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Diploid
Cuban



Registered: 01/09/03
Posts: 19,274
Loc: Rabbit Hole
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Budget Cuts At Fermilab
#7787449 - 12/21/07 10:28 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Meanwhile the budget for killing people in Iraq FAR outstrips Fermilab's and keeps growing...
Send $1,000,000 million to the Middle East while cutting Fermilab's budget to $310 million.
Good going Bush.
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Budget Cuts Imperil Fermilab
By Adrian Cho ScienceNOW Daily News 19 December 2007
The last U.S. lab dedicated to particle physics will be forced to lay off about 200 of its 1900 scientists next month after learning yesterday that its 2008 budget will be nearly 17% smaller than expected (ScienceNOW, 18 December). The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, will also be forced to stop development work on all future accelerator-based projects, a move that threatens the viability of the 40-year-old Department of Energy (DOE) lab.
The budget decisions, part of a $550 billion omnibus spending package that Congress approved this week, call into question the U.S.'s commitment to particle physics as a whole, says Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. "There's a policy question for the government and for Congress," he says. "Do we want to stay in particle physics or not?"
The omnibus bill, passed nearly 3 months into the 2008 fiscal year, funds every federal agency outside the Defense Department. Bowing to a demand by President George W. Bush to trim domestic spending, the Democratic Congress sliced $22 billion from an earlier spending blueprint. That step meant steep cuts across the government, including a proposed double-digit boost for DOE's $3.8 billion Office of Science that funds Fermilab. As a result, the 8% increase that the lab was expecting for 2008 suddenly turned into a 10% cut from current levels. That $62 million turnaround (from $372 million to $310 million) specifically targets projects that are key to Fermilab's future.
One is a neutrino experiment known as NOνA, which would have been the lab's flagship experiment after its Tevatron collider shuts down. Researchers had expected $36 million in funding to start assembling the experiment this year; instead, Congress flat-lined the budget for the program, for which Fermilab spent $16 million last year.
Congress also cut funding for the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC)--a 30-kilometer-long multibillion-dollar behemoth that U.S. researchers hope someday to build at Fermilab (Science, 9 February, p. 746). Congress reduced funding for ILC research and development from a requested $60 million to $15 million. It also cut funding for research on superconducting accelerator technology from a projected $24 million to $5 million. Fermilab's share of those two pots shrunk accordingly, from an expected $47 million to $15 million. As the fiscal year is a quarter over, physicists have already spent nearly that much, so work will stop immediately, Oddone says. "These cuts rain down devastation on all these future programs," he says.
The cuts may also affect Fermilab's flagship Tevatron collider, which researchers hope will cough up the long-sought Higgs boson before it is nabbed by the more powerful Large Hadron Collider. The LHC will swing into action next summer at the European particle physics lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. To meet the new budget, employees will have to take unpaid leave, although Oddone says he hopes a "rolling furlough" program will allow him to keep the machine running.
The cuts undermine Fermilab's plan to move into neutrino research in the next several years and then, before the end of the next decade, play a leading role in the ILC. Some observers say that the cuts threaten the lab's very existence. "Effectively, Fermilab is put on a glide-path to shut down after 2011," says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C. Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and leader of the ILC Global Design Effort, says that project is in better shape, despite a 75% cut in the U.S. contribution to its budget, than is Fermilab. "Their problem dwarfs ours," Barish says. "Fermilab is in deep, deep, deep trouble."
sciencemag.org
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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lIllIIIllIlIIlIlIIllIllIIl
Stranger

Registered: 12/16/04
Posts: 11,123
Loc: Texas
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: Diploid]
#7787597 - 12/21/07 11:28 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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yeah thats fucking retarded
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Legend9123



Registered: 09/24/06
Posts: 2,590
Last seen: 8 months, 13 days
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I thought the hulk would be appropriate given the particle physics theme.
-------------------- Those who would give up a little freedom to get a little security shall soon have neither. -Benjamin Franklin
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Seuss
Error: divide byzero



Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 2 months, 20 days
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: Legend9123]
#7791414 - 12/23/07 02:08 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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> Send $1,000,000 million to the Middle East while cutting Fermilab's budget to $310 million.
The age old battle between science and religion wearing new clothes. Although the crusades haven't changed, at least they aren't burning scientists at the stake anymore. (Unless, of course, you support pro-drug or anti-global-warming research.)
-------------------- Just another spore in the wind.
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tak
geo's henchman




