The news from Capitol Hill this week is terrible. Congress has finally passed an omnibus spending bill for Fiscal Year 2008 – this is a bundled package of 11 appropriations bills that fund the operation of our government. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Monday, the Senate on Tuesday, and now it is being prepared for the President’s signature. We have been under a continuing resolution since 1 October, 2007, which is the start of FY08, and had been welcoming the end of the stand-off between Congress and the President so we would have an actual budget for the year. That was last week. This week, we wish we could be funded via a continuing resolution all year long, just like last year.

In short, this omnibus spending bill is at best disappointing, and at worst a total disaster, for science funding in the US. Overall, the research agencies all received a meager increase in their budgets (roughly 1% for NIH, 2% for NSF, 3% for NASA, and 2% for the DOE). That’s disappointing because these increases don’t keep up with inflation, are far, far short of the Administration’s request and the American Competitiveness Initiative, and won’t support all the scientific projects in the pipeline.

The disaster occurs in two specific areas, Fusion Energy Sciences and High Energy Physics, which are targeted for deep, roughly 10%, cuts. The cut in fusion research comes about because the bill provides zero funding for the US contribution to ITER. Let me remind you that ITER is the large international fusion reactor that is currently being constructed in France and is funded by international treaty. The US has signed that treaty and was set to contribute roughly $160 M this year. Apparently Congress just doesn’t understand that there are serious ramifications in backing out of an international treaty. Even one dedicated solely to science projects. This jeopardizes future international projects and provides yet further proof that the US is not a reliable partner. I imagine that the DOE Office of Science will find a way, somehow, to restore funding to ITER.

For High Energy Physics, well, the situation is dire, and I am not exaggerating. The numbers are:

This is a reduction of $63.5 M from FY07 and $94 M from the President’s FY08 request. The language specifically targets NovA (a neutrino facility under construction at Fermilab) and the International Linear Collider:

Within funding for Proton Accelerator-Based Physics, no funds are provided for the NOvA activity in Tevatron Complex Improvements. Within Advanced Technology R&D, in the current constrained environment and without a Critical Decision 0 by the
Department, only $15,000,000 is provided for International Linear Collider R&D and $5,455,000 for Superconducting RF R&D.

Since we are already 3 months into FY08, we’ve already spent this much on the ILC and have put money into NOvA.

So, WTF do we do? Even though the $63.5/94 M shortfall is targeted at projects, it’s important to recall that most of this money is spent on salaries. Not equipment or fancy gizmos, but people. Basically, there are two extreme choices on how to handle the shortfall: shut down all of our operating facilities now, today (yesterday would have been better) and halt science output from the US, or fire $63.5 M worth of people. Don’t ask me how you accomplish the latter. The final solution will clearly be a mix of the two. The young physicists, grad students and post-docs, will be hurt the most as funding for those positions will dry up first. Next come the folks who work at National Labs. We’re going to have to start a discussion about closing and consolidating labs.

It will take a little bit for the DOE, lab directors, project managers, advisory panels, etc to formulate a plan, but no matter what they decide, the consequences of this budget shortfall will be drastic and will be felt for years to come. Our science output will be reduced and we will lose good people with valuable talents.

Oh, and just so folks can calibrate, the countries in the European Union spend about $2 B/year on High Energy Physics, roughly $1 B for CERN, and another billion in individual grants. Germany alone has just infused its total science funding with an additional $2 B Euros. The US continues to fall further and further behind.

The London Science Museum has an amusing interactive game which gives us all a chance to hunt for the Higgs. They show you what Higgs production looks like in a collision at the LHC (albeit, via a very limited set of final states - good enough if the Higgs is heavier than about 180 GeV) and they show what a typical uninteresting Standard Model background process looks like. Then they give you a bunch of collisions with the chance to record 5 events in 30 seconds. Are any of the events you chose an actual Higgs event? Mine were, but then this is what I do for a living (well, almost!). The game is a rather simplified version of what life will be like at the LHC, but it’s fun.

Click here to play!

