{"id":1978,"date":"2009-05-12T15:07:20","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T20:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2009-05-18T11:06:20","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T16:06:20","slug":"austria-may-leave-cern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=1978","title":{"rendered":"Austria May Leave CERN"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned this here<\/a> when I first heard about it, but by now more information is available. Last Thursday the Austrian government announced their intention to withdraw from membership in CERN, effective late 2010. This decision still needs to be approved by the parliament. An official statement from CERN is available here<\/a>, news stories here<\/a> and here<\/a>, blog postings many places including here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The cost to Austria of CERN participation is not extremely large (less than 20 million Euro\/year, roughly similar to the cost of running the math department here at Columbia [upon investigation, that’s an exaggeration, maybe closer to the cost of the physics and math departments together…<\/em>] ), and this decision came as a surprise to the physicists in Austria who will be most affected by it. Unfortunately, joint efforts like CERN that produce fundamental scientific knowledge with no direct applicability suffer from an inherent structural problem. After leaving CERN, Austria will still benefit from knowledge produced there, even if they are no longer paying for membership. In times of budgetary problems, a government could rationally decide to cut-back on its contribution to organizations that it believes will manage to go on without its help. The problem here is not so much the loss of Austria’s contribution, which is a budgetary problem CERN can find some way to deal with, but the danger that other members of the European community may decide to follow suit. If a lot of other European governments make the same calculation as Austria, CERN could not survive.<\/p>\n

A letter signed by representatives from all the particle physics groups in the UK is going to the Austrian government, asking for reconsideration of this decision, and presumably similar efforts will come from the rest of the CERN member states. The Austrian Institute for High Energy Physics has set up a web-site dealing with the issue here<\/a>, and an on-line petition here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If the decision is not overturned, CERN will be in a very uncomfortable position with respect to collaboration with Austrian physicists. While cutting off contacts goes against all traditions of the field, continuing them would encourage other states to follow Austria’s example.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: It looks like the decision has been overturned, and Austria will stay in CERN. There’s a news story in German here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned this here when I first heard about it, but by now more information is available. Last Thursday the Austrian government announced their intention to withdraw from membership in CERN, effective late 2010. This decision still needs to be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experimental-hep-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1991,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/1991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}