While the US needs to get spending under control, the cuts to science sting.
A $1B cut for ΛCDM seems pragmatic as long as we focus on the economy. The cosmic background will still be waiting for us in four to ten years.
Unfortunately, it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral. Especially when the deficit is increasing.
Everything needs to be cut back, not just things one party doesn't care for.
The added bummer is that space funding cuts aren't just hurting public projects, they're also killing private companies that rely on the government as a customer.
Hey another way to dumb down the country. Become second rate at particle physics (LHC), aerospace (Boeing), cut funding from universities, <TLDR list goes here>.
These sorts of comments always get downvoted to hell because HN are true believers in science, especially space and NASA. The arguments for funding extremely time-insensitive research are usually de minimis (we spend so much more on X) or to beat the Russians/Chinese. Mass transit proponents have a similar relationship with opportunity cost. Yes, we can build California High Speed Rail, but would there be more net benefit by using the money to improve Bay Area and LA transit? You have to value these things against where the money would otherwise go.
Obviously this administration has no interest in the homeless, but I'm personally a little tired of all the ivory tower elites getting upset that their intellectual play toys are in jeopardy, when millions of people struggle for food and healthcare.
And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.
Historically, the center of scientific innovation shifted from Europe to the United States approximately a century ago, and is currently showing signs of transitioning towards China.
Folks, let me tell you: nobody thought it could be done, but your favorite President (that's me, by the way) took on cosmic inflation and won, big league. We passed the spectacular Inflation Reduction Act - everybody's talking about it - and guess what? It didn't just tame rising prices here on Earth. No, no, we went ALL THE WAY. We ended cosmic inflation EVERYWHERE too. Incredible, right?
First of all, they said "not possible." Scientists, astrophysicists, even Big Foot was scratching his head! Nobody could figure out how to stop the universe from exponentially expanding faster than my rally crowds. But under my leadership, we negotiated the best cosmic deal. We deployed state-of-the-art interest-rate spinners on dark energy, put tariffs on runaway space-time, and - I'm not kidding - built the beautiful galactic wall to keep excess inflation out of the Milky Way!
The results? Beautiful. The universe has stabilized. No more exponential bloat! Stars remain at just the right distance, galaxies keep their perfect shape, and astronomers can finally retire their "Big Bang gone wild" theories! Our beautiful Inflation Reduction Act also saved trillions of light-years' worth of energy - making it green, making it lean, and letting us focus on what really matters: making America go WOW again!
Now the Fake News Media will try to discredit us: "Impossible!" they'll cry. But we know the truth. We have the best cosmic economists, the smartest black-hole negotiators, and let me tell you, they're all saying the same thing: "Sir, you've done what no one else could!" So join me in celebrating the greatest cosmic achievement in history. We've ELIMINATED inflation, not just here at home, but across the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's what winning looks like, folks!
This, and many other things in the area of science, is an embarrassment.
However, I feel that what is argued about, by all sides, misses the point.
The US spends 2X what China does on civilian space programs, and 4X what Europe spends. We spend 2X as much on health care, 1.5X as much on education, and 2X as much on science research.
Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Arguing for or against how much money we need to spend or to cut is just the modern day circus that distracts everyone from the real problems and provides everyone on both sides with feel good excuses.
Because let's be real here all the patriotism is just a facade the rich want to keep the money for themselves. Singing the national anthem on the fourth of July is cheap.
On the other hand, the US is close to bankruptcy. And that's not all the current admin's fault.
And their cuts are trying to avoid that, although they have thrown out many babies with the bath water. It's hard to blame them for trying to avoid default, which would be far worse than anything.
The program apparently cost $900 million which is not a trivial cost.
Can anybody steel man the practical value of this kind of research for me? It seems to me that almost all astronomy, particularly the sort studying very large scale phenomena like this, is essentially useless for humanity. The best it does is satisfy our curiosity about the nature of our reality, but when the subject of study is something so huge there's no chance of it ever having practical application to humanity (unlike quantum mechanics!) As for the argument that it "kills private companies" who are contracting for the government on projects like this, it seems very much like a broken windows fallacy. If the government went around breaking everybody's windows that would be great for the private companies that replace windows, but so what?
