My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials cost. For my purposes they worked perfectly. The microbonding machines and the wonderful people associated with them are still to the best of my knowledge the only viable place in the US to have 9x9 cm silicon autobonded in small volume.
There are continuous technical workforce challenges in science because the methods keep advancing. If only there were money it. Instead we have engineers, scientists, and physicians driving Uber and we outsource and offshore the entire scientific supply chain.
I don't know if that is true. Stuff just changes. To solve similar problems to this, my lab developed sapphire metal bonding techniques that could be run with CNC machined parts. Everything became nice and reliable and repeatable.
We lose techniques all the time but gain new ones. I designed a scientific instrument once that had a long precision bore through it. I designed it with the belief that I needed clearances for a large stiff boring bar to make the feature.
I showed the prints to my machinist, and he told me they were just gonna put it on the five axis and hit the bore on both sides with an end mill. That it was as accurate as how the old guys did it.
Are downvoters aware foreign qualifications don’t always transfer neatly? Sometimes even domestic citizens have to take jobs in between postdocs or staff positions?
Back in 2015 when I still thought I'd be a physicist, I was a summer intern at Fermilab on the MicroBooNE experiment. The sense of excitement and teamwork on the 10th floor was something I dearly missed when I went to CERN the year after.
Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On Fridays the coffee turned into wine and the cookies into cheese.
The second floor, where the coffee was, had a rotating art installation, which at some point included an acrylic box filled with water. One day this box went from being empty to containing a live goldfish.
I hope Fermilab retains this sense of magic that I have found in so few other places.
When I last worked in person in IT, a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life. Different people went in the mornings. It was really useful to team-build and feel decent about work.
People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me. I don't understand how people are supposed to have any joy at work, or get over comms barriers, when there is no opportunity to get to know coworkers as people.
I can have lunch and water cooler chat friends at work, but rarely do they turn into invite over to bbq on the weekend friends. There's a big difference.
You can be friendly, but when something happens at work and one of you no longer works there...things get weird. Those weekend bbqs that you had with work friends no longer happen, or they keep going for a bit, but conversations are awkward since the still employed are no longer free to discuss or the no-longer employed harbors resentment that isn't exactly hidden. What kind of "friend" was that after all?
It all depends. Most of my coworkers are friendly, some are friends. We respect each other, etc, but it most cases any contacts end when someone leaves the company. The key marker is can I discuss any matters, including inappropriate, politically incorrect? In most cases not. But with true friend we can discuss anything without a fear of being reported. And we are still in contact many year after.
This and other kinds of social issues are why some cultures put a very clear line between professional and personal. God forbid if it concerns intimate matters, which are the worst.
Just responding to some of your points - sorry if this comes off as abrasive.
> a few members of my team would get up at 2pm to get coffee and chat about work and life
If I stopped programming arbitrarily at 2:00pm when my hours are 9:00am-5:00pm I expect to be let go (unless I'm taking this as my lunch period). Especially to socialize over coffee. As a production-level IC I just can't do that ethically, and perhaps this is a personal fault... but I'm paid to keep my nose down and develop software solutions, not to socialize with colleagues. If we need to meet over work it's best to get that on the calendar so there's some expectation of formality - not in some adhoc social hour/afternoon.
> People who say "I don't have friends at work" with pride are completely foreign to me.
I don't say it with "pride," but I have 100% learned to put distance between my personal and professional lives. Example: every time I have had to deal with suicide scares it's always been a professional relationship/colleague of sorts. It's been three times now, and for some reason I seem like a trustable enough person that people put this on me. I hate it.
Then, there's people who I have thought were close friends who completely ghosted me after moving to a different company - who knows, maybe it's me. But I've heard lots of people express similar frustrations and it's just pushed me to consider every work friendship a "work friendship." I have more equitable and consistent relationships when I make friends outside of my profession, I invest my time and energy there.
