Every time stories appear about the Particle Physics Center, Fermi Lab - they seem to show up in waves.
Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
31–40 of 153 posts
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#32DOE should really be spending more money on condensed matter physics than on high-energy physics, at least the former has more practical applications and research can be done with smaller budgets, and the latter has plateaued in many ways.
Neutrinos are pretty fascinating, it's true, but the price tag's pretty high. DOE could instead be financing solar PV research, battery research, etc... although then the politicians would likely cut their budget under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel exporters.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#33Fermilab has been in trouble for a while. They did not diversify enough at the tail end of Tevatron and (I think) are mostly working on DUNE, which isn’t going great. You can’t have a lab that big with mostly a singular focus which is being executed poorly.
DUNE wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Underground_Neutrino_Expe...
The video of the project is pretty cool https://youtu.be/nv13DswIKr8
Shooting neutrinos through the earth 1300km in 4ms
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
No civil service government employee should openly talk to the media, ever.
Government should operate in secret?
Insider leaks and “the fourth estate” are arguably part of checks and balances in modern democracy, but it’s clearly untenable for every employee of the government (or any large organization) to be empowered to speak on its behalf.
AFAIK the rule for federal employees is they’re allowed to speak publicly and opine on political matters, but not to identify themselves as government employees while doing so.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#35They should give it to Northrop Grumman instead - if it's 12 years late and 10x over budget, everyone will get awards, like what happened on JWST.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be an interesting example of a “zombie” organization. Fermilab exists to push the boundaries of particle physics. We stopped wanting to do that, or at the very least outlay the capital to do that. We likewise don’t want people at fermilab doing other things with their time. Meaning that they don’t have much to do but go through the motions. We have a few of these in science, it would arguably be better in th…
Government organizations should be wound down more regularly. Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity, yet there seems to be this "strictly increasing" mindset around organizations funded by the taxpayer.
> Nobody would argue that a business unit that has outlived its usefulness should be funded in perpetuity
Au contraire, private sector bureaucrats aren't special. The constituent bureaucrats of that business unit certainly would and do advocate for the continuation of their fiefdoms, but in business settings their self-interested scheming is eventually overridden by business considerations (e.g. the people with the money, who want to stop hemorrhaging their money.) In government orgs, the bureaucrats have more influence (because there is more distance between the people who pay for it and the people who decide it should be paid for) so the bureaucrats are more effective at preserving bureaucracy for the sake of itself. However in each case, the instincts and inclinations of career bureaucrats are precisely the same: grow the org. This is Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. It applies to both private and public bureaucracies alike.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#37The real problem is that theoretical particle physics had hit a local optimum that they can't break out of. String theory hasn't panned out, quantum gravity hasn't panned out, and no one really knows where to go next.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the state of physics. The problem is not theoretical physics, if anything, the problem lies in our technological/engineering prowess that has not been able to follow our advances in physics.
The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligible until the Planck scale, we have no technological means to get even close to those levels. That is, physicists have been able to provide an understanding of the universe that for all we know for certain might be valid up to the Planck scale, which is where we know for sure new physics must appear. And because our technological ability is lagging much farther behind they must probe that new physics blindly, without any experimental evidence. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
Imagine that the ancient greeks managed to discover Quantum Mechanics. They lay down the correct Schrodinger equation, and understand the superposition principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, etc. They know it can potentially explain the atom but lacking sufficient engineering prowess they cannot really test the theory and verify its validity. This is the situation physics is in, we have mathematically consistent theories of quantum gravity but we cannot know if it's the correct description of the universe because experimental evidence is inaccessible and might be inaccessible for centuries to come.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
No civil service government employee should openly talk to the media, ever.
Government should operate in secret?
Statement should read no civil service government employee should talk to the media about their work or workplace unless the authority to speak on the topic on which they are speaking is in their formal job description, or they have been approved to speak to the media by someone who’s formal job description gives them authority to approve that they do so.
I am all for radical transparency in the public sector, but part of that transparency requires that the individuals communicating have a precise understanding of technical communication. I’ve seen inaccurate communication cause very similar issues to those caused by a lack of communication.
Re: Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center
#39One of my great joys as a teenager exploring electronics was the opportunity to clean out an old storage closet at some Fermilab facility with a friend. This was in the late 80s, we got several 1950s oscilloscopes and much other gear of similar era. The room had been overlooked in the usual surplus process for years. My friend was related to someone working for the janitorial services company, and they'd been told to…
This is tangential at best but I was in Chicago,US once for a business trip and we had weekends off so we did some sight-seeing and one Sunday late afternoon we were close to Fermilab so we decided to take a look. The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at th…
I’m not sure if it’s still there, but if you walked into the cafeteria the remote ops center for the CMS detector and the LHC was on your left hand side through a glass wall and door.
My leadership chain was…interesting but it was incredibly cool in my mid 20s to lunch with high energy physicists and others in this space.
https://cms.fnal.gov/remote-operations-center/
(worked on CMS data taking for a year in the mid 00s)