Missing the "subcritical" point

The Ion Report warned that further cuts in STFC's support for nuclear physics could make it "subcritical." According to a report in today's Research Day (needs a subscription) Lord Drayson said that this point was dismissed because international collaborations are independent of each other and "withdrawing from some does not adversely affect the others."

That is missing the point of what the Ion report said. Without the critical mass in size of UK community, we are not able to provide the broad student training, to run summer schools, the national conference, the vibrant MSc and specialist undergraduate programmes or the specialist training and advice to industry, to law, to journalists and the media. Without adequate funding, people are lost, and along with them the bright PhDs who go off to work in nuclear engineering and industry. Yes, the projects STFC have pulled out of will largely continue, albeit without some UK expertise, but the survival of the nuclear physics community in the UK, which is small by international standards, but packs quite a punch, risks falling apart, and with it, all the added value that it brings to our moderately ambitious country.

Doomsday update

Sometimes, when people ask what I do and I tell them that I'm a nuclear physicist, they look a bit amazed and ask me if I make weapons. It's not terribly surprising since, of all the many uses that nuclear physics has been used to, weapons are the one that has made most impact on culture. Though there are lots of other interesting (and more positive uses) of nuclear physics, weapons will probably always be the most iconic one, and by association, I will have to get used to being vaguely associated with them.

I sort of feel that I came to nuclear physics too late to really be associated with weapons, and I sometimes forget what a powerful influence the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons had on the generation before mine. I even spent my first postdoc in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which was built for the atom bomb project, and visited the museums... but I've never really felt too associated with weapons, though I find the history fascinating. One of the almost romantic hangovers from the cold war era is the Doomsday clock. It was set up by a group of nuclear scientists worried about the problems of the weapons that they created. It perpetually points at a time close to midnight to represent the danger the world is under from threats so serious (originally and particularly nuclear war) that it could spell "doomsday". The clock still exists, and today it was moved back one minute to be 6 minutes from midnight, reflecting an improvement in the global situation, as judged by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I guess that's good news... and the announcement, which mentions climate change in conjunction with nuclear proliferation, suggests that the era of nuclear war as the primary (perceived) threat to civilisation is over, and we have a new enemy.

Funding cuts - update

So, as mentioned before Christmas, nuclear physicists were awaiting news of potential funding cuts that would come as a result of a shortage of money at the funding counil, STFC.  We were worried that, of all the areas STFC fund, nuclear physics would face disproportionately higher cuts.  We were right.   I could have (perhaps should have) been blogging about this daily - it's too late to do a complete summary now, but my colleague Niels at Manchester has set up an excellent website summarising much of the information about the cuts and the response to it, and I suggest looking there for more comprehensive information.

This afternoon, I happened to look at a Twitter feed not long after STFC tweeted that their director of science programs had just had an op-ed published in New Scientist.  It was something that deserved comment - and it's got it.  Take a look (my comment is by user "drpdstevenson" since I logged in with my AIM credentials)

Dark Matter - Detected?

Stealing a march on the LHC, it seems that groups looking for Dark Matter in a low-background experiment in a copper mine in the States may be about to announce the detection of dark matter. I noticed the story a day too late to put it in my particle physics course...

Interesting days ahead

It can't have escaped many people's attention that there is a serious worldwide financial crisis going on.  There have been innumerable reports in the news about forthcoming cuts, even before the recent pre-budget report.

It would be nice to try to place the financial responsibility of recovering from the crisis on the banking sector, which was largely responsible for the problems, but the time for that is long past.  They have been bailed out and the City shown up as not the contributor to tax revenue it has liked to claim but a drain of historic proportions.   This leaves the rest of the economy to figure out how to keep going.  Whole countries are at peril of defaulting; Iceland a few months ago, and Greece in the news today.