The most useful kind of astronomy is searching our solar system for dangerous rocks so that we might avert disaster. Anything beyond our solar system is just useless stargazing, everything out there is too far away for us to do anything with or about. Theories about reality which can only be validated or ruled out by looking at things so far away cannot have local relevance to us, or else whatever local phenomenon they govern which might be useful to us could also be used to test that theory.
(For the record, I think this administration are a bunch of morons.)
I mean that can be said of any research, couldn't it? 400 years back, nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help us understand tides on earth. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases are some invisible organisms in the air no one can see. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive that these imaginary "atoms" will lead to reserves of immense energy. And yet here we are today living in a world only made possible because of what people did before.
The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?
There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!
> Almost a trillion dollars to increase the resolution of white noise.
Is this "a trillion dollars" in the room with us? The budget of the canceled project is not even 1B. You're off by not one order of magnitude, but by three.
Didn’t JWST recently present confounding evidence against one of
of the core assumptions of big bang theory, thereby invalidating it?
Something about the faint, far off “redshift” background radiation from the beginning of time was actually coming from a much closet newer source , not what the theories held? I’ll repost paper if I can find it.
It really hurts to see this happening. CMB-S4, stands for stage 4, is a huge collaborative effort that units many CMB scientists and experiments, in a sense that stage 1 to 3 experiments are “converging” towards this.
To put that in context, CMB-S4 being a DOE project has many side effects to other CMB experiments in a lot of ways. For example, a few years ago the LiteBIRD mission led by JAXA from Japan has been gaining momentum, and many international CMB scientists got involved. European scientists got funded by ESA, and US scientists were expecting NASA to fund them too. In the end they denied the proposal (despite generally positive impressions when discussing with various people there), partly because they think the satellite based CMB experiment LiteBIRD has significant overlap with the goals of the ground based CMB experiment CMB-S4, deeming it unnecessary to support LiteBIRD.
And then CMB scientists used to get generous access to NERSC, a top 10 HPC system in the world. But as CMB-S4 becomes a DOE project, NERSC being DOE funded also, it becomes a bit of conflict there, in the sense that they feel they need to prioritize access for CMB-S4 to guarantee its success. There are many other factors in play but in the end it becomes much more difficult to even get access to the system, not to mention having any sizable allocation.
All these might not be so bad as CMB-S4 is supposed to be our endgame. It would benefits the CMB community as a whole so much. But now? It’s game over.
It also hurts particle physics progress as well. Long story short, the CMB B-mode holds a promising sensitivity to inflationary models, that its discovery may finally makes inflation falsifiable. At the very least, it involves an energy scale so high that no experiments on Earth can reach, and therefore is a good complement, to high energy physics experiments such as LHC.
There is a reason it is deemed so important in both the decadal survey and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
Project like this has under heavy scrutiny from both the scientific community and the funding parties around feasibility, risks, costs, etc. It wasn’t a a light decision to have had happened in the beginning. Why would the end come so abruptly without explanation?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadA $1B cut for ΛCDM seems pragmatic as long as we focus on the economy. The cosmic background will still be waiting for us in four to ten years.
Unfortunately, it feels like the budget cuts being made are incredibly partisan and not actually helping pay down the debt spiral. Especially when the deficit is increasing.
Everything needs to be cut back, not just things one party doesn't care for.
But we're #1 on social media!
And this isn't a matter of "you can do two things at once"; we should provide for our own people _before_ we worry about cosmic inflation.
First of all, they said "not possible." Scientists, astrophysicists, even Big Foot was scratching his head! Nobody could figure out how to stop the universe from exponentially expanding faster than my rally crowds. But under my leadership, we negotiated the best cosmic deal. We deployed state-of-the-art interest-rate spinners on dark energy, put tariffs on runaway space-time, and - I'm not kidding - built the beautiful galactic wall to keep excess inflation out of the Milky Way!
The results? Beautiful. The universe has stabilized. No more exponential bloat! Stars remain at just the right distance, galaxies keep their perfect shape, and astronomers can finally retire their "Big Bang gone wild" theories! Our beautiful Inflation Reduction Act also saved trillions of light-years' worth of energy - making it green, making it lean, and letting us focus on what really matters: making America go WOW again!
