Actually, it is must be and will figured out by each of us who gets HEP-related proposals to review. If as reviewers we take the stance that “it’s not ILC, so I score it low priority,” then the prospect of an ILC will likely damage our field. If we realize that LHC will likely see 2 upgrades before any possible ILC data arrives, that RHIC upgrades may offer exciting physics before 2020, then we will be more careful not to choke off inventiveness and innovation in our field before ILC. The opportunity for prudence and wisdom is ours, not some blue-ribbon panel’s.

While I’ll grant that the ILC is most likely the best way to continue
exploring the Terascale, it’s possible it won’t be. The scenario I
have running through my head is that by 2010, all the funds for US
accelerator based particle physics are going into the LHC and the
ILC. But the LHC finds nothing but a 160 GeV Higgs. No clues as to the
dynamics of EWSB or to the Heirarchy Problem or to the nature of the
dark mass are found. If this is the case, I’m terrified Congress will
say, “You found nothing you told us you would at the LHC, so there’s
no reason to fund the ILC.” Congress then takes away all the money and
puts it into battleships, just like the SSC. The field is obliterated
and all that’s left is particle astrophysics and cosmology. Honestly,
I wouldn’t blame them.

I think a more appropriate message to Congress is that Nature is a coy
mistress, and we need to be prepared for whatever she may give us. To
me, this does mean continuing on with the ILC planning. But it also
means investing more in accelerator physics, especially a muon
collider (for a Higgs factory or neutrino beam). It means
continuing to run the Tevatron and CDF/D0 as stripped down precision
(rather than discovery) machines to keep a stream of students coming
through this country, even if it is dwarfed by the LHC. Also worth
noting, once you turn off the Tevatron, you’ll never get it back. And
it’s certainly possible the LHC might see something only the Tevatron
could explore more fully. It means investing in reasonable scale
precision measurement experiments. I don’t necessarily mean BTeV, but
I probably do mean an experiment like CKM.

The concern of the committee seems to be that if we don’t fund the ILC
right now, someone else will. I don’t see that happening. The ILC will
require an international collaboration to build with the host country
putting up roughly half of the funds. This is true whether or not it’s
built here or abroad. It will require Europe, the US and Japan all
agreeing on one site and one technology, and any one party can drag
their feet (for example, Europe might drag their feet b/c they want to
see CLIC chosen or they’re over their heads with the LHC). So, by
pushing the start date of the ILC a little in the future, we would be
much better positioned to maximize our resources when the LHC tells us
what Nature has in store for us.

You’re right. It’s really amazing that the party has lasted as long as it has.

Once upon a time there was a thing called WW2. Physicists in the US allowed the US to win that (through, not least, radar and fission weapons) with pretty minor damage to the US. This was followed by the cold war during which physicists through fission weapons, spy satellites, detection systems and so on, helped the US govt do what it wanted. Now, and this is the crucial point, was there, at least implicitly, a quid pro quo understanding through all this time — the physicists will give the US govt some of their time and skills, and the US govt will, in return, fund what these physicists want funded (which was essentially HEP)?

If this model is correct, one can imagine things having changed recently. In truth, no-one threatens the US even slightly, not like WW2/the Cold War. Osama is a fine Emmanuel Goldstein for GWB to drag out on public occasions, but even he doesn’t regard terrorism as any sort of real threat (vide the endless stream of revelations we hear regarding malfeasance in this area, from refusing to kill known terrorists when it was possible because they were more useful as political rhetorical devices through the very idea and pointlessness of the Iraq war through the childish lack of planning at every stage of that war). In the absence of such a real threat, the US govt feels no need to have to keep the physics (and general science) establishment happy.
Perhaps once China is wealthier and gets some science based attention (the obvious candidate is their talk of a manned moon mission) this will change, but for now this seems to be the situation.

Comments?

Well, in light of the recent CDF results on Bs mixing it might be good that it wasn’t built… but of course we didn’t know that then. Yet, BTeV was a perfect experiment that was supposed to be Fermilab’s flagship experiment from the point when the CDF/D0 are done to the point when the ILC is built. Now the situation in HEP looks more like if NASA were to scrap everything and redirect all their resources to mission to Saturn or something (in principle, the technology is there! :-)). What are the arguments (if any) against building a linear-collider-type super-B factory (like the one that Europeans are proposing to build near Rome) at Fermilab as an intermediate step?