s the answer?

During the week of February 6, a workshop on the LHC performance was held in Chamonix, France. All of the main LHC machine folks gathered there, in one room, and discussed their strategy for the start of operations of the LHC, for all aspects of the accelerator. Reports have appeared on the blogosphere, for example here and here.

What’s new is that this afternoon at CERN, a 3 hour summary of the workshop was given in the main auditorium. And I was there. The auditorium was packed, and the audience peppered the speakers with questions. The CERN staff certainly appreciated the opportunity to hear the summaries and to ask questions. I know I did. It’s one thing to sit in California and read the slides and perhaps watch the video stream, but it’s another thing to be there in person, listen to the discourse, and to ask questions myself.

The talks ranged from safety issues, to what they learned with and without their few days of beam in 2008, to their plans for the next run. And here is the official schedule for the 2009/2010 run:

For me, the most interesting part of the talks was information on the next run:

The accelerator physicists presented the lab management with two options for the 09/10 run, depending on how many of the pressure relief valves in the arcs would be installed before the run. It’s worth noting that the full quench system will be operational in either scheme and that the pressure relief valves only serve to stem possible damage, i.e., they are not preventive. The accelerator guys were split on which plan was better. Management opted for the plan which gave beam in 2009.

The schedule is tight with no room for contingency in case of slippage.

Today, they are 1.5 weeks behind schedule, which is actually very good!

They will have a short run (few days?) with collisions at injection energy (450 GeV per beam). This is at the request of the general purpose experiments (ATLAS and CMS) in order to aid in the calibration of their detectors.

They will then run at 4 TeV per beam for a limited time (I asked specifically about this afterwards and was given various answers about the length of time at 4 TeV). Clearly, they will ramp up the beam when (and not before) they feel it is safe to do so.

Then they will run at 5 TeV per beam with the goal of collecting 200 inverse picobarns of luminosity.

To do this, they must run during the winter months December 09 – February 2010. CERN accelerators do not normally run during the winter months as the cost of electricity is 3 times higher than for the rest of the year. The additional electric bill for running the LHC during these months is $8M Euros.

It’s not clear how the lab is going to pay the additional electricity costs and the lab staff is clearly concerned about cuts, but management thinks it is manageable.

It’s not clear that the LHC will ever run at the design energy of 14 TeV. There is a problem with the number of expected magnet quenches as one tunes the beam from 6.5 to 7 TeV. Namely, it’s alarmingly high. They don’t know why yet, but are working on it. It is possible that the maximum energy the machine will ultimately reach is 13 TeV in the center of mass.

All in all, the news is good. They are expecting a reasonable set of good quality data at high energies with good discovery potential. Colliders are always slow to start up (just ask Fermilab), and the LHC will get to design parameters in good time.

Various things that have been piling up in the “Bloggable” folder. But together they tell their own story.

Part of the stimulus package includes money for high-speed rail. That’s good — if the government is going to be spending piles of money in an attempt to kick-start the economy, it would be nice to get something of lasting value in return, and mass transportation connecting distant cities is certainly of lasting value. Of course opponents are playing politics with it, which is to be expected. And here is their fun strategy: to highlight on such proposed high-speed rail line, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and label it the “Sin Express.” Get it? Real Americans don’t travel between those two dens of iniquity, only shady reprobates who want to divert stimulus dollars from hard-working blue-collar Midwesterners who would never step foot inside a shiny Vegas casino.

Unfortunately, it’s not even true — there is no money set aside for high-speed rail between LA and Vegas, and it’s not listed as a high priority on the Federal Railroad Administration’s list of officially designated high-speed rail corridors. Which is too bad, as I’ve driven along several of those hypothetical routes, and the one between LA and Vegas is certainly one of the more useful places to plunk down some high-speed rail.

Read Jessica Valenti on “hook-up culture.” In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a catchphrase invented by cultural conservatives who would like you to believe that kids today are disrespecting America’s Puritan heritage by having sex with each other. And they may be right! I suspect that some kids are having sex with each other. Sex is fun. But it is also something to be careful about, with possible unintended consequences ranging from emotional pain to disease to unplanned pregnancies. So we might hope that responsible cultural conservatives would want to equip young men and women with the knowledge necessary to avoid those pitfalls while enjoying the fun parts of sex. But that agenda seems to be well-hidden under a campaign to shame people, under the theory that other people having sex is a dirty and disgusting thing.

You may have heard that Michael Phelps, former paragon of American purity and might and speediness in water, has been uncovered as a shocking moral degenerate. Apparently he intentionally inhaled the fumes from a slowly-burning psychoactive herb, funneled through some sort of device designed expressly for that purpose, while “chilling” with his “buds.” Now all of his recent success at the Beijing Olympics must be called into question — how do we know that his fantastic performances in competitive swimming weren’t artificially aided by “toking” on a “doobie” before hopping in the pool? Naturally, Phelps has been suspended from competition, stripped of lucrative sponsorship deals, and forced to wear a sackcloth and ashes while parading around the town square with a giant scarlet “M” hanging around his neck.

