Diamond Geezers

For many weeks, I have had interesting and difficult conversations with fellow Physicists in Edinburgh who have a somewhat different perspective on the STFC situation - condensed matter physicists who are long term users of ISIS, SRS, ESRF, and now ISIS-2 and Diamond. These guys are fed up with us astro-pp folk acting as if we were all of Physics; and fear that our whingeing is going to damage us all. A comment on this earlier post gave a link to a Research Fortnight piece. Not everybody has access, so here is a PDF.

Now these guys do some really good stuff. I would say that, because I am Head of the School of Physics, but its true. Even as an astronomer, I am fascinated by some of what they do. They are measuring material properties at pressures close to that in the centre of Jupiter, and within shouting distance of the outer parts of Brown Dwarfs. They want to understand the formation of planetary ices, and we are talking about simulated planetary atmosphere experiments.

As the STFC problems broke, they too were nervous, but for different reasons. It seemed obvious to them that the underlying problem was that astro-pp spending was out of control, as it periodically is (they say). This is mostly because subscriptions dominate the budget, are set in Europe not the UK, grow with GDP, and are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. But also there were vast aspirations such as ILC and Aurora, and looming problems such as the VISTA penalties. As far as they were concerned, the idea that problems were “due to Diamond and ISIS” were just a myth. There is no Diamond over-run they said - the costs have not changed since 2003. Diamond has been delivered on time and on budget. So they felt this was nothing to do with them.. but then ..woahh !! Hundreds of redundancies at Daresbury and RAL ! And rumours of closing down Diamond and ISIS for part of the year.

So.. since then the National Audit Office report has become well known, making it clear that the problem was indeed NOT with Diamond and ISIS. The problem was simply with CCLRC not putting enough money aside for all its commitments. But, my colleagues say, this is only one of several problems, along with the others above. Furthermore, if you know enough tensor calculus to understand near cash, non cash, DEL and all that mumbo jumbo (see John Peacock’s recent comment), it looks like Government has fixed the ~Diamond-ISIS ops costs problem, which means that what remains is that other astro-pp stuff.

So all this was coffee room grumbling until the IUS select committee report came out; now the “ex-CCLRC community” have gone public, because they fear our childish behaviour will bring us all down.

Some of the IUS report wording certainly did not help. “One community has been saddled with the debt of another” was an attempt at blunt truth, but its not fair - the debt had nothing to do with the community that used CCLRC facilities. Now STFC Council have fought back on this issue - news issued by Council states that pain has been equally shared - £38M cuts on the PPAN side, £45M cuts on the PALS side. My guess is some of you will be sceptical about that, so I will let you at it…

Actually the bit that made me larf in the RF piece was the suggestion that astronomers are organised … If Particle Physics is a Stalinist Economy, and EPSRC and their clients represent a perfect Free Market, then of course Astronomy is a bit of a good ole British muddle. You can do what you like, but we don’t do things like that here old chap.

Durham ahead of the game

Yesterday I was at the fifth anniversary celebration for the Durham Ogden Centre. Maybe Carlos Frenk knows something we don’t, cos the Ogden Centre web page says that “ongoing support is provided by PPARC”. Of course, Carlos is on the Wakeham panel, so maybe the plan is to re-invent PPARC. Durham have got the new web page ready, but released it too early ? Or… they haven’t changed the web page for eighteen months … surely not.

Anyhoo… it was a splendid afternoon, with a series of excellent review talks on cosmology and particle physics by Carlos himself, Silvia Pascoli, Shaun Cole, Nigel Glover, and Martin Ward. The room was crammed full of PPA types. Guess what the main topic of conversation was at coffee time ? It wasn’t the Higgs Boson. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be anyone there from STFC.

My favourite moment was when Arnold Wolfendale asked Carlos a tricky question, which produced an uncharacteristically long pause in the Frenk flow of speech. Finally he said, “I think you should all know that when I was interviewed for my lectureship in Durham in 1985, Arnold asked me the same question. Well, Arnold, the answer is still the same …”

Judge Willis Reports

If you are a UK astronomer or particle physicist, then two possible positions pertain. (a) You have been in a coma. (b) You are perfectly well aware that a Parliamentary Select Committee has been digging into the recent Science Budget Allocations. Paul Crowther has all sorts of details, and my own reports of the hearings are here, here, and here . Well … they have finally completed their deliberations and published a report. If you were expecting a whitewash, think again. Its pure Semtex.

Quotes from the summary :

“… in merging two Research Councils, one research community has been saddled with the debt of another, despite assurances from the Government that STFC would be formed without any legacy issues.”

“In STFC itself, we found weaknesses in its peer review system, its communications and its management.”

“We recommend that STFC wait for the results of the Wakeham review of physics before implementing the cuts proposed in the Delivery Plan and that it use this time to consult with its stakeholders”

“…substantial and urgent changes need to be made to the way in which the Council is run in order to restore confidence and to give the Council the leadership it desperately needs.”