Via Kelen Tuttle at SLAC Today.

While we’re on the subject of tenure here at CV, there is yet another tenure flap happening in the physics department at Iowa State University. Which is my alma mater (always embarrassing to admit that, so I might as well get it out of the way early on). The department has denied tenure to Professor Guillermo Gonzalez. Prof Gonzalez, by all reports, is the author of nearly 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers, co-author of a major college-level astronomy textbook, his work led to the discovery of two new planets, and he has had his research featured in Science, Nature, and on the cover of Scientific American. Recently, he discovered what is known as the Galactic Habitable Zone, which essentially proposes that life forms when there is the right balance of unique conditions. A hypothesis not too different from our own discussions of the anthropic principle here in theoretical high energy physics!

Sounds pretty good, so what’s the problem? In addition to this scholarly record, he has also co-authored a book on Intelligent Design, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. Ooooohhhhh!! A religious studies professor at ISU led a faculty petition drive to denounce efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science. Hmmmm! Seems like a healthy response.

The upshot is that Gonzalez wrote this book as an untenured professor, and now has been denied tenure, with some members of the faculty, including the department chair, apparently saying that the book factored in their decision. He has appealed the decision. The Discovery Institute and Christian blogs are all over the story.

It’s not the first time ISU has had fundamentalist Christians on their faculty — one of my physics professors there used to hold bible meetings with students in his office. (He also always asked me why I was studying physics rather than busying myself cooking in the kitchen. He very grudgingly gave me an A, but had to admit I had earned it. But I digress…)

So what would you do?

At first, I thought this is a difficult case. I could never condone the preaching of ID in the classroom. But Gonzalez claims that he had never introduced Intelligent Design into the classroom (could you be sure he never would?). He claims it is a private belief and he wrote the book on his own time (how could he believe in ID and be a serious scientist? How does he resolve the conflict in his mind?). IF his claims are true, it’s kinda like writing a blog!. And wouldn’t we be hypocritical if we thought he didn’t deserve tenure because he shared his private views in public and we didn’t share his views? Is this worse than the guy with the bible meetings in his office?

But yet, he wrote a popular book, very much in the public arena, advocating an anti-scientific idealogy. This shows a clear lack of scientific judgement, and
damages the public’s perception of science. However, after a simple google search, I found the clincher: he gave invited lectures at other academic institutions, billed as an ISU professor, promoting Intelligent Design. OK - now he crossed the line and used his professional position to promote ID. So the faculty does have a basis in denying him tenure in my book.

PS: I just saw Rob Knop’s post on this case, which also agrees with this denial of tenure.

This video has been making the rounds and makes me burst out laughing everytime I see it. I think we have all been there! From from the Norwegian TV show Øystein og jeg.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here! I’m deeply, totally, absorbed in a project. It’s taking all of my energy and every minute of my time. All other aspects of life have stopped. I’m down to eating take-out Chinese night after night cause all other food in the house has been eaten. I have run out of clean knives and forks (still plenty of spoons!) and coffee cups and wine glasses. (Yes, come midnight or so, I need a glass of wine to relax!) I wash each (knife, fork or glass), one at a time as I need it. All 4 suitcases and 6 boxes from my 2 month stay at Fermilab (I don’t travel lightly) are scattered about the house, essentially unpacked, except for where I have ravaged through them looking for something. I did find the leftover girl scout cookies. My tomato plants, lovingly replanted as seedlings into 4 inch pots 2 months ago, are now 2-3 feet tall and are begging to be planted into their big pots for the summer. Birthdays and Mothers Day are coming up and I haven’t done anything. I have referee reports past due. I haven’t read my email. My bills are not paid. I’ve sat so long in front of the computer that my back truly aches and my eyes (and carpel tunneled wrist) have gone. I put my trash out at the curb tonight thinking it was Wednesday, only to discover it’s actually Tuesday and now my neighbors will think I am nuts.