Finally there's the emotional investment. When it comes to employment I am not part of a "family," and I'd really appreciate that sort of language to stop. Right now. I am selling my time and labor to a business to solve problems and fulfill operational duties that they require of me. At any point, employer or employee can terminate that relationship because "at will." This is surely not a "family," and I personally believe it is not an ideal spot to sink your social energy. I've seen people have their careers pulled from underneath them after over-investing socially into the company - they do not do well. I'm not here to emotionally invest during my 9-5, I'm here for business. Unless it's a requirement of the job (sales, vendors, talent aq, etc.) I am not putting myself out there socially/emotionally.
---
Sorry to share some anecdotes but I think there are very valid reasons to put distance between your work relationships and your personal ones, purposefully erecting a buffer. I think it's very valid if someone wants to keep their work relationships just that: work relationships.
> If I stopped programming arbitrarily at 2:00pm when my hours are 9:00am-5:00pm I expect to be let go (unless I'm taking this as my lunch period). Especially to socialize over coffee. As a production-level IC I just can't do that ethically [...]
Just an aside, but at a senior level walking around and bullshitting with people is where a lot of the work gets done. At some point you'll get involved with a project that's so interesting you'll never really stop thinking about it, and then your idea of what someone looks like when they're "working" will change.
Also at formal senior/project lead/management levels myself. I do not find what you are positing to be my reality, at all.
I don't think bullshitting leads to high productivity or task throughput. Anecdotally, I find the bullshitters are the ones holding the 20-40% of productive IC's back because of constant distractions, spec/scope socializing (and subsequent creep), and just general talking while others are trying to work. If there needs to be a meeting to work out spec I'd rather it be on the calendar where it's company sanctioned, has an agenda, and where we can formally gather action items to be delegated and assigned -- that last list of things does not happen with "bullshitting."
> At some point you'll get involved with a project that's so interesting you'll never really stop thinking about it, and then your idea of what someone looks like when they're "working" will change.
I've been very involved and interested in my work and this has not happened to me yet. People socializing in adhoc 1:1 conversations is where the "good ol' boys" comes from, and it has typically been incredibly damaging to my clients, specs, and timelines. My idea of people working is people traditionally working, adhering to the SDLC, and ensuring technical communications are not private.
In my anecdotal experience, "bullshitting" is a negative thing. I'd rather not be a "bullshitter," and I hope those around me don't use such language to describe me -- especially at a professional level.
---
Just to reiterate:
"Bullshitting" != "where a lot of the work gets done." "Bullshitting" is a negative thing.
And, being incredibly invested into a project has not yet changed my opinion on this. I find this comment makes assumptions of future me with the "at some point" language. Using a hypothetical regarding someone else's future self isn't ideal when arguing a point. It feels condescending in a "you just don't know yet" sorta way.
This isn't someone coming up to your desk, this is more like two people from different departments rubber ducking each other on the walk to get coffee. It's all pre-spec work as you'd put it, but a bit of a continual review as well. 'Shop talk' doesn't really cover the scope.
> I find this comment makes assumptions of future me with the "at some point" language. Using a hypothetical regarding someone else's future self isn't ideal when arguing a point. It feels condescending in a "you just don't know yet" sorta way.
Yeah I'm working on a certain tone in my writing and haven't quite nailed shifts in PoV e.g. transitioning from you/you to you/one in a single sentence. Appreciate the feedback.
To your first point, the coffee stops improved my ability to work with my teammates and get projects done. We were better for it. And for a fair amount of that time, we were salaried so we were paid to get a job done, not by how long it took.
I don't think it was particularly good or bad, when I was there. I don't drink beer none of my friends ever said "this beer is great" or "this beer sucks".
One 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 clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster.
We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.
As a teenager I got to work and study at Fermi for two weeks under a DoE summer program. There was one kid from each US state and territory, and a few from other countries. We worked in the shops assembling the D0 and Leon Lederman tried to teach cosmology, which was both an incredible privilege and ultimately futile. I was eating in the cafeteria the day the Texas Supercollider was canceled and I don’t think there’s ever been a sadder crowd of physicists anywhere.
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 the same time. We didn't see the accelerator of course but still, we saw some control rooms etc..., to this day I'm not sure if we broke in or what
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.
Fermilab was built from late 1967 and opened in 1969 so that must have been really old stuff.
Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).