Wow. As you would expect, STFC have issued a firm riposte which you will find at the STFC website. I am trying to decide whether the right comparison is Geoff Boycott or Edith Piaf …

Wakeham weirdness

This evening I have been drafting our submission to the Wakeham review - both the Departmental submission, and the Vice Chancellor’s submission, which of course I have the honour of having been asked to draft … The questions are quite striking. After Q1=”name please” (oooo der hard ones first eh…) we go straight into

Q2 Please list and describe five examples of non-academic impact that have stemmed from research carried out by members of your department …

Wow. It takes until Q9 before we get to the expected “so, is STFC crap or what ?” question. (Of course many of my colleagues are looking for the “so is EPSRC crap or what ?” question … you can stare at EPSRC documents all day trying to decide whether your grant application should fit into “digital economy” or “securing the future”…

Over at the VC questionnaire this looks like a key question :

Q3 : Has the focus of research in your Department had to be adjusted to attract students and ensure long term viability ?

Of course ! We hire nothing except astronomers, because this gets thousands of punters in. We tell them at interview they are almost certain to meet Heather Cooper at some point, or possibly just Chris Lintott. Meanwhile, every one of these astronomers demands a personal eight metre telescope.

My favourite though is Q12 on the Departmental submission :

Q12 : Please detail the number of staff in your Department that have received senior management training.

Jeez.

Wakeham Up

The long awaited RCUK review of the Health Of Physics in the UK, aka the Wakeham Review, is now thoroughly underway. The panel had their first meeting Feb 29th; by May 2nd Physics Departments and VCs etc have to return their questionnaire submissions; there is a two day meeting with witnesses on June 23-24; the panel reports to DIUS Sept 15th. The questionnaire is fairly weird … The review has a web page on which you can find the panel membership. You can also find the review remit. This of course is deathly dull and detailed, leading to one thinking “OK, what’s REALLY going on ?”. Coffee room chatter produces three theories :

(A) The Fix. Government knows that the funding crisis is real, and that the STFC is after all the wrong structure, but they can’t be seen to be caving in to whingeing and sensational press. So they need a nice quiet rational review to justify rescuing astro-pp without destroying facilities for condensed matter, chemistry, and biology in the process.

(B) The Kick into Touch. Government is uninterested in all the whingeing because they have given a broad area plenty of money and its up to us to sort out our own problems. So the review is just to keep us busy while we all gradually calm down and accept life.

(C) The Descending Boot. Government feels that the fundamental problem is in the Universities, who have been trapped into relying too much on “PPARC” science because of competing for student bums on seats. The balance of Physics is unhealthy in the UK and needs fixing.

Mesdames et Messieurs, faite vos jeux.

Gordon’s Final Word

I got another email from 10 Downing Street today. (Yes I know, most of you did too..) I wrote about Gordon’s initial response to the famous petition in this post. Here is the text of the final response :

You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “reverse the decision to cut vital UK contributions to Particle Physics and Astronomy.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here:

http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page15216.asp

Prime Minister’s Office

Petition information - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Physics-Funding/

If you would like to opt out of receiving further mail on this or any other
petitions you signed, please email optout@petitions.pm.gov.uk

Have a read of the petition. Its a mixture of depressing and encouraging. Of course, the Government was never going to say “Oh dear you are quite right, here is lots more money”. That ain’t how things work. However this :

Claimed reductions in STFC’s budget appear to have been derived from STFC’s aspirations for the three-year Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) period (2008/9 - 2010/11). These aspirations never constituted an agreed set of activities or funding for them, and the suggestion that £80m has been cut from its budget is wrong.

is close to insulting. We are not stupid. Nobody said £80M has been cut from the STFC budget. Merely unfunded aspirations ? That applies to the ILC, but not to discussing plans for several hundred job cuts, sending a message to every UK University saying “how would you respond to 25-40% grant cuts”, and publishing a Delivery Plan announcing “We plan to withdraw from future investment in the twin 8-metre Gemini telescopes” and “We will cease all support for ground-based solar-terrestrial physics facilities” and “We will cease to invest in high-energy gamma ray astronomy experiments”. (I am avoiding plugging the cases that affect me personally). These are facts and quotes and they are cuts. I am not even saying they are wrong to do … I might have done these things too … but saying “there are no cuts, only unfunded aspirations” is more or less spitting in our face. I was actually pretty impressed with the STFC performance at NAM, and so really disappointed they allowed these patronising words to escape Number Ten.

On the other hand .. The response says

It is a tribute to UK science that it will always be the case that there will be more proposals for scientific research than the funding is able to cover. Funding bodies such as STFC will always have to make difficult decisions and it is both justified and understandable for there to be a debate over how these decisions are made.

Which seems to say it was ok for us to make a fuss. Huh. Maybe we are not foolish children after all. Perhaps more importantly the response says :

This follows large increases in funding in recent years and means that there would be no major reductions in physics funding before the outcome of the Wakeham Review is known. (Professor Bill Wakeham, Vice Chancellor of Southampton University, has been asked to lead an independent review of the health of physics overall and we, and the Research Councils UK (RCUK), will pay close attention to his conclusions, which are expected in the Autumn.)

The community and the RAS have been consistently asking for this, so its very good to see. So.. having had my hissy fit … lets all start working to make the best of this. We have time.

