As you know, Bob, the telescopes used by observational astronomers are almost always shared facilities. Many of these are public: owned and/or paid for by governments of one or more countries, through their science funding agencies. In Canada, the main funding agency is the National Research Council (NRC), with some money also from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). In the US, the federal science funding agency for ground-based telescopes is the National Science Foundation, NSF. No prizes for guessing what the one for space-based telescopes is.

Since we spend public money on telescopes, and there is never enough money to do all the nifty things we can think of, we have to set priorities somehow. In Canada the astronomical community writes a Long Range Plan every 10 years. In the US the astronomical community does a Decadal Survey every 10 years as does the planetary sciencecommunity. As inputs to these reports, scientists write  “white papers” which explain Why Their Science is Cool and what facilities are needed to do it. Scientists representing new or existing facilities also write white papers explaining why their thing is the best thing since sliced bread. The committee in charge of writing the Long Range Plan/Decadal Survey/whatever takes all these white papers, plus input from “Town Hall” meetings and whatever other channels are available. They then try to figure out what new facilities will give the biggest bang (the most exciting new science) for the (hopefully reasonably estimated) buck. And produce a report that makes at least some people happy, and probably some angry.

Both the Canadian and US communities have had some issues to deal with after their most recent decadal reports. The problem, as usual, is money. The previous Long Range Plan report in Canada had lots of great ideas, but only about half of them were funded. The current plan recommended phasing out funding for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, which has finally got its long-awaited SCUBA-2 camera working but has no current prospects for funding after 2014. Some Canadian astronomers are trying to figure out how to keep it going for longer. In the US, it became clear that the budget envelope used by the 2010 Decadal Survey was, shall we say, optimistic. So a new committee got convened to tell the NSF what existing facilities should be shut down  in order to fund new ones. They released their report last week and, unsurprisingly, many people were unhappy with the results, which called for closing most of the Kitt Peak optical telescopes as well as the Green Bank and VLBA radio telescopes. Similar things happened in the UK a couple of years ago when they joined the European Southern Observatory; my understanding is that in fact the JCMT closure is related to both this and to the inception of the ALMAtelescope.

How did we get ourselves into this mess? Part of the problem, and a part which is not unique to science funding, is that it is easier to sell a shiny new facility than to sell refurbishing or maintaining an existing one. Another part, which may well be astronomy-centric, is that the last decade or two have been a “golden age”, with many wonderful facilities like HST, Spitzer, Keck, Gemini, etc — and when one is at the top like this, there’s nowhere to go but down. [I think I heard this argument first from Bob Kirshner at the CfA.] Andy Lawrence said it well on his blog: “the US has done such wonderful  things in the past, that if we keep them all going – especially the very newest things like ALMA – that uses up all the money forever”.  And of course science with these golden facilities leads to new questions that can only be answered with platinum facilities, which maybe the citizens of Earth just can’t afford. Martin Elvis recently had something to sayabout the virtue of asking “answerable” questions.

And how do we get out of the mess? If I knew, I would run for CASCA and AASpresident and fix it myself. Creative public-private financing, better outreach efforts so the public understands why we want to build big telescopes, more efficient operations — all of these look to me like drops in the bucket. Maybe our fields is going to have to contract. That would stink.

But it could be worse! Every so often, I pull out my copy of Greg Egan’s Quarantine: a science-fiction novel that has as its premise the idea that the solar system has been surrounded by a giant opaque bubble (Why? Read the book.) Inexplicably, Egan doesn’t discuss the effects of the Buuble on observational astronomers, but it would of course mean there’d be no point in building more telescopes, because there would be no more new photons. Not that I think this scenario is likely to  come to pass, but I wonder just how creative we could be with our petabytes of existing astronomical data, if we knew there were never going to be any more. Maybe it’s this kind of out-of-the-box science-fictional thinking which can make things work for astronomy.
I sure hope so.

So it is finally time for the grad students to move upstairs!

Our new office looks sunny and nice with a big window 🙂

Great excitement on the faces on Allison and Neven

Thanks for everyone who worked hard to make it smooth

I spent last week attending the International Conference on Rheology in Lisbon, Portugal. This is the biggest conference in the field, and is held every four years. It alternates continents: in 2004 it was in Korea, and in 2008 in California. The next one, in 2016, will be in Kyoto, Japan. There were about 1000 people there, and 11 parallel sessions of contributed talks. It was a very intense conference, with talks starting at 8:30 AM and running until 6:30 PM. They even had poster sessions during the coffee breaks, so there was very little time to sit and catch your breath! However they had a good social program, including a port-tasting evening, a half-day bus tour on Wednesday afternoon, a beach party, and a banquet, so there was a bit of time to see some of the sights, to talk shop and get to know some people.

I enjoyed most of the talks I attended and got several good ideas, which for me is the mark of a good conference. Now all I need is time, and money, and students to turn the ideas into reality …. One thing that impressed me was the breadth of subjects that were covered, and how the flow of complex fluids impacts many diverse areas of research and application. There were lots of talks about blood flow, for example, and blood clotting. Also lots of talks about nanocomposite materials made of polymers mixed with carbon nanotubes or graphene. There were very applied talks about polymer processing and highly theoretical talks on trying to predict bulk properties based on molecular structure, which is one of the holy grails of the field. Most talks were well presented and interesting.

My own talk was scheduled for late Friday morning, the last talk in the last contributed session on the last day of the conference. To make matters worse, one of the talks in my session was cancelled, so everyone drifted off to other rooms for a while. Most of them came back, however, and I had enough of an audience – about 20 people – for my talk to make it worthwhile. Since it was the last talk, there was time for quite a good discussion and question period after.

I enjoyed Lisbon and would go back to see more of the city if I had the opportunity. It reminded me of Rio, perhaps not surprisingly, but was better looked after and not as crowded. Restaurants were relatively inexpensive and the 20 words of Portuguese I picked up in Brazil served me well! The weather was great – low 30s and sunny all the time.

Now it is back to reality, with two courses starting in a couple of weeks and a to-do list a mile long.