This IS what science is like! When you get so caught up and so excited about something, that literally everything else in life gets put on hold. I’m very excited about this paper, and want to do my best job! I have 3 collaborators, 2 on East coast time, and one in Hawaii. Two of us are in charge of the master text file — me and a collaborator on the East Coast. He is a morning person and works on the file from 8 EDT until mid-afternoon. That means around 10 AM PDT he ships the file to me and I start my day, working until about midnight. Comments from the other 2 collaborators are coming in at all hours at a rapid pace. This means that the collaboration is literally working round the clock! We have a system set up, so we don’t get confused and mix up the “master file” for our paper. It hasn’t failed us yet…

We should finish any day now (seems to always be just 2 days away). And I’ll tell y’all about it as soon as we’re done! OK, maybe I’ll plant the poor tomatoes first!

March Madness is winding down and today is the start of the Men’s Final Four games, while the Women’s Final Four have just been determined. This year, science has also participated in March Madness, complete with brackets of its own (via Science Blogs):

(A full screen image is available here.)

Note that science is still on the sweet sixteen stage and has yet to determine the final four. Sometimes the progress of science marches more slowly than we would like. It’s probably a funding issue.

The four regions being represented are physics, scientific methods, biology, and chemistry. Not that I’m biased or anything, but may particles win!

Jonathan Dorfan, the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), made a stunning announcement this morning - he is stepping down from the laboratory directorship this Fall. This news is certainly a surprise - at least to me! It seems that this decision is all about timing. This Fall marks Jonathan’s 8^th year as laboratory director, as his tenure began in the Fall of 1999. Factor in that Jonathan has said he believes change at the top is healthy for large organizations and when he accepted the directorship he stated his intent to serve only for 8 to 10 years. Couple this to the fact that SLAC’s contract with the Department of Energy will be sent out for bids and competed against in about two years time. And recall that when a new contract is drawn for the lab in this two years time, one condition of the contract is that the lab’s directorship must pledge service (i.e., stay in place) for an additional five years. Jonathan apparently looked at the numbers and decided that now is the right time to step down.

Stanford University President John Hennessy said, “Jonathan Dorfan’s tenure at SLAC has been characterized by exceptional scientific vision and foresight. He deserves our thanks—and those of the greater scientific community.”

During Jonathan’s tenure, he has accomplished many things, including:

The Stanford President has asked Persis Drell, deputy director of SLAC, to head the search committee for Jonathan’s replacement. The committee will be established shortly, will conduct a world-wide search and report back to the President. Jonathan will remain on the SLAC faculty and will no doubt become actively involved in actually doing science again.

Best wishes to Jonathan, and thanks for what you’ve done!

CMS, one of the large general purpose detectors being built for the Large Hadron Collider, is performing detailed tests of one of the fundamental forces in the universe: gravity. The detector has been built in a large hanger-type building above ground. However, the accelerator is 100 meters underground, and if CMS wants to record collisions, it has to go underground too. So CMS is being carefully, oh so carefully, lowered in sections to its collider hall by a giant gantry crane. If you think of the detector as a giant cylindrical can, the sections being lowered are transverse slices of the can and look like large thick disks. Luckily, the ability to separate the detector into these disks, and then reassemble them, was built into the detector’s design.

A particularly large chunk of the detector – its heaviest piece – was lowered this week. CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid and it’s the solenoid itself (preassembled with the central portion of the detector) that made the journey underground Wednesday. The solenoid is a large magnet, generating a 4 Telsa magnetic field (100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field) with a total stored energy of 2.66 GigaJoules (equivalent to half a tonne of TNT), and is responsible for our ability to observe tracks and measure the energy of charged particles. It’s an essential and expensive component of the detector.

This test of gravity was a challenging engineering feat. The solenoid weighs 1950 metric tons – as much as 5 jumbo jets – and is 16 meters tall, 17 meters wide, and 13 meters long. It had a 20 centimeter clearance with the walls of the shaft leading underground. The gantry crane supported the detector by 4 massive cables, each with 55 strands, and operated by a hydraulic jacking system with sophisticated monitoring and control systems. The process took about 10 hours, which is a long time to hold one’s breath!