Here is the letter Michael Phelps should have written. If only.

This is Annette Obrestad from Norway, one of the best poker players in the world. She is also a young woman, and a great role model for girls in what has traditionally been a boy’s game. She burst on the scene when she was only 15 years old, winning online tournaments in Europe. At the age of 18 she proved that her prowess extended to live play, winning $2 million by taking first place at the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event.

But Obrestad can’t legally play poker for money in the United States. She’s too young, and will have to wait another year until she turns 21. You can join the army, or vote, or sign multi-million-dollar basketball contracts if you are 20 years old, but you can’t play poker for money. (Michael Phelps participated in the 2000 Olympics at the age of 15.) America is afraid of poker. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, smuggled through Congress in 2006, led many online poker sites to stop accepting money from U.S. players, no matter how old they are.

I’m not sure what it is that makes America so puritanical, compared to Western Europe. (It’s also substantially more religious, but the direction of the causal arrows is not clear.) Hopefully we can scold the country into taking a more grown-up attitude toward sex, drugs, gambling — maybe even, someday, rock and roll. A few more blog posts like this one should do it.

From ScienceDebate2008.com comes word that funding for science, particularly for NSF and the DOE Office of Science, was largely restored in the House-Senate conference. The relevant passage of the preliminary report is here:

Transform our Economy with Science and Technology:
To secure America’s role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America’s investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.

Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion)
o Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
o Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences – areas crucial to our energy future.
o Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency in collaboration with industry.
o Provides $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
o Provides $8.5 billion for NIH, including expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease.
o Provides $1 billion for NASA, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research.
o Provides $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.

DOE Office of Science and NSF funds had been zeroed out in one version of the Senate measure proposed last week, and were set to $330 million and $1.2 billion respectively in the bill the Senate passed. This is a huge boost for our scientific infrastructure in this country, and will immediately create large numbers of jobs for a broad range of workers. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event: let’s spend the money wisely!

Our next challenge: the 2009 and 2010 budgets for science. We are still operating under a CR, and without an increase in funding, the national labs and universities will have to shed personnel. Stimulus money will not be used to directly fund scientists and engineers at the labs, or postdocs or graduate students at the universities. That money comes from the yearly budget. Obama has pledged to double funding for the physical sciences in 10 years. Let your congressfolk know you care about this!

After the devastating quench incident on September 19 of last year, resulting in the rupture of the cryogenic vessels within the LHC magnets , CERN has worked furiously to repair the damage, prevent any future similar failure, and get the LHC back to its commissioning program. Following a meeting of technical experts and the leadership in Chamonix, France last wee, the CERN Directorate has issued a press release with the new plan for LHC restart:

The CERN Management today confirmed the restart schedule for the Large Hadron Collider resulting from the recommendations from the Chamonix workshop. The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.

This new schedule represents a delay of 6 weeks with respect to the previous schedule which foresaw LHC “cold at the beginning of July”. The cause of this delay is due to several factors such as implementation of a new enhanced protection system for the busbar and magnet splices, installation of new pressure relief valves to reduce the collateral damage in case of a repeat incident, application of more stringent safety constraints, and scheduling constraints associated with helium transfer and storage.

In Chamonix there was consensus among all the technical specialists that the new schedule is tight but realistic.

The enhanced protection system measures the electrical resistance in the cable joints (splices) and is much more sensitive than the system existing on 19 September.

The new pressure relief system has been designed in two phases. The first phase involves installation of relief valves on existing vacuum ports in the whole ring. Calculations have shown that in an incident similar to that of 19 September, the collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) would be minor with this first phase.

The second phase involves adding additional relief valves on all the dipole magnets and would guarantee minor collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) in all worst cases over the life of the LHC. One of the questions discussed in Chamonix was whether to warm up the whole LHC machine in 2009 so as to complete the installation of these new pressure relief valves or to perform these modifications on sectors that were warmed up for other reasons. The Management has decided for 2009 to install relief valves on the four sectors that were already foreseen to be warmed up. The dipoles in the remaining four sectors will be equipped in 2010.

That the delay would be a year, in total, was not unanticipated given the magnitude of the incident, and the good news here is that the root cause is now believed to be understood. The retrofit to the quench detection and pressure relief systems should prevent this from happening or causing such great damage in the future.

Hopefully this was the worst of the birth pangs of the LHC! With such a complex and enormous machine, however, it would be overly optimistic to hope that it will be the last.

The experiment I work on, CMS, is open now and in March we are going to remove the innermost detectors, the forward pixels, do minor repairs, and reinstall them by mid-April. We are taking advantage of the fact that so far, anyway, the detectors have not become radioactive from high intensity beam, after which any work on them will be far more difficult.

And, we are preparing to do the physics once we do get data. The extra year, though painful, gave us extra time to refine our approaches, and physics will emerge faster as a result, I believe.