Registered: 11/20/00
Posts: 3,776
Loc: nowhereland
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: Seuss]
#7791655 - 12/23/07 07:05 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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It is fucking bullshit.
Have people really forgotten how to read. Wait...you don't have to anymore. You can watch the science channel, on some very entertaining segments in 30 minutes and learn that the earth is only a spec of sand in this infinite universe. On earth, we have existed for only a teeny tiny bit of time, and our development as human beings only happend because of multiple global disasters based on outside sources, aswell as climate change.
Now we sit at the brink of disaster on so many levels. Nuclear war, disease, global climate crisis, etc...
Human kind will be wiped off the face of this planet. Fact.
We now have the technology and the resources to evolve, to realize that the world is a playground where anything and everything is probably possible, given the right amount of understanding and research.
The world is a miracle, not human beings. This place has allowed us to evolve into smart creatures, and we have become smart to the point where we can either conquer existence, and possibly become godlike. Or we can become fat and lazy, then blow eachother up.
A religious war? Give research the kind of money you are spending on war, and then see what you think about religion. There will be no more war.
Someone needs to get their head out of their ass, because I am bored, sick, and tired of the way we are heading. I dont know about everyone else, but I'd rather take control of this world, instead of blowing ourselves up.
Thats just me though.
ugh
-------------------- The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days.
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tak
geo's henchman




Registered: 11/20/00
Posts: 3,776
Loc: nowhereland
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: tak]
#7791659 - 12/23/07 07:07 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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We are spending trillions on war, soldiers are coming home left and right, with life altering injuries...we cannot afford to take care of them...and they end up on the street, or commiting suicide.
Kill ourselves, kill the other countries, and kill the planet.
Or save some jobs, save some lives, and save existence.
Is it really that tough of a choice. It makes me so sick.
-------------------- The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days.
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DieCommie


Registered: 12/11/03
Posts: 29,258
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: Diploid]
#7792213 - 12/23/07 11:40 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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I thought they were going to mothball it when the LHC comes on line? I guess not...
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Madtowntripper
Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers



Registered: 03/06/03
Posts: 21,287
Loc: The Ocean of Notions
Last seen: 5 months, 23 days
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: DieCommie]
#7792632 - 12/23/07 01:43 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Even though the collider at CERN will be able to do things they cannot at Fermilab, they will still have many experiments to perform that can advance science...
-------------------- After one comes, through contact with it's administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it. - Ernest Hemingway If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent. -Cormac MacCarthy He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. - Aeschylus
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Legend9123



Registered: 09/24/06
Posts: 2,590
Last seen: 8 months, 13 days
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Re: Budget Cuts At Fermilab [Re: tak]
#7793274 - 12/23/07 05:27 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
root-ninja-tak said: It is fucking bullshit.
Have people really forgotten how to read. Wait...you don't have to anymore. You can watch the science channel, on some very entertaining segments in 30 minutes and learn that the earth is only a spec of sand in this infinite universe. On earth, we have existed for only a teeny tiny bit of time, and our development as human beings only happend because of multiple global disasters based on outside sources, aswell as climate change.
Now we sit at the brink of disaster on so many levels. Nuclear war, disease, global climate crisis, etc...
Human kind will be wiped off the face of this planet. Fact.
We now have the technology and the resources to evolve, to realize that the world is a playground where anything and everything is probably possible, given the right amount of understanding and research.
The world is a miracle, not human beings. This place has allowed us to evolve into smart creatures, and we have become smart to the point where we can either conquer existence, and possibly become godlike. Or we can become fat and lazy, then blow eachother up.
A religious war? Give research the kind of money you are spending on war, and then see what you think about religion. There will be no more war.
Someone needs to get their head out of their ass, because I am bored, sick, and tired of the way we are heading. I dont know about everyone else, but I'd rather take control of this world, instead of blowing ourselves up.
Thats just me though.
ugh
-------------------- Those who would give up a little freedom to get a little security shall soon have neither. -Benjamin Franklin
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