Unfortunately my first post to this blog is motivated by difficult times for physics in the UK. As you will doubtless all be aware the UK funding body covering Astronomy, Nuclear and Particle Physics (STFC) has announced severe budgetary reductions affecting each of these fields. It is feared that grants may be cut by up to 25%. This being a particle physics blog I have no doubt that the readers are aware of the specific problems this has caused for our field. However, I wanted to bring home just how many people are affected by this across the broad spectrum of UK contributions to physics, from stellar observatories to power stations. If you share the feelings of many in the community that these changes simply can't go uncontested then please consider signing our petition on the 10 Downing Street website. Hopefully, if enough people sign up, in conjunction with the letter already sent to the government on behalf of the community, we will cause those responsible to think again before they seriously damage the future prospects for physics in the UK. Thanks for your support!
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Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, Research Associates and Staff at the Imperial College London High Energy Physics Group. (everyone is invited to add comments!)
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4 comments:
Hi Will good to hear from you!
(Will recently graduated from the HEP group with a PhD on the BaBar experiment)
The petition you started already has over 4,500 signatories, which shows that people care about university physics departments being starved of resources and the UK's commitment to pure science.
Because of the nature of the subject, government funding reviews and research councils, this isn't a trivial matter to fully comprehend, but there is an editorial in Nature this week that summarises the situation:
A Policy of Drift (British physics faces an unnecessary squeeze)
My understanding, by the way, is that is wasn't actually cost over-runs that caused this, but the non-provision of known running costs for large facilities, which is forcing the squeeze on basic physics, and hence university physics departments.
Thanks for the info Yoshi. I should also apologise to any Nuclear Physicists out there who aren't happy at being left out of the wording of the petition. Unfortunately I wasn't fully up on the breadth of the cuts when I started it. Needless to say we all support the reversal of the cuts across all areas of the community.
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