The new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, addressed the national labs in an all-hands video transmission today. I was not there, but my colleague and friend Rob Roser at Fermilab was there, and sent me a very nice bulleted summary. So, you are getting this second hand, and people who were there can add nuances in the comments, but here goes:

• Energy is the defining issue of our time.
• Addressing the environment is the major reason Chu took on this job.
• These problems provide a tremendous opportunity for the DOE, but it comes with a burden: we can not fail.
• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• This was part of the message of the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report.
• The DOE should endeavor to replace the great industrial labs that no longer exist as they once did.
• The DOE will be the “go to” organization for a multitude of key problems — will depend on all labs to help.
• The DOE can quite literally “save the world” by developing a sound energy policy going forward, and invent new science that will provide new technologies.
• Our current use of energy not sustainable — have to move forward.
• We are facing something society has never been asked to do before: to deal with ominous problems with climate change. If half of the things climate science tells us are half true, we have a huge problem on our hands and the DOE has to work to provide those solutions.
• The Obama administration is creating a new Energy and Climate Change Council which will serve as a coordinating body including all stake holders in this arena. DOE is first and formost in this but Interior, Agriculture, Treasury and Defense etc. all play a role.
• The DOE is the science and technology “arm of energy”.
• There is a core of truly oustanding scientists at the national labs, and these labs have trained many successful scientists.
• The national labs are “crown jewels that the US doesn’t want to lose”.
• Restimulation of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.
• We can’t be completely overwhelmed by the short term economic woes; we need to still find a path to solve our long term problems. The DOE has to invent transformative technologies that will allow us to get to the next level of energy independence.
• Chu sees a lot of young and middle age scientists shifting careers to deal with energy, and the DOE is optimistic to capture the best and brightest to work on these issues.

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

The US House unveiled an $825 billion, two-year stimulus plan today, crafted by the Obama transition team and House Democrats. There is a hefty amount for basic research in the sciences, totaling some $10 billion! My eyes are instantly drawn to the $1.9 billion directed to the DOE Office of Science, which funds my own field. It is hard to overstate how fantastic, and sorely needed, this is. Here is the relevant part of the plan summary:

TRANSFORMING OUR ECONOMY WITH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge technologies and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.

Broadband to Give Every Community Access to the Global Economy
• Wireless and Broadband Grants: $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas to strengthen the economy and provide business and job opportunities in every section of America with benefits to e-commerce, education, and healthcare. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment.

Scientific Research
• National Science Foundation: $3 billion, including $2 billion for expanding employment opportunities in fundamental science and engineering to meet environmental challenges and to improve global economic competitiveness, $400 million to build major research facilities that perform cutting edge science, $300 million for major research equipment shared by institutions of higher education and other scientists, $200 million to repair and modernize science and engineering research facilities at the nation’s institutions of higher education and other science labs, and $100 million is also included to improve instruction in science, math and engineering.
• National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research: $2 billion, including $1.5 billion for expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease - NIH is currently able to fund less than 20% of approved applications – and $500 million to implement the repair and improvement strategic plan developed by the NIH for its campuses.
• University Research Facilities: $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants. The National Science Foundation estimates a maintenance backlog of $3.9 billion in biological science research space. Funds are awarded competitively.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $462 million to enable CDC to complete its Buildings and Facilities Master Plan, as well as renovations and construction needs of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
• Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences including high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences and improvements to DOE laboratories and scientific facilities. $400 million is for the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency.
• NASA: $600 million, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research, including Earth science research recommended by the National Academies, satellite sensors that measure solar radiation critical to understanding climate change, and a thermal infrared sensor to the Landsat Continuing Mapper necessary for water management, particularly in the western states; $150 million for research, development, and demonstration to improve aviation safety and Next Generation air traffic control (NextGen); and $50 million to repair NASA centers damaged by hurricanes and floods last year.
• Biomedical Advanced Research and Development, Pandemic Flu, and Cyber Security: $900 million to prepare for a pandemic influenza, support advanced development of medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats, and for cyber security protections at HHS.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites and Sensors: $600 million for satellite development and acquisitions, including climate sensors and climate modeling.
• National Institute of Standards and Technology: $300 million for competitive construction grants for research science buildings at colleges, universities, and other research organizations and $100 million to coordinate research efforts of laboratories and national research facilities by setting interoperability standards for manufacturing.
• Agricultural Research Service: $209 million for agricultural research facilities across the country. ARS has a list of deferred maintenance work at facilities of roughly $315 million.
• U.S. Geological Survey: $200 million to repair and modernize U.S.G.S. science facilities and equipment, including improvements to laboratories, earthquake monitoring systems, and computing capacity.

Obviously it will be some weeks of Senate/House wrangling to arrive at a final plan, but my expectation is that something along these lines will become reality very soon…how the DOE divvies it up will be an interesting exercise, I imagine. But it’s the kind of problem we want.

I have said it before and I will say it again - if we are going to mortgage our children’s futures, mortgage it on this. And better health care. And infrastructure. Oh, and education, public housing, energy…hmmm. I can see that $825 billion may be about right.