Now the Fake News Media will try to discredit us: "Impossible!" they'll cry. But we know the truth. We have the best cosmic economists, the smartest black-hole negotiators, and let me tell you, they're all saying the same thing: "Sir, you've done what no one else could!" So join me in celebrating the greatest cosmic achievement in history. We've ELIMINATED inflation, not just here at home, but across the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's what winning looks like, folks!
And will soon launch their own version of Hubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian
Deeply embarrassing as a US citizen.
However, I feel that what is argued about, by all sides, misses the point.
The US spends 2X what China does on civilian space programs, and 4X what Europe spends. We spend 2X as much on health care, 1.5X as much on education, and 2X as much on science research.
Our systems are inefficient and corrupt, and that is what needs to be addressed.
Arguing for or against how much money we need to spend or to cut is just the modern day circus that distracts everyone from the real problems and provides everyone on both sides with feel good excuses.
Because let's be real here all the patriotism is just a facade the rich want to keep the money for themselves. Singing the national anthem on the fourth of July is cheap.
And their cuts are trying to avoid that, although they have thrown out many babies with the bath water. It's hard to blame them for trying to avoid default, which would be far worse than anything.
The program apparently cost $900 million which is not a trivial cost.
The most useful kind of astronomy is searching our solar system for dangerous rocks so that we might avert disaster. Anything beyond our solar system is just useless stargazing, everything out there is too far away for us to do anything with or about. Theories about reality which can only be validated or ruled out by looking at things so far away cannot have local relevance to us, or else whatever local phenomenon they govern which might be useful to us could also be used to test that theory.
(For the record, I think this administration are a bunch of morons.)
The cosmic microwave background is not even something imaginary far away in time or space. It is radiation that surrounds us in the present. It is passing by the earth constantly, all the time. There's some research trying to use it for space navigation, but no one knew you could do that when they pointed antennas randomly in the sky. The amount of cross over some research has to a lot of other research and eventually to practical applications cannot be easily comprehended. Science builds upon science in very complex and convoluted ways with each step being that people simply tried to find more about something around them that they did not know. If you knew how to find it, then there's nothing to research in the first place, is there?
There must be so much information in cosmic microwave radiation about things we may not even know. Who knows if it could lead to uncovering information about dark matter or dark energy and who knows where that information would take human civilization. At this time, research simply indicates that you find out as much about it as you can, because it is there!
Is this "a trillion dollars" in the room with us? The budget of the canceled project is not even 1B. You're off by not one order of magnitude, but by three.
To put that in context, CMB-S4 being a DOE project has many side effects to other CMB experiments in a lot of ways. For example, a few years ago the LiteBIRD mission led by JAXA from Japan has been gaining momentum, and many international CMB scientists got involved. European scientists got funded by ESA, and US scientists were expecting NASA to fund them too. In the end they denied the proposal (despite generally positive impressions when discussing with various people there), partly because they think the satellite based CMB experiment LiteBIRD has significant overlap with the goals of the ground based CMB experiment CMB-S4, deeming it unnecessary to support LiteBIRD.
And then CMB scientists used to get generous access to NERSC, a top 10 HPC system in the world. But as CMB-S4 becomes a DOE project, NERSC being DOE funded also, it becomes a bit of conflict there, in the sense that they feel they need to prioritize access for CMB-S4 to guarantee its success. There are many other factors in play but in the end it becomes much more difficult to even get access to the system, not to mention having any sizable allocation.
All these might not be so bad as CMB-S4 is supposed to be our endgame. It would benefits the CMB community as a whole so much. But now? It’s game over.
It also hurts particle physics progress as well. Long story short, the CMB B-mode holds a promising sensitivity to inflationary models, that its discovery may finally makes inflation falsifiable. At the very least, it involves an energy scale so high that no experiments on Earth can reach, and therefore is a good complement, to high energy physics experiments such as LHC.
There is a reason it is deemed so important in both the decadal survey and the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.
Project like this has under heavy scrutiny from both the scientific community and the funding parties around feasibility, risks, costs, etc. It wasn’t a a light decision to have had happened in the beginning. Why would the end come so abruptly without explanation?