Congress expresses concern over LHC failures

High-energy physics and the Large Hadron Collider in particular were put under intense scrutiny at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment of the House Science and Technology Committee earlier this month (video available ).

Money spent on the LHC was compared to that of the never-completed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The taxpayer had “got nothing really out of it,” said subcommittee chairman Brian Baird (D-WA) . (See video at the 1:15:00 mark)

Baird then described the “tremendous” amount of money contributed to the LHC and how it failed to operate properly, adding “we put a hell of a lot of money into this thing on the promise that certain things would be achieved and now it’s not going to be achieved.”

Baird predicted that investigations would have been undertaken and oversight hearings convened if this had occurred in any other US government program. “You get to skate, partially because you know stuff that we don’t have a clue what you are doing,” he said. “And I think that’s neat. I admire your knowledge, I admire your intellect.”

Baird said it was a member’s responsibility to ensure that federal revenue is well spent, saying that constituents’ taxes allocated to research facilities like the LHC could have been used for a child’s education, a new car, or to repair a roof.

Money used on “big gizmos,” said Baird, could be spent on programs with a more immediate and a more direct benefit to a society. Besides curiosity, “how can this spending be rationalized?” he asked.

The witnesses respond

“It really has to be justified by the results,” said Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory director Pier Oddone , one of four witnesses testifying in the hearing.

“I completely agree with you that our field is in deep, deep trouble globally if we do not deliver on the LHC,” Oddone said, adding “our intent is absolutely to deliver.” In a reference to Christopher Columbus’s unexpected discovery , he added, “we may be going toward the spices in India, but we may run into America.”

Another witness, Dennis Kovar, the director of the DOE High Energy Physics Program , responded that the US contribution to the LHC was working as designed, and under the Office of Science’s project management practices, was on cost and on schedule.

He said the LHC was a very complicated machine that is defining the state of the art, and as such is a “high risk.” While acknowledging that it is “not good right now,” Kovar said that there is “the expectation that it is going to run at some point.”

A larger problem, Kovar stated, was the difficulty of better documenting and communicating the value of highly technical research performed at facilities such as the LHC to the larger public.

People need to better experience science, he said. Among immediate gains from US participation in the LHC are advances in US technology, the training of a workforce that goes on to work in many areas, and the appeal of cutting-edge discoveries to the public.

Hugh Montgomery, director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility described how metrics have measured the success of accelerator performance at Jefferson National Laboratory, Fermilab’s Tevatron , SLAC’s B Factory , and Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider . “You are getting real scientific measurements and return on your dollars in general,” he told Baird.

Lisa Randall from Harvard University expressed disappointment that the SSC was not completed, and assured Baird that it was only a question of time before the LHC would be operating. Governments, she said, were the only source of funding for cutting-edge basic research of this type.

The role of physics

Earlier in the hearing, the witnesses discussed the likelihood of profound consequences from future discoveries in high-energy and nuclear physics research, expressed concern over the number of US high-energy physics facilities that were closing, and emphasized the necessity of maintaining US leadership in the area.

In response to Rep. Daniel Lipinski’s (D-IL) observation that research in these fields is expensive and that more needs to be done to better communicate its results, the witnesses spoke of the importance of the media and other programs to engage the public. Oddone and Montgomery described the public’s enthusiastic response to outreach and teacher education programs at their laboratories.

Kovar expressed concern that advances in accelerator technology have moved overseas, and with it the vendors who provide develop them.

It was, Kovar said, extremely important for the US to maintain its leadership in these fields.

Other witnesses explained how the construction of accelerators in the US has strengthened domestic technologies leading to advances in areas such as the web and medicine. Laboratories serve as “the great attractors,” said Montgomery, drawing the world’s best scientists to the US.

The subcommittee continues its work on a reauthorization bill for DOE’s science programs over the coming weeks.

Originally published as FYI’s Questions Raised About DOE High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics Programs by Richard M. Jones.Edited for Physics Today by Paul Guinnessy.