I tried taking apart one of those old oscilloscopes. After the first screw, I heard a few nuts and parts drop behind it. I knew it was never going to be the same again. Complicated instruments.
I have a bunch of stuff in my house that I know there are people who would be happy to have it and maybe pay a few dollars but I live in a fairly small town and I'm certainly not about to go to the trouble of boxing things up and shipping them. I can get rid of some things by just leaving them at the end of the driveway with a free sign but doesn't work for everything.
ebay is your friend. People buy entire boxes of unknown old electronic equipment junk that may or may not be working. "As is." You don't even have to really list the contents, just a big picture of everything. I think a lot are scrapping the gold and components, something I got into for awhile. I got almost 4 oz of solid gold from crushed cpu's, memory, old IC's, cable connectors, etc., using nitric acid, a hammer and a jar. Also recovered silver. At current gold prices (about $1950/oz) those little bits add up. Old tantalum capacitors sell for quite a bit as well. They used to be huge and if recycled, many smaller modern surface mount caps could be made. There are several channels on youtube showing the process. It can be a fun hobby. Instead of taking my old gear to a recycling center, I throw it in acid (lol).
Do you really think it's likely the person you're responding to is holding onto these items he knows would be of use to someone, with the intention of it becoming monetized as scrap?
He does it with PCBs in one and ram connectors in another, but mentions the process is essentially the same for everything else including CPUs. I'm not sure what the economics of the acids he uses versus nitric are, though.
Yeah. I've gotten pretty good but still have some old electronics and computer-related stuff in my attic that I have no real reason to hold onto but have no interest in going to the trouble of finding someone to take it off my hands and probably basically hoard it.
Whether or not your home smells like rotting garbage. There is a big difference between filling some shelves with obsolete gadgets, and having a big pile of rotting food covering every food preparation surface in your kitchen because you have a severe untreated mental illness. Let's not whitewash the reality of hoarding to shame some nerds for having obscure interests.
One of my favorite memories from thirty years ago in college was having small group breakfast with a few other students through the honor's program with Leon Lederman, the Nobel winning physicist that was the then Director of Fermilab. He had a lot of great stories about how big government funded research worked and was very charismatic.
I toured Fermilab later in college while we where near there for an ACM programming competition. The one thing I remember from the tour was a big red button labeled "Start" next to some huge experiment. The tour guide saw us looking at it and said something like "You don't want to touch that". I've often wondered if that was real or just a prop they used for tours.
Btw, I'll never forget what Leon said when asked by a physics student about what the most important thing to learn or study as an undergrad. He said, "learn to write".
> However, Fermilab may not deserve all the blame, says a theoretical physicist who requested anonymity to protect relations with DOE. For example, he says, after the lab finally hammered out an excavation contract with Thyssen Mining, months passed before DOE approved it. “I’m not sure whether it’s really the lab that has a problem, or if it’s DOE that has a problem and is blaming the lab.”
If you need anonymity to talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.
> If you need anonymity to talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.
I know nothing of the issues going on but this just isn't a universal truth. Most people would speak anonymously when talking about their employer and that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with their employer.
Which employers allow their employees to speak poorly of them in public without permission to speak about the company?
In general, companies are pretty sensitive about employees talking to reporters. And certainly employees who aren't media trained and talking about things that aren't explicitly public. Depends to some degree on the employee and the topic, but generally talking to media outside of official channels can easily get someone in trouble even at relatively open companies.
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.
How does those instances compare to the number of times things that would be in the public interest were not shared, because the trained communicators knew it was bad for the bureaucracy?
Knowledge is power, and knowledge of what is going on can be used to harm the organization by outside actors - pathological and good ones - and control of information can be used by harmful internal actors to harm folks too.
Since (legitimately) harmful outside actors aren’t going away, especially in this space…..
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.
A big issue at these labs is that there's this idea that people with PhDs think only others with technical PhDs can manage things. Management takes a certain set of skills, and quite a lot of PhDs have zero experience outside of academic environments with managing things.
> “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.”
Another thing that strikes me is, why is construction in the U.S. so corrupt and such a money pit? I don't think I have ever heard of a large construction project being delivered on time and on budget. I understand construction is very difficult, but it just seems out of control.
