Bloody short-sighted governments. First the UK: pulls out of the ILC. (Allegedly because of poor budgetary planning.) Then the US: kills NOvA, strangles ILC, effectively killing off Fermilab, while stiffing BNL and others. (Also see here.) Not long ago, a White House spokesman spoke about the importance of blue-sky projects finding support from private companies. BNL got a funding cut in 2006 and took a donation from a hedge fund. It cost the Lab Director his job. Now no-one will touch private donations. We're not talking about big bucks here, either. Well, with the exception of ILC. Some of these programs take $10-20 million to run each year. A pittance compared to the cost of building them in the first place. Forcing them to lie idle to save a little cash, after that kind of investment, is crazy. People get upset about NASA's funding cuts (see here) but cuts to other blue-sky research programs sometimes slip under the radar. The understanding of Quantum Mechanics--a fundamental part of HEP--has led to practically every major technological development of the 20th century. Without it, we wouldn't properly understand the transistor. We wouldn't understand the structure of DNA. We'd have no radiotherapy or NMR. Very few electronics would have been developed. When quantum mechanics was being investigated, nobody had any idea of what it would spawn. Now, because nobody has any idea of what blue-sky may give us next, it's being screwed into the ground. /rant Thank you. I feel better now.
^ I dunno, I guess as soon as LHC starts producing promising/interesting results, ILC will have a much better standing. If it doesn't, the UK probably wont be alone in dropping out...
Hopefully so. I can't imagine the LHC not producing anything of interest. That, in itself, would be interesting. The trouble is, all this delay in supporting ILC means people out of their jobs. By the time we come to start it going again, a lot of expertise and experience will be lost. It'll wind up costing us more. So, the latest on the budgets is that they've turned a 4% increase into an 8.5% cut. SLAC has been gutted. Its experiment, BaBar, produced 500M b/bbar events since 1999. Its remaining 6 months of running were predicted to produce another 250M in a high luminosity run. Fermilab is facing layoffs. NoVA is dead. Tevatron is barely hanging on. ITER is on hold.
