Bob Park is normally funny to read every Friday, either because you agree with him rabidly or because you don’t agree with him but you find his grouchiness lovable . This week, he’s just plain on target. Here are his opening paragraphs, verbatim:<\/p>\n
1. HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS: SANK IN “THE GATHERING STORM.”
\nScience-policy reps were patting each other on the back in August when
\nPresident Bush signed the bipartisan America COMPETES Act in response to
\nthe NAS report Rising Above the Gathering Storm. It was meant to keep
\nAmerica competitive by boosting basic science, including a doubling of
\nfunding for NSF and the DOE Office of Science. Six months later, the most
\nbasic of all the sciences, high-energy physics, is in a death spiral.
\nFermilab faces major layoffs, the neutrino oscillation experiment, NOvA,
\nwhich was expected to be the lab\u2019s principle activity after the Tevatron
\nshuts down, is terminated. Three quarters of the funding for the
\nInternational Linear Collider is cut. The US again stiffed ITER on our
\nshare of the fusion program. The NSF increase was pared down to 1
\npercent. Meanwhile, in a letter to the research community, House Speaker
\nNancy Pelosi (D-CA) said her “commitment to the innovation agenda remains
\nstrong and steadfast.” Try spending that.<\/p>\n2. IT\u2019S FUNDAMENTAL: DO WE NEED HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS?
\nWhy would fragile, self-replicating collections of atoms, trapped on a
\ntiny planet for a few dozen orbits about an undistinguished star among
\ncountless other stars in one of billions of galaxies, spend their orbits
\ntrying to understand how it happened? Others claim to know all the
\nanswers, but the only way to know is to experiment – and they haven\u2019t done
\nit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n