Here was an opportunity to address Wakeham’s prior head-on by spelling out in supported quantitative terms the benefits of astronomy to the economy in £/yr, the career destinations of Physics-w-Astronomy undergraduates, etc. Not to mention making the case for pure science as a cultural activity. Instead, the RAS has submitted a fairly random collection of anecdotes, cheaply held together by bullet points. No value added. No synthesis. Not even a whiff of the word “culture.”

Even where there is an objective figure, they manage to undersell it. Apparently, over his/her entire career, a physics graduate is worth £134K in extra tax revenue to the Exchequer. Whoopee! Why not multiple that by the 3000-odd physics students to point out that physics graduates are producing a steady-state value added of £400M per annum, which is rather more impressive? And then point to the percentage of these students attracted to physics in the first place by astronomy to arrive at a figure for what we are worth to the nation through even this most basic of routes.

Then there are deeply alarming sections, like the part on “leveraging,” which, through a further random assortment of anecdotal bullet points, seems to be making the argument that the UK’s astronomers are very good at getting things for free from NASA, which doesn’t seem like a particularly good line to take if you are trying to make a case for maintaining or increasing UK astronomy funding.

They can’t even make up their mind about the long-running saga of how closely facility and exploitation funding should be tied together. On the one hand, “It is sensible that the funding of facilities (telescopes etc) be within the same Council as the funding of the grants to use those facilities.” On the other, “The grants line which funds this effort, together with the use of the facilities, needs to be protected from the large fluctuations in financial pressure that often occur due to overruns etc in the large facilities.”

As usual, the IoP have put in a rather professional and convincing job. Apart from anything else, it actually addresses the questions Wakeham had asked in the order in which they were asked! Sadly, however, the IoP mostly steers clear of astronomy, and makes a strong case for supporting mainstream physics. In a cash-limited World, that isn’t likely to do us any favours either.

How do you do those smiley things ? Mike M did it by accident, but you seem to have done it by cunning design .. ?

I have no problems with the labs or their staff. They are top-notch world class institutions. RAL and Daresbury should have Directors as well as the ATC, and they should continue a proud independent activity that depends less on political fortune.

Specially for my ATC chums : this doesn’t necessarily mean I think the University should do what the ATC does instead. Legal ownership is almost irrelevant. The ATC already runs as a quasi-autonomous entity, and we are all rather proud of it.

K17 : you do of course have the advantage of me…