While Hubble and Voyager's cancellation have made the headlines, there's been a gradual yet more substantial decline in resources for physics research in the US. A much more harmful event to astrophysics is NASA's cancellation of the Astrophysics Data Analysis and Long Term Space Astrophysics programs.
http://catdynamics.blogspot.com/2005/03/bleedin-nasa-exploration-vs-science.html
The US is basically abandoning experimental particle physics. The Tevatron at Fermilab will run through the end of the decade; after that, fundamental research will be carried out at the LHC at CERN in Switzerland. We'll see a reversal of the decades-long draw of scientists from Europe and Asia to the US. This isn't necessarily good news for Europe, though, as it's hard for a field to be healthy when most of the major participating institutions drop out. Over half the top 20 best universities and labs for this type of physics are in the US today.
For details, see http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/images/seife05.pdf
Now the Department of Commerce wants to make it much more difficult for foreigners to get research done in the U.S. The DoC wants to require a special license for each foreign national who will be doing research with an "export controlled instrument" -- a vague category that depends on what country you're from, but might include things like powerful computers. If your Chinese grad student wants to use a supercomputer,
they will have to wait until a license comes through, which will probably take a few months. 45% of the graduate students in the physical students are foreign nationals, who have been a tremendous benefit to science in the US.
http://catdynamics.blogspot.com/2005/03/bleedin-nasa-exploration-vs-science.html
The US is basically abandoning experimental particle physics. The Tevatron at Fermilab will run through the end of the decade; after that, fundamental research will be carried out at the LHC at CERN in Switzerland. We'll see a reversal of the decades-long draw of scientists from Europe and Asia to the US. This isn't necessarily good news for Europe, though, as it's hard for a field to be healthy when most of the major participating institutions drop out. Over half the top 20 best universities and labs for this type of physics are in the US today.
For details, see http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/images/seife05.pdf
Now the Department of Commerce wants to make it much more difficult for foreigners to get research done in the U.S. The DoC wants to require a special license for each foreign national who will be doing research with an "export controlled instrument" -- a vague category that depends on what country you're from, but might include things like powerful computers. If your Chinese grad student wants to use a supercomputer,
they will have to wait until a license comes through, which will probably take a few months. 45% of the graduate students in the physical students are foreign nationals, who have been a tremendous benefit to science in the US.