Now it's the task of the rest of the UK economy to recover from the debts we've incurred.  Science funding will take its part alongside everything else, as it must.  I'm a nuclear physicist (hence the purpose of this blog) and nuclear physics will no-doubt be part of the cuts, of course.  There is a fear in the nuclear physics community that (university) nuclear physics may be cut from the budget outright.  A recent story in the Guardian quoting my colleague Jim Al-Khalili highlights some of the issues.  You might well expect me, as a nuclear physicist, to say that funding in academic nuclear physics should be increased, rather than cut, because my job depends on it.  In truth, my job doesn't - at least I hope the University of Surrey would give me support and a little time to make headway into other research areas - or if not, the skills that working in nuclear physics have given me would make me pretty employable.  But the UK funding of Nuclear Physics is embarrassingly small by the standards of competitor countries, yet it was just judged in an independent review as high quality despite at a scale below OECD norms. It really is at such a low level that to cut it a bit is to essentially get rid of it.  It may be that we can do without it, despite having plans to increase nuclear power to counter global warming.  We can always buy the expertise in from elsewhere if we think that's right for the UK, but I can't really believe that cutting science that we'll then have to buy from outside can be cost-effective.  I rather fear we'll find out pretty soon.

Expect announcements in the next few days.

NMR/Enema

On Friday I went to a school in Slough to give my nuclear physics talk entitled "Field guide to the isotopes" which consists of a whistlestop tour of different isotopes, their uses and their significance in the realm of nuclear physics, in society, in medicine, in geology, in biology and ... just about every branch of science.

I used to worry about going into schools to talk, since I figured I'd be no good at dealing with naughty students (despite working at a University). I've long realised that it's not that hard - at least not as a guest speaker, so I wasn't too worried, and indeed it turned out fine. In fact, I found, as I always do, that the pupils were interested, they paid attention, and asked lots of interesting questions. One of these was related to a picture of the JET fusion reactor in Oxfordshire which showed it both in action (with a hot plasma of hydrogen isotopes) and out of action (to see the apparatus without all that hot plasma). One of the students asked, "how did they take the picture when it was switched on?" and I had to admit that I didn't really know. It's a good question: The temperature inside the reactor when it is on is exceedingly high and would destroy a camera. The answer I gave (with a caveat that it might be wrong) was that the plasma is contained in a magnetic field, which keeps it away from the walls, and a camera could be attached near the wall and away from the plasma. It's probably the right answer, but I don't know (if anyone does, please comment!). But that's one of the nice things about giving these talks - I get a combination of questions that make me think and comments that inform me of things I didn't know.

One of the best comments I have got when giving the talk was about the medical imaging technique which is these days known as MRI ("Magnetic Resonance Imaging") and used to be known as NMR ("Nuclear Magnetic Resonance"). I ask, as I usually do, if anyone in the audience knows the difference. Usually noone answers, and I explain that there is no difference, except that the word "nuclear" was removed to avoid worrying people that there was something nuclear about the technique. One time that I gave the talk, and told this story, someone came up to me at the end and said that actually the reason that they changed the name was because "NMR" sounds too much like "enema" and that people would get confused about what they were going in to hospital for. I told this story on Friday, and I thought that I got some glowering looks from the teachers. Oh well. It's a good story. I don't know if it's true though.

P.S. I'm glad that when this post is mirrored on facebook that people comment. I'd rather, though, that you'd do it on the original blog post so that everyone can see the comments and comment on the comments whether they are looking on facebook or not. Thanks!

Science and Politics

So: the Home Secretary dismissed a scientific advisor for being a scientist and complaining that the Government deliberately ignored the advice of his panel. There's been a huge amount of rather interesting commentary about the link between science and government during the fall-out of the sacking of Prof David Nutt (which has the glorious Twitter hashtag of #NuttSack). It sort of surprises me and sort of doesn't that one arm of the people who run the country (the government) think that basing decisions on scientific evidence is a bad thing to do, and that another (the Daily Mail and its constituency) rants that it would be hell on earth to be governed by those that weigh up the balance of evidence and come to conclusions based on that evidence.

It's a real shame - and part and parcel of the two cultures that are as alive today as they were 50 years ago. It's a bit tiresome when the presenters of the Today program fail to challenge scientists like they do politicians because they don't have the ability or confidence to do so. It's a little annoying when Jeremy Paxman is impressed and surprised when contestants in University Challenge answer a basic science question but is scathing when a poor guess is made to a question in the arts. It's really annoying, though, when things that really matter - things like government policy - deliberately ignore the evidence.

Still, in other news, universities aren't going to be "ivory towers" anymore, with the intellectual and research freedom that goes with it. Instead they must concentrate on being drivers of the economy and respond to social need (which they already do alongside the "ivory tower" aspect). Research grants will be rated according to their financial payoff (as if it could be measured), not the science. Soon Universities can be a fully paid-up part of the service economy too, and we will no longer have to worry about troublesome disinterested scientists and their crazy evidence-based reasoning.