Ike - I agree with your assessment, and I think the impact is much more insidious than what happens to research. Education also completely gets lost in the mix! The university I go to now is a good example of what happens when you let a corporation (RIM, maker of BlackBerry)** run the show: resources are unevenly distributed (for example, the Institute for Quantum Computing is awash in money but the physics department can barely pay its TAs), the students don’t care about anything except getting that hot corporate job, and the idea of a broad and meaningful education for the sake of learning is totally lost on a significant portion of the population.

I think the academy should do everything possible to maintain its independence from corporate interests. This means that the public should remain committed to maintaining the academy’s integrity and providing the academy with the funding it needs.

**It should be noted that I am completely aware of Perimeter’s relationship with RIM’s co-founder Mike Laziridis.

The relationship between patent law and basic research should be pretty obvious. Essentially, if large corporations are denied sole control of university patents (which, as human growth hormone has shown, can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars), then they will suddenly realize the value of Bell Labs -style support of technical research. This is a good role for corporate interests - to move basic research concepts into commercially viable applications. In fact, this has been the traditional role of corporate research - until Bayh-Dole came along in the early 1980s.

Once corporate business interests are kicked out of the university system, the focus on basic research will be re-invigorated. Why is basic research important? There are hundred of examples. There are no commercial applications of Hubbert’s discovery of red-shifted receding galaxies, but isn’t that an fundamentally important discovery that has had major impacts on our view of the universe?

The fact of the matter is that U.S. academic science is in a serious crisis due to this obsession with patentable, profitable research. There is no reasonable excuse for doing proprietary research on the public dollar, period. The best solution to this dilemma is the previously described reform of Bayh-Dole law.

You did not show the causal relationship between your patent law proposal and the supposed benefit of bringing basics research to the fore.

I’d also note in the Omnibus Bill the Congress let the R&D tax credit expire; so much for encouraging the Bell Lab model.

Finally how does proposed change affect to compensation model in universities. In many universities the faculty retain an intellectual property interest in their inventions (unlike at most companies). Removing this benefit removes in a statistical sense at least faculty compensation. Does this make academia less attractive for the most inventive faculty? I don’t know, but I do know that one should consider unintended consequences before changing intellectual property law.

The key thing in basic research is the free and open exchange of ideas and information. This is completely opposite to the key thing in private research, which is protecting the company’s trade secrets from competitors and being the first to patent. Unfortunately, the latter philosophy is becoming the norm in many university research departments - to the serious detriment of basic scientific research across the board.

This might be affecting the distribution of funds between solid-state physics and particle physics, but more importantly it might also be affecting the direction of research away from basic inquiry and towards proprietary research. There’s a simple fix to this, however: make all publicly funded research and patents available to all under non-exclusive licensing agreements.

This would have some very beneficial effects on U.S. academic research - basic research would come back to the fore, with the traditional free exchange of data and ideas, and large corporations would go back to the AT&T Bell Labs model of private research - which was very successful, having produced the semiconductor-based microchip as well as the semiconductor-based solar panel. These proprietary inventions can then be used to expand the scope of basic research (The Hubble Telescope is powered by solar panels, for example).

A simple reform of the Bayh-Dole Act is all that is needed: universities may patent their inventions, but any research that involves public funds must be made available to all under non-exclusive licensing agreements.

Be careful what you wish for! Wolfgang B, physicist turned financial guy, has pointed out that converting high energy physicists to investment bankers has produced some scary results. Think about the path from Omega prime to omega sub-prime.

People should understand that most of the world’s current problems—the most important ones—aren’t so different from difficult research problems in physics, in precisely this sense. They will require many years of sustained problem-solving efforts, and a willingness to preserve the infrastructure and learning communities that contribute to those efforts. Sometimes I really wonder if there is any serious comprehension of this among the country’s business and political leadership. The societal dynamic referred to by the phrase “creative destruction,” that free market ideologues are so fond of, allows little room for such sustained efforts.

[The above may be stated too categorically, but maybe that will provoke a discussion.]

The real reason is not to fill in entries in tables about the Standard Model or even Supersymmetry. Actually, those are just the default hypotheses.

The real reason is to find an incredible surprise. It happened before… in the 1920’s Rutherford himself likened any practical uses of nuclear energy to moonshine. Simultaneously he urged his young colleagues to search for the neutron, so Chadwick’s prepared mind was ready to discover the neutron when the Curies missed it. Then there was the whole trail to fission, with Fermi himself mentioning the false discovery of Ausenium and Hesperium in his Nobel lecture, and it taking the exiled Lise Meitner to sort it all out. All entangled with Nazis and well… one of the greatest stories ever told.

The point is: it could all happen again. Our default hypotheses could be as wrong as Rutherford in the 1920’s.

I thought it was a good idea to have 2 experiments at the Tevatron. We all hoped the second would be clever and innovative at low cost, and I think in many ways, D0 has done so. Certainly they influenced calorimetry at the LHC.

But also the importance of tracking and the solenoidal spectrometer of CDF won. D0 started arguing to keep up with CDF. Eventually all the cleverness of the very capable D0 guys is better applied to one of the two detectors at the LHC. In human terms it is hard to accomplish… people want to optimize their gadget and it is hard to pick up and move to another continent (both physically and intellectually). Well, in the end, it is happening naturally.

I think 2 detectors at the LHC is OK.

This is good thing that your are enthusiastic about what you do. I do research in HEP as well, and I enjoy every minute of it. But sometimes, in the days like these I sit back and I think, am I digging my own grave? Are there more than 2,000 people interested in what I personally do? Am I turning in a kind of mental masturbator, who, in addition needs to ask kind folks of the US to give me the money to continue to enjoy myself?