Next up, Wakeham. Just got the questionnaire … some thoughts on this soon…

Sticky Moments

I am back in Edinburgh after two days at the National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast, and then a day in St Andrews for the SUPA Advisory Committee. So today I will miss the session where STFC meet the community … I hope it will be positive, but it may well be a rather sticky moment. I had the feeling in Belfast that people were talking more about politics than science, but maybe that was just all the senior old farts like me. The grad students won’t have been wasting their time on politics. They will have been drinking beer.

I went to a talk by Don Pollacco summarising progress on discovering exoplanets, including an announcement that SuperWASP has found ten new transiting planets, a third of all those known. The exoplanet business is very exciting but puzzling as there are several odd and worrying things. there are too many elliptical orbits; planets only like high metallicity stars; and at a given mass they are nearly all larger than they should be. All these things are explained by theorists of course, but it feels uncomfortable.

Here is another piece of sticky discomfort. For years the standard picture of planet formation has this crucial period of time where grains start sticking together. Once they are big enough gravity starts to do its clumping thing, but first they have to collide, stick, and grow. So nobody ever tested this until recently, but now its been done by my SUPA chum Helen Fraser who runs an Astrochemistry lab at Strathclyde. She has a machine that she takes up on a zero-g parabolic flight ESA aircraft. She fires the grains at each other and makes a movie. They don’t stick. They bounce off each other and spin. She tried ice. It doesn’t stick either. Her last hope is spongy ice - fractal grains like those we do actually find in the interplanetary medium. (But how do they get made ?) She is in Bordeaux now about to fly with her toy. Sounds more fun than STFC bashing ..

Anyway, you won’t get a debrief on the STFC session from me .. hopefully it will be covered by Stu and Chris or the orbiting frog …

Last but not least, we released the AstroGrid software on Tuesday. You can get it from http://www.astrogrid.org.

Education versus the Internet

I am a fan of Bob Cringely’s Pulpit. He is one of those guys who were blogging years before blogs, and his IT industry column is always fascinating and amusing. His latest column is very scary for an academic to read. Its about the impact of information technology on education. Most arguments on this take one of two positions; either that IT is a great opportunity we must seize, or that it is a threat that stops students concentrating. Cringely suggests that the search-and-graze style associated with the Google era will eventually be seen to be good for education per se, but that it will destroy the traditional institutions that get paid to deliver it. College not needed.

If this depresses you too much, head over to the latest xkcd cartoon. (Thanks to Dave Pearson).

The King’s Shilling

The panels for the STFC consultation exercise are filling up and starting work. I have taken the King’s Shilling and agreed to serve on the space science and space exploration panel, chaired by Steve Schwarz. I think I am seen as an independent in this context … although I have used all sorts of space-based data over many years, I am not an insider on any space project. A good colleague has suggested to the SCAP list that we only agree to serve under some sort of statement of fundamental disagreement with the process. This is a bit like those French citizens who voted for Chirac with pegs on their noses, to keep Le Pen out. I think that is going slightly too far; but I (and others) have asked that our deliberations should be public, and we can then include a statement of discomfort, along the lines that Walter Gear made for PPAN at the March Town Meeting

Paul Crowther’s web site contains an update today of a meeting that Oxford profs had with Science Minister Ian Pearson, who asked for details of grants cuts. According to the email circulated amongst the SCAP list, Pearson also said that we had to co-operate with the consultation exercise, rather than try to destroy it. I am pretty sure most people’s instincts will indeed be to co-operate to the fullest extent and to do a very thorough job. The result will be to make STFC’s job much much harder. What stands out in the Programmatic Review priority list is that a large fraction of the highest priority things are very exciting but speculative things - grand plans for the future - whereas a large fraction of the lower priority things are projects and facilities that are producing science now, or are just about to. The present is being sacrificed for the future. There is a brave logic to this; but my guess is that the instinct of most working scientists will swing the other way. Of course any sensible programme has some of each …

Here is the weekly reminder of the two mantras :

(1) STFC inherited a budget deficit of £75M from CLRC.

(2) Its the Economy Stupid

My understanding of Mike Green’s commentary on the papers released to him under his FoI request, is that the Executive explained to Science board that “previous inadequate provision by CCLRC” led to a “negative dowry of £40M”. Its not clear what time frame this refers to so we don’t have to agonise over the exact amounts, but at least the basic principle is clear.

This seems to me to be the thing to concentrate on politically. You can complain about STFC’s approach to community engagement; you can disagree if you like about their chosen science policy; but these things are within their rights as an organisation; and they may improve with time. But the political record states that the PPARC science programme was not to be damaged by the act of merger itself; this principle has blatantly been breached. And the extra cost of operating Diamond and ISIS-2, at +£25M/yr, goes on ad infinitum.

Moreover, someone high up understood this problem, and chose not to address it. This is is related to mantra number two.

Because I know these two things are really the problem, I can participate openly in the consultation exercise, and do my best for STFC under their own rules.

Keep your eye on the ball.

Budget 2008 surprise rescue plan for science allocation

Nah, only kidding.