Luckily, we have a fairly thorough understanding of Newtonian gravity (unlike quantum gravity) and this lowering experiment was able to confirm our calculations. In other words, the solenoid now safely rests 100 meters underground! All in all, 15 slices of the detector must be lowered, with the solenoid being piece number 8. The last slice will make its descent this Summer, just in time to complete the assembly and record the first collisions this Fall.

I’ve just arrived at Fermilab for a 2-month sabbatical (gotta do my part to enhance the CV geographic distribution) and learned of a contest sponsered by the state of Illinois to chose the Seven Wonders of Illinois. It’s a gimmick, of course, to promote tourism and is a total rip-off of the ancient seven wonders of the world. Visitors to the Illinois Bureau of Tourism Seven Wonders web site can nominate their favorite wonder. Note that timing is of the essence - nominations are due by 1 March, 2007 (this Thursday!). The state has been divided into seven regions and folks are asked to pick a region in which they want to nominate a site. Online voting will then take place to pick the top sites from the nominations starting March 5. The field will be successively narrowed through the rest of the month and the Illinois tourism bureau will announce one winner for each of the seven regions on April 30.

Curious? So, ya go to the 7 wonders website and you see lots of pictures that the good folks at the Illinois tourism board consider worthy of nomination - historic courthouses, lakes, Indian burial mounds, riverboats, majestic big city buildings, but nothing - absolutely nothing - of what I consider to be the most important, and probably famous, site in Illinois: Fermilab! This is a place that is special and unique to the planet, and yet retains its roots in the prairie land of Northern Illinois. I think the good folks of the Illinois Bureau of Tourism should take note. Afterall, it is (presently) the most energetic particle accelerator on earth and has made, and has the potential to make further, fundamental discoveries of the nature of the universe. It is also honestly a wonder in itself to the human eye. The collider ring circumference is 6.28 km and can easily be viewed by an airplane heading to or from one of Chicago’s airports. The accompanying office building is a 15 story highrise, built in an A-frame shape with a spectacular multi-story atrium. To retain its natural connection to the land, the lab boasts a buffalo farm (gosh the young ones in the spring are cute!) and a prairie wilderness area.

It’s a truly spectacular site! And is more than worthy of being one of the top seven wonders of Illinois. So, there’s one day left to nominate - let’s flood’em with nominations for Fermilab! Let the folks at the Illinois Bureau of Tourism know that people from all over the world think they’ve got something truly special (which they do).

To nominate, go here. You gotta type in your address (even better if you’re out of state/country - let’em know Fermilab is famous!), and write a 250 characters maximum blurb on why you think Fermilab is a wonder. That was tough for me - I hit 250 words and hadn’t even touched all the lab’s features.

Go to it folks - let’s show’em that science is important!

Update: Alas, Fermilab did not make the first cut of sights for the first vote! I’m sure we had plenty of nominations, perhaps the committee thought it was too esoteric. C’est la vie in the science world.

The Large Hadron Collider has yet to begin operations and the particle physics community is already looking ahead to the next big machine: the International Linear Collider. The ILC would collide electrons and positrons at energies of 500 GeV. Accelerator projects have a long lead time, and if we want to follow up on the questions that the LHC data will invariably raise, we have to get started now. Broad international support was shown for the ILC in 2003 when a significant fraction of the worldwide particle physics community signed a consensus document, which served as a blueprint for the physics case of the machine. Today in Beijing, the Reference Design Report (10 MB), which is a detailed technical blueprint for the design of the accelerator, was released. It is the first fully integrated design for the ILC and it contains the first full cost estimate.