I keep going back to SSC cause this experience struck me pretty hard. I never could’ve imagined that a project can be canceled after so much has already been spent. I recall that physicists were drawing all sorts of lessons from SSC. Among those the chief lessons were mentioned
1) have effort international to attract external funding
2) do not promise what you cannot deliver.

Interestingly that is seems that (1) is not working! ITER and ILC both have “International” in its name. Both are axed! The real reason I believe is that american people do not want to share, they want (in their hearts) to be exclusively superior or they need nothing at all. ISS is still limping along though…

(2) was still violated in Tevatron Run II TDR. The luminosity Tevatron delivered in 2007 was promised to be delivered in 2002! However successful Tevatron now, it still looks like a failure to anyone outside. This compound a cool attitude towards Fermilab.

Then there is the question of sociology. These experiments are hard; they take many talented people who think in different ways, with different insights and responsible for a hierarchy of tasks. You might say that each collaboration is already “crowded”; doubling the size would make life very difficult especially for those lower in the food chain. So someone will say get rid of all those salaries. Scratch only slightly below the surface and you see that the university programs that support these researcher make up only ~20% of the HEP budget. Those folks are not what is so expensive.

Bottom line two detectors make a lot more sense than one for Tevatron and LHC.

I am in experimental HEP, with no particular plans to leave the field. I choose to address the scientific problems that I find the most exciting with the resources available: the science drives me, not Congressional appropriations. Of course this is idealistic, but if you don’t think your work is worth doing and fighting for money for, why do it? Because you desperately want to have the job title of “scientist,” but don’t care about what science you do? In any “fundamental” science, this is an extremely odd position to take.

The real issue here is the US funding system - as witnessed by the zeroing of ITER (a treaty-level obligation) or the ignoring of the COMPETES act, we are almost incapable of creating R&D plans and seeing them through to the end, whereas the EU is. This is not something to be proud of in the slightest, and I think is more indicative of a complacent superpower that has forgotten what it was like not to be the scientific/technological hub of the world than of a sensible post-Cold War policy.

I find what you wrote pretty naive. Your alluding to the political wind evokes association with “Pissing against the wind”.

1) The wind is not blowing towards HEP in US since the demise of USSR. That is 15 yeas now. Does not look like politics to me, more like a trend.

2) The enthusiasm about HEP in the 50s and 60a was a residue of nuclear weapons programs. A spin off so to say.

3) Realization that HEP will not make any new weapons in the near future finally set in.

In this situation the “tough” you mention, turns into “dumb” who is stuck in a rut.

The smart are opportunists, they are not marathon runners. (Richard Feynman comes to mind).

IMHO the US has decided that Europe will be running the show for the ones who cannot adapt for the next 10 years. And those will be doing it remotely, cause the travel money will not be given. The glory of discoveries at LHC (which I doubt will amount to much beyond observation or non-observation of SM Higgs) will belong to Europeans. In these conditions it will be hard to get any new students/postdocs in the US. In the last 10 - 15 years the majority of students/postdocs in HEP were foreign (China, Russia and lately Korea). As scientific opportunities improve in their home countries, and investments into science increase, they will tend to stay there (which is already happening with China). In the end high energy physicists, whatever small army of them will remain, will be teaching freshman physics in some college of art someplace just like Kurt Vonnegut has predicted. As for Fermilab - the land will be sold, only the FCC(Feynman Computing Center) will remain to provide computing serve to the small community of remote users. Stuff to operate this computer center will amount to 100 people or so. And the Tevatron will be turned to prison (here I am joking).

Someday, as an experiment, I will write a post consisting of the single letter X, and then see how long it takes before a comment pops up saying “Of course you would say that, since you obviously believe not X.”

Well, Sean, either my comment was correct or you have two totally unrelated ideas linked by “contrariwise” in your post. And your quote from Weinberg is a complete non sequitur, given that he’s talking about what’s fundamental, which clearly has nothing to do with what’s interesting. And don’t claim that Weinberg linked the two, because he didn’t in that quote. He was talking about what’s important, which is very weakly correlated with what’s interesting.

You’re generally a good writer, Sean. It appears that ability briefly broke down in that paragraph, but I’ll hope you’ll excuse me for believing what you wrote.

What if the scientists working on it had just walked away in the middle because it was “the smart jump to make”? Not only would we be missing the wondrousness that Hubble has contributed, but we would have lost a major financial investment. The same goes for Chandra, for Keck, for Fermilab … Moreover, what kind of example does that set for budding physicists? “Never finish a problem unless the political winds are always blowing in your direction”? “When the going gets tough, the tough give up”? This is exactly the opposite of what we teach in physics: all of that painful problem solving is intended to teach us to persist, not to quit.

True, sometimes if a problem is intractable it is worth walking away. But the biggest problem here isn’t in the physics — it’s in politics.

Much of experimental science requires a tremendous and profound time commitment from its participants, one that all of us should deeply respect. As a theorist, I recognize that in the end, the physical validation or invalidation of all my work rests on the shoulders of those who are willing to undertake these large experiments and see them through, from Auger to GLAST to the LHC. Without them, we’re only dreamers. With them, we are dreamers making sense of the physical world.

From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus” (1990):

“I asked Charlton if he had come all the way from Waxahachie, Texas. The last I’d heard, he was running experiments with the enormous atom-smasher, the Supercoffider, down there. He said the funds for the Suprecoffider had dried up, so he had moved to Geneva, New York, not that far away. He was teaching Fresh-man Physics at Hobart College.

I asked him is there any way the Supercoffider could be turned into a prison….”

This is by a non-physicist, but a visionary, predicting the demise of the SSC 3 years prior.

Some of the folks in HEP remind me of frogs sitting in a water which is being gradually boiled. The smart ones are long gone for the greener pastures.

That’s probably because there isn’t a single experimental particle physicist blogging there.