Thanks for the video. I'll watch in full later. But it is interesting that he opens with The Big Dig in Boston. There have been several counts, including prosecutions, of fraud in that project. It wasn't just because it was complex. There was rampant fraud and corruption. After some skimming, it didn't appear that that video covers that.
I have also read anecdotes about that project. For example, stories of contractors tricking out their personal trucks and tools and booking it to the protect.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/) at Fermilab. Many of the lectures went completely over my head at the time but I was still in awe of the particle accelerator on campus. I actually got lost driving to a different building one Saturday and accidentally drove around the ring (with several people blindly following me). Their neutrino experiment, which was planned to shoot neutrinos to Minnesota (MINOS program), was on the imminent horizon and the staff were excited... apparently that was ended in 2016.
I guess it's a hard life being known for a particle accelerator when you get dethroned by CERN and then shut down your ring.
Fermilab 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.
Your comment reminded me of a Youtube documentary about "the missing American particle collider"[0]. The documentary touches on some Fermilab drama, but most of the content is aimed at politics (and in particular, how presidential politics is unfortunately intertwined with funding for science mega-projects in the US).
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 the long run to refocus our science budget on problems we’re interested in solving and some “risk” budget for different ideas.
There's a further subtlety -- the US would like to retain the capability to do this work without funding the entirety of the work itself. A lot of the expertise and infrastructure is unique and world-class.
In my view, the entire field is on pause awaiting the development of truly transformative accelerator technology, then it's off to the races again.
"In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." -- Wilson.
Plasma Wakefield and “accelerator in a chip” are those breakthroughs that are expected to mature soon, though accelerator on a chip would be pointing more towards new applications
>would like to retain the capability to do this work without funding the entirety of the work itself
Oh, then that's easy: just pay them to keep reading work in the field, maybe write a blog, and get into the theoretical side. I'm sure plenty of folks would jump at the opportunity to be on "professional standby" in a field they find fascinating.
Unfortunately that just attracts fakers/scammers, as it’s the perfect role for them. They get to act all high and valuable, but there is no concrete verifiable output expected to be able to tell if they really are able to do what they say or not.
At least until whatever situation you’re hoping to hedge against happens - then you’ll find out you’re being scammed, but far too late.
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.
Not no longer necessary, but not viable on the scales we’re willing to invest. A new accelerator would cost on the order of 100 billion. Such an accelerator is unlikely to discover anything of interest compared to its cost.
There are paths forward, but most of them involve stellar phenomena - which leaves the extensive organizations required to push accelerators forward without much to do.
I found this webpage[0] (and those it links to) to be a good bit of context on what this all means. (And then ran off to do a bunch more searching!)
tl;dr: CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is one of two major detectors of the Large Hadron collider. Fermilab was intimately involved in designing CMS. Fermilab is also a "tier 1" computation center for processing LHC data (possibly restricted to CMS data?). Per this factsheet[1], there is one other "tier 1" compute farm in the US, though it isn't named in particular. I'd guess Lawrence Livermore, but I have nothing more than a hunch.
The 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.
> 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.
That used to be my view, but it turns I was wrong. The standard model was complete in the 1970's, and everything beyond it since then has been fruitless. Axions excluded, the other kind of axion excluded, sterile neutrinos excluded to make just a few.
Even Roger Penrose thinks we're on the wrong track with quantum gravity.
Check out Sabine Hofstetter's voluminous output on this issue for a better breakdown than I can give.
Roger Penrose is a remarkable mathematician and has made profound contributions to mathematics and its application to General Relativity. But his opinions on Quantum Mechanics, (e.g., its relationship with conscience) are very fringe, when not outright quack-material. Nobody takes him seriously on this topic and he has made no recognizable contribution or proved anything that would grant any credibility to the idea.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a peculiar character. She raises some good points regarding the futility of a lot of the phenomenological models that are published, in my mind they are little more than busy-work to have something to publish and survive the publish or perish attrition that researchers must endue. And she is right that is not the way to do science. It's a form of overfitting and throwing things to the wall in the hope something sticks. But this is mostly due to publish or perish. Discovering something deep is very difficult and if you have to have several publications per year to renew your contract you have strong incentives to build a silly toy model with little chances of being right. But the problem lies in the incentives that have been set up in academia. Remove them and most of those silly publications will disappear. But then it's hard to establish a different set of incentives that ensure those that most deserve funding get it. Beyond that fair criticism it's hard to understand what she proposes as an alternative. She doesn't bring anything constructive to the table. Pack it up and de-fund physics until our technical means allows us to probe the Planck scale?