It’s been a long road to get to this step. The physics case is really rather simple. The discovery of new particles helps us to understand how the universe works. Accomplishing this takes two steps: (i) we have to discover the new particles, and (ii) we have to discover the new theory or symmetry that gives rise to them. The LHC is tailor-made for the former and has an expansive discovery reach for new states. However, the latter requires a more delicate touch – precision measurements of a particle’s properties are needed to learn about the underlying theory. Enter the ILC whose beams are fundamental particles with a known and tunable initial quantum state, enabling ultra-precise measurements. There have been literally thousands of physics studies for the ILC and several large review volumes such as here, here, here, and here (non-technical). I’ve been involved in these studies for ages – I wrote my first ILC paper as a graduate student in 1988 (I was the first to show the reach for new gauge bosons) and either wrote or contributed to the new physics chapters in each of these review volumes. I truly believe we will need high energy electron-positron data to fully understand the physics that awaits us at the TeV scale.

An awe-inspiring physics case isn’t worth much unless it can be matched by the technical feasibility to build the machine. Our hard-working accelerator friends have been studying this mahcine for decades as well. Ideas began to mature in the mid-1980’s when folks understood the basic accelerator concepts for a high energy linear collider and thought one could be realized with a finite amount of research & design. During the next decade, four leading concepts for the accelerating mechanism emerged: (i) TESLA, based on superconducting Radio Frequency accelerating cavities, (ii) NLC/JLC-X based on high frequency (11.4 GHz) room temperature copper cavities, (iii) JLC-C based on lower frequency (5.7 GHz) conventional cavities, and (iv) CLIC based on a two-beam scheme with high gradient room temperature cavities and transfer structures operating at 30 GHz.

Research progressed on these four designs for over a decade and several reviews to evaluate them were undertaken. In 2004, after the physics consensus document was signed, the international community came together and formed a panel to make a recommendation for a RF technology between the superconducting and room temperature cavities. (CLIC was viewed as requiring significantly more R&D to demonstrate feasibility.) The panel chose the cold technology citing, amongst other things, a higher reliability and further progress on industrialization of the components. This choice was promptly accepted by all groups involved and is viewed as a major milestone towards a global realization of the project.

At this point the Global Design Effort (GDE) was formed, headed by Barry Barish of CalTech. About 100 accelerator physicists worldwide participate in the effort. Their first task, known as the baseline configuration, was to choose the parameters for all of the components and subsystems of the 500 GeV machine. Parameters like the accelerating gradient of the cavities (35 MeV/meter peak and 31.5 MeV/meter operating), the length of the accelerator (31 km), the capability to polarize the positron beams (yes), etc. were decided upon. This was completed by the end of 2005, so that the GDE could spend 2006 writing the Reference Design with full costing. I’ll write a step-by-step guide to the accelerator design soon – it’s a story in itself and constitutes a major technological feat. The Reference Design was released today, and now the next task for the GDE is to evolve and improve the design through continuing R&D and value engineering. They hope to make engineering choices for further optimization of the performance relative to cost. This process will take two to three years and will lead to a detailed Engineering Design Report, which can be used for the actual construction of the ILC. The estimated time for construction is seven years, after the project has been formally approved. Here’s a schematic of the GDE timeline:

The big news from today’s document release, the question that has held everyone breathless for years, is the cost. The cost was given in international value units. Each region (Europe, Asia, Americas) has its own peculiar costing scheme, and the trick was to present a cost that can be translated to each of them. So, the cost is….insert drum roll here….

ILC Value Unit? This is new terminology for a currency exchange rate! Their definition is 1 ILC Value Unit = 1 US Dollar in 2007 = 0.83 Euro = 117 Yen.

It is critical to realize that this costing scheme is most similar to that used in Europe. The $6.7B figure does not include labor or contingency, which we include in the project cost here in the US. There are standard factors that are usually employed to estimate the translation to the American accounting scheme, which invites everyone to do their own calculation. This can lead to rather disparate results. To have a firm, standarized US cost estimate, the Department of Energy and the American Linear Collider Steering Group are performing their own translations of the GDE costing to US accounting procedures. The only thing we know for sure at this point, is that once labor and contingency is included, it will be more than $6.7B. Oh, and don’t forget that we need to include the cost of the detectors too. So, stayed tuned….

Today’s press release can be found here, as well as articles in the New York Times, and Science, as well as a movie starring my good friend and wine-consuming buddy Phil Burrows being interviewed by the BBC.