Science is a tough business. Experiments rise and fall based on their scientific merit, judged through a peer review process that is meant to weed the well-planned projects from the rest. Last week, that time-honored system of peer review was apparently thrown to the side of the road as the Braidwood neutrino experiment was cancelled unilaterally by the Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics.
I am sure the process was more complicated than that. I am sure there were financial motivations, or political motivations, and maybe even some scientific motivations. But down here, at the bottom of the food chain, it looked pretty arbitrary, the process seemingly opaque. I am sure over the next few months, the administrator at the head of this cancellation will speak in private and public about his decision, a decision made without the input of the very advisory body – HEPAP – setup to help him make difficult funding decisions. Right now, it seems as though good experiments have been tossed aside to make room for… well, it’s not exactly clear what the room is for.
If it’s for the International Linear Collider, then I am torn. In conjunction with the Large Hadron Collider, the ILC is an important project that defines the future of collider-based particle physics. It is a machine that opens doors we’ve only dreamed of opening. However, it cannot do the kinds of neutrino physics the community needs to make important, independent headway in understanding the energy Terascale. Without a robust global neutrino program, we are ultimately stymied in our attempts to make complete sense of the material universe.
It’s the process, stupid. The process is what matters. Maybe in 9 more months, Braidwood would have gotten the shaft anyway. Maybe there was a very good technical reason why this neutrino experiment would never fly. But we will never know, because we’re denied the research and development funding to even make headway on that issue. We’ve had only the most minor of peer review, during which the committee recommended money be spent on R&D to really answer the hard questions. But that money can really only come from the Department of Energy, and they’ve already made up their minds.
So while I decide what to do with myself three years from now, it’s time to re-re-refocus on the work here at the BaBar/PEP-II B factory. There’s a whole summer worth of conferences to explore.