There is certainly an argument to be made on how much funding different sciences should receive given their potential contribution to society. And I see a lot of low hanging fruits in other sciences that would grant most funding going there. But theoretical physicists cost pennies to our society; they are few, poorly paid, and require little more than pen and paper. At the same time, theoretical physicists have contributed to this date immensely valuable contributions that make our developed world possible. It's my perhaps biased opinion that they have had the most outsized impact into our progress. It's sensible capital allocation to keep some funding in the chance they keep changing our lives for the better as profoundly as they have done in the past.
There is this apocryphal quote that summarizes it quite well, it is said that William Gladston (british minister of finance) asked Michael Faraday what was the usefulness of this electromagnetic field he was researching. To which Faraday purportedly answered, "I don't know, sir, but one day you may be able to tax it". Even if this particular exchange didn't happen, it contains a very valuable truth, when you are researching the frontiers of science the practical application is not always obvious but that shouldn't deter us from doing it.
> "I don't know, sir, but one day you may be able to tax it".
You can't just take any and every topic of research and apply this quote to it. There are always more potential research topics than there is research funding. You need to prioritize somehow.
> when you are researching the frontiers of science
There are many other frontiers of science, than just theoretical particle physics. Maybe some other topics would deserve a bit more resources now?
This implies, I believe, that further progress refining physics will result in similar great societal advances. This can only be based on belief. Maybe. And perhaps a spectacular future awaits us, due to some present-day discovery that now seems insignificant. Yes, one can point to many such instances in the past; but what gives us confidence this will continue into the future?
When we're studying physical phenomena that require machines the size of a small country to test, it's difficult to see how there can be any practical application. The practical application would have to be much smaller, in which case it would be a much smaller test.
> The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity.
Yes. Theoretical particle physics has done a wonderfully good job in explaining everything it can. But now the job is done. Should move on and do something else. But because the institutions are too established, and past glory is too good, they don't know how.
Sure blame the experimentalists. If the theorists are so smart maybe they can use their immense brilliance to draw on their chalkboards with femtoscale precision. All joking aside, while you are correct that we don't really have the technological ability to advance on a better theory of Quantum Gravity. But theorists need a rich experimental backdrop for their work to be meaningful. Since this is lacking, theoretical physics has produced a glut of plausible models that all arrive at similar answers from very different first principles. This leads to the sense that none of them are decisively right or wrong and the pursuit of yet more models is a meaningless project. Yes the root problem is with the experimentalists, but the theorists suffer the consequences.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say it's either the theorists or experimentalists fault. The problem might just be that it becomes physically impractical to the point of practical impossibility to observe the nature of things beyond a certain scale to us. And that's just, you know, the nature of things.
I'd say physics without the related "technological/engineering prowess" (i.e. the experiments to back said physics up) is just wishy-washy fancy-sounding maths.
DOE 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.
DOE already funds a ton of research programs in battery tech, PV, and other renewables. I mean it would be great if they could fund even more, but you make it seem like some kind of politically untenable topic when it’s not
Some categories shouldn't be privatized like medicine, military arms, basic science, road maintenance, and emergency rescue operations. Elon isn't going to work on particle physics without a direct commercial purpose.
Private does not mean for-profit. Funding and performance are two different things. Road construction is funded by government, but performed by private companies.
Typically huge profits are made when government contracts are managed by private companies. You see this in defense, space (SpaceX broke this) and big construction projects.
For the longest time, scientific research performed two significant functions beyond its stated mission of discovering things:
1: It kept a workforce advancing, both at the labs themselves, and at all the suppliers and manufacturers who fed into them. Those mega-budgets weren't buying mega-yachts for the lab directors; they flowed into mega-upgrades for industry, who could score "juicy government lab contracts" and advance their capabilities, which then paid dividends for the rest of the sector.
2: It supplied national prestige. The best and brightest from all over the world would fall over themselves to work in labs here. The moon landing shattered records for the most-watched TV broadcast ever, and a billion people knew America was on top of the world.
Both of these had significant trickle-down effects, which I don't think were fully appreciated until we let them rot on the vine.
I think "science" in the sense that GP uses it, should refer to any research that ticks both of the above boxes.
It really depends on where responsibility begins and ends. It might make a lot more sense, financially, for the government to manage maintenance using supplies and equipments purchased from private companies, with the people working on the roads being government employees instead of employees of the contractors. However, for specific jobs - say building a new bridge, etc. - it might make sense to have that be a complete private contract, and then, after it's built, maintenance becomes the government responsibility.
In general however, there's too much opportunity for corruption if contracts are just blindly given to private interests by politicians. Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction contracts were a good example of how bad that can get.
I think there's a good reason to have anti-corruption measures and bring down the hammer hard on everyone in the administration that tries to circumvent them, but I do believe that government is just too inefficient when it comes to doing things.
I'd rather risk that every tenth contract is fraudulent than have every contract cost twice as much with the government doing it themselves. There's just zero incentive for government employees to work quickly and efficiently.
Check private contractor's work to make sure they're not cutting any corners, make corruption harder and incentivize whistle-blowers, but letting the government do things is not something I want as a taxpayer.
Privatized electric grid as a market led to Enron causing unnecessary rolling blackouts to make money.
The government is not a static hivemind, and deregulation and privatization are not panaceas.
The US political class (elected fraction of government) is among the most corrupt in the world. Campaign finance reform will never happen because the rich run America. If you think the rich have the needs of the many in mind when they spend billions on lobbying to get their way, I don't think you're fully aware of the situation in which America finds herself.
I'm not demonizing anyone, I'm talking about incentives.
And I've come to my understanding of how they work on government employees by talking to, and working with (as a consultant), government employees. There's a certain bureaucratic counterproductivity that I've only ever encountered in government employees.
If that doesn't match your experience and government in your area is highly efficient and you wouldn't change a thing, that's great and I envy you, but it's not my experience at all.
Please don't antagonize a commenter or trivialize their condition. There are millions of frustrated Americans who can't articulate their discomforts much less their sources. There are many possibilities:
1. Loss of privilege and prestige socially and/or geopolitically
2. Lower income, more stress, working harder, and less financial freedom to have a happy enough life
"Please insert your FriendlyCard to unlock the street in front of your house."
And toll turnpikes.
"Public-Private Partnerships" are neoliberal fantasies of privatized, for-profit monopolies performing government functions while taxing working people. Most often, there is some sort of corrupt and unethical favoritism and revolving door between government official(s) and the vendor corporation.
It’s worth noting that these large-scale projects, like the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, are incredibly complex and have no real historical precedent. The sheer scale and ambition of these endeavors make it nearly impossible to accurately predict timelines and budgets.
It's easy to criticize Fermilab for cost overruns and delays, but we must remember that they are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. The nature of cutting-edge research means that there will always be unknowns and challenges that cannot be anticipated.
I think it is a poor idea for the Department of Energy to being hiring businesses or organizations to be managing the National Laboratories. This means there are three levels of management: the DOE, the managing organization/business (such as the University of Chicago) and the lab itself. Eliminate this middle layer--so that management is either done by the DOE or the laboratory.
I expect many scientists would quit working for a lab if they had to become direct gov't employees and those who are non-US citizens would be even more excluded than they are now. Both results would degrade the quality of the scientific output of the labs and not necessarily save any gov't expenditure. I also suspect the contractor layer gives some continuity and smoothing of the rocky year-to-year games played by executive and congress critters.
>Theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg had this to say on [the SSC's] cancellation:
>>Spending for the Superconducting Super Collider had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance.
Threads like these make me really happy to be a Hacker News reader. This is a slice of life that is very far afield from my own but one where I appreciate the attention to detail and correctness that holds the whole damn thing together.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.
