It wasn't there for very long.
Every day I get into work and check out my page on iGoogle. I have my custom page set up to give me the general headlines, as well as those in business, health, and science & technology.
For a very short period of time (as it was released about one hour ago), the headline in Science said:
Europe leaps ahead on physics frontier
To write this diary I went back to my iGoogle page and it was gone.
I suppose it doesn't sound like a really interesting story at first blush.
To follow his vocation as a particle physicist, Yurkewicz has been a grad student in Michigan, an experimenter in Illinois, a postdoctoral researcher in New York, and other things in between. He is now working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and living in France with his New York-born wife and their first child.
In short, Yurkewicz is a science nomad.
That term, "nomad," has been pestering me this morning.
The buzz of activity at CERN's Swiss campus dramatically illustrates a changing of the guard on the frontier of physics, with Europe taking over from the United States. For the past 14 years, Europeans have taken the lead role in building and financing the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, which was started up on Wednesday. The U.S. federal government kicked in $531 million for construction.
Wait. So...it's a collaborative effort, right? Science is just so expensive now we need multinational investment?
Wrong.
The LHC is just this week's most obvious example of Eurocentrism in science: Less than 200 miles (300 kilometers) away, an even costlier international physics project, the $13 billion ITER fusion research center, is just getting started in southern France. And European officials are currently considering how to move forward with yet another fusion project, the $1 billion HiPER laser-fusion facility....
Meanwhile, in the United States, physicists were shocked last December to see Congress pull back on research spending, to the tune of $94 million. Financial support for ITER was virtually wiped out.
We have felt the effects of the Bush Administration's anti-science stance in several areas. But now our best resources -- scientists -- are seeking employment elsewhere and are leaving the country to get what they need. There have been a few diaries here about scientists and "brain-drain." But when I saw this article, I started to feel like we haven't even begun to see the amount of emigration that could quite possibly ensue if McCain gets elected and the Bible-thumping and the anti-intellectualism becomes even more enshrined in the culture.
As a former history major, I can say with confidence that frequently the downfall of a nation and/or the move to totalitarianism was predicated by persecution and hatred of the educated, as justified by making them the "other" and "dangerous." One day, as I was dusting bookshelves, my husband said to me, "you realize that we are subversives." I looked at the titles and realized he was correct: Freethinkers; The Origin of Species; Scientists Respond to Intelligent Design; The Papers of Margaret Sanger; The End of Faith; Letter to a Christian Nation.
And you know what?
I was suddenly afraid.
I thought of Sarah Palin's attempt to purge the library of "objectionable material."
I thought of Nazi bonfires of intellectual works written by "undesireables".
I thought of the inevitable increasing level of brutality in Rome's "circuses," as it became harder and harder to distract and entertain the masses.
Jon D. Miller, from Michigan State University, has written extensively on how absolutely, pathetically behind we are in the "acceptance" and knowledge of basic scientific fact. He gets harrassed by Fundamentalists. I was privileged to work with Dr. Miller for a time, and crunched some data pertaining to the public's perception of science and scientists. It wasn't heartening. A full 20% of people surveyed (a good, large, representative sample) endorsed the statement: "Scientists have knowledge that makes them dangerous."
That little factoid has never left me, in spite of it being three years later. It was like a quiet, blinking, warning light.
And now, reading about scientists leaving, like birds in seasonal formation, makes me wonder if we are indeed on the verge of a long, cold, dark winter.