Newton's law of funding

摘要

Isaac newton, besides being the founder of modern physics, was also master of Britain's mint. That is a precedent which many British physicists must surely wish had become traditional. At the moment, money for physics is in short supply in Britain. Having spent a lot of cash in recent years, physicists and astronomers are now finding they do not have enough money to use the very facilities they paid to have built. On December 14th, for example, the British delegation to cern, Europe's biggest particle-physics laboratory, abstained from a vote to increase the budget to make best use of the Large Hadron Collider (see previous article). A vote for a rise, British delegates said, would be a vote for job losses elsewhere in physics. The budget was carried nonetheless and Britain is obliged to pay up. Perhaps not coincidentally, the country's government had announced a few days earlier that it would withdraw from the International Linear Collider (ilc), an $8 billion project to build the successor to cern's new toy. Since America seems almost certain to cut its ilc budget, too, this project looks to be in trouble.