[HN Gopher] Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S...
___________________________________________________________________
Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle
physics center
Author : dyslexit
Score : 186 points
Date : 2023-03-25 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| Animats wrote:
| They're in trouble because they didn't have a few people who knew
| how to manage excavation contracting.
| dt23 wrote:
| 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.
| peteradio wrote:
| Yea well cern had beer on tap ... For lunch!
| brnt wrote:
| "beer"...
|
| /ducks
| smcl wrote:
| Ok now I'm curious what beer is served at CERN. I am not
| familiar with any Swiss beer and only a handful of
| unspectacular French beers.
| naves wrote:
| If my memory does not fail me, that would be
| Feldschlosschen: https://feldschloesschen.ch/
|
| (2003-2007 period)
| harunurhan wrote:
| 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".
| fdeee wrote:
| In 1996 maybe Heineken:
| https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/flaschen-im-
| ring-a-45296...
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| I don't know about the beer at CERN specifically but the
| beer culture of Geneva generally is subpar.
| naves wrote:
| Local Calvinus Blanche and Calvinus Ambree are pretty
| good for Swiss standards. And the country is starting to
| produce great biers, e.g. JA-MoM: https://www.brauerei-
| oerlikon.ch/shop/JA-MoM-p285045816
| ntsipina wrote:
| It still does!
|
| Source: Currently at CERN.
| peteradio wrote:
| Tell me, is it still in a goofy wooden barrel?
| nukeman wrote:
| Perks of a stand-alone national lab I guess! My workplace
| (Savannah River Site) has a strict no-booze policy. Although
| people frequently bring donuts!
| pknomad wrote:
| That's awesome! I work over at ESnet (located w/ LBNL) and
| got to interact with some folks over at SRS. Y'all are cool
| bunch :)
| prpl wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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
| scheme271 wrote:
| They're also the CMS tier 1 site for US and possibly north
| america
| ccooffee wrote:
| 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).
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U&list=PLAB-
| wWbHL7...
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| ISL wrote:
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> 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.
| prpl wrote:
| 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
| pieix wrote:
| 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.
| stametseater wrote:
| > _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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I guess the Holometer doesn't count as diversification. >.>
| yummypaint wrote:
| 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.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Reminds me of this story:
|
| https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb...
|
| 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.
| clivefx wrote:
| 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.
|
| It was.
| samstave wrote:
| Every time stories appear about the Particle Physics Center,
| Fermi Lab - they seem to show up in waves.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| well that's the article-wave duality in action.
| pfdietz wrote:
| OW OW OW
| Caligatio wrote:
| This makes me sad.
|
| 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.
| dugmartin wrote:
| 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".
| h2odragon wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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).
| mycall wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ithinkso wrote:
| 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
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| One man's junk is another man's treasure.
| rektide wrote:
| So the adage goes but sometimes one man's junk just becomes
| another person's hoarding.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| What would be the fine difference between hoarding and
| collecting?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Actually using or curating the stuff.
| burnished wrote:
| Well, one test if it is causing nevative impacts in other
| parts of your life.
| stametseater wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| 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).
| pengaru wrote:
| 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?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Any videos on how to recover gold from crushed CPUs, ICs,
| etc?
| zdragnar wrote:
| YouTube is your friend here. I think even NileRed has a
| video on it.
|
| Edit: here you go: https://youtu.be/ASQCa7mfjVo
|
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
|
| I wonder if they still do that summer program.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| RedCondor wrote:
| >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.
|
| https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its...
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| 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.
| kingstoned wrote:
| Private does not mean for-profit. Funding and performance are
| two different things. Road construction is funded by
| government, but performed by private companies.
| luckylion wrote:
| "Road maintenance" shouldn't be done by private companies that
| are given contracts by the government? Why not?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| 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.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Who decides what "basic science" is?
| spacecircle wrote:
| [dead]
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| stametseater wrote:
| [flagged]
| analognoise wrote:
| They 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.
| alangibson wrote:
| 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.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| 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.
| sampo wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| alangibson wrote:
| > 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.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I think her name is Sabine Hossenfelder.
| alangibson wrote:
| Correct. My bad working from memory.
| pa7x1 wrote:
| 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.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| 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?
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| sampo wrote:
| > "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?
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| Rury wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| > follow our advances in physics.
|
| 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.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=dOe_6vuaR_s
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| > 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| No civil service government employee should openly talk to the
| media, ever.
| bagels wrote:
| Government should operate in secret?
| closeparen wrote:
| 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.
| borkt wrote:
| 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.
| spacecircle wrote:
| 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?
|
| I say this as a federal scientist myself.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > 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?
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Translation: poor leadership is endemic.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
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