Physics Roundtable: Reinventing Our Future (original) (raw)
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Particle Physics in The United States, A Personal View
2013
I present my views on the future of America's program in particle physics. I discuss a variety of experimental initiatives that do have the potential to make transformative impacts on our discipline and should be included in our program, as well as others that do not and should not. This is a notable year in the history of our discipline. For six decades America led the world in the pursuit of particle physics at the highest energies: at the Brookhaven Cosmotron (commissioned in 1953), the Berkeley Bevatron one year later and at their more powerful successors up to the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. Sadly, with the cancellation of the SSC project twenty years ago, last year's shutdown of the Tevatron Collider and my country's failure to formulate any plan to regain the initiative, this heroic era of American leadership in high-energy physics has ended. For the forseeable future the high-energy frontier will be explored on foreign soil and under foreign control. By a remarkable coincidence 2013 also marks the opening of a new and exciting chapter for particle physics in which all of the ingredients of our standard model have been seen and accounted for. Of the final three, top quarks and tau neutrinos were found at Fermilab in 1995 and 2000 respectively, while the Higgs boson held out until last year when it was first produced and detected at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. What will be the future of high-energy physics and what role can the US play? In the near term (a few decades?) the LHC is the high-energy frontier and I hope my country (and my university) will continue its active and effective engagement at CERN. Although the world's next great collider is unlikely to be built in the US, I hope that we will be eager participants in any sensible future multinational efforts. But can there be a fruitful domestic program in experimental particle physics as well?
What Future Will We Choose for Physics?
Physics Today, 1995
Science in the United States is in a time of pain and uncertainty. The pain is felt most acutely by young scientists, who are having great difficulty establishing their careers. The uncertainty about the duration and outcome of the current situation stems from its roots in ponderous events of recent history-the end of the cold war, industrial downsizing, government deficits and demographic trends. Although budget difficulties and lack of jobs plague most of the sciences, the atmosphere of uncertainty about the future is palpably different from one profession to the next. Our concern here is with the profession of physics. Disciplines
The Importance of Investing in Physics
2021
Research with immediate applications is easy to justify, but there are economic and philosophical reasons to invest in physics even when the return is not obvious. By Cherry Murray and Nick Treanor W ith large-scale COVID-19 vaccination programs now underway, some optimism about the new year seems justified. But even when the medical emergency phase of the pandemic is behind us, its economic consequences will linger for years to come. Funding for "pure" research is hard fought even in the boom years-can it still be justified in the straitened times ahead? In two essays, Cherry Murray of the University of Arizona and Nick Treanor of the University of Edinburgh, UK, give reasons to believe that it can. Using examples of technological and industrial impacts, Murray argues that investing in physics research makes economic sense. In a separate essay, Treanor explains that even without such tangible benefits, physics research can be justified because the insights that it provides into the world are Medical MRI, satellite navigation, and optical-fiber communication are some of the technologies made possible by fundamental physics research.
Physics as a Door into a STEM Education
Nowadays, business leaders and businesