I'm currently a graduate student in High Energy Nuclear Physics. For the last few years, whenever someone mentioned the economy, I joked about how I was dodging that whole mess by going to grad school. As bad as it could get, I thought, never would we start gutting our sciences and education system. I was dead wrong.
The professor I'm taking my data analysis class from is one of the high-ups in the CDF experiment at the Tevatron. Earlier this year, he mentioned how the Tevatron wouldn't get funding to continue running for an extra two years. (They wanted to keep hunting for the Higgs and thought they might be able to beat the LHC.) Sad, but not the end of the world. We have the LHC up and running now, so being down a proton collider isn't that big of a deal.
Then last Monday, he shows up to class looking very glum. It seems the head of their experiment had a talk with the other high-ups, and told them if they want to run anything, do it NOW. As in by March 1st. 14 days. It seems not only did congress decide not to extend their program, but they have already been targeted in the massive looming discretionary cut.
However, for those of you that don't know, the US has another accelerator at Brookhaven National Labs in Long Island: the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Unlike the Tevatron, RHIC is young and is scheduled to continuing running for the next decade. Or so we thought.
This morning I received message from the powers-that-be at the experiment that if HR1 passes, we turn off RHIC. Kinda sucks seeing as we are just now finishing calibrating the machine for this year's run. And we were going to collide Uranium for the first time (whoooo).
You want to talk jobs? We're not painlessly cutting waste and abuse here (if there's all that much to really cut). There are over 1,000 named scientists working on the detector systems alone at RHIC. Probably the same again in undergrads and young grad students. And this isn't even counting the accelerator itself.
How can we consider ourselves a nation of science if we turn off BOTH of our major particle physics experiments. I guess we care more about massive tax cuts than, you know, science and education. In ten years, when America has fallen another 12 spots in national math and science rankings, we can look back on this and cringe.
It gets even better. We can deal with the accelerator shutting down for a year. It slows down forward progress, but we've got data from the past ten years we can reexamine in the meantime. What we can't deal with is the gutting of NSF grants.
The way most physics research groups are funded is through NSF grants to the professors that run them. Every 2 or 3 years, they apply for their grant and are awarded a pool of funds to run their group. However, if HR1 passes, the NSF might not be able to fulfill its grant promises to researchers. This is HUGE. If funds are cut in the middle of the school year, it means students currently getting paid to do research by the advisor might have to go looking for a TA position (and thereby stop progressing on her thesis). New grad students who are fighting for a TA position in an overcrowded field might just end up SOL and have to pay their own way for the beginning of grad school (which often means not going to grad school). This is likely enough to happen that our head of gradate studies sent us a long e-mail warning of the dire situation and pleading for e-mails to congresspeople.
The cuts to science in HR1, amongst other parts of HR1, are short-sighted and will only hurt our country. Even though it has already passed the house, it'll probably come back from the Senate modified. If you haven't called you Senators and Representative yet over science cuts, please do so; our Universities (and futures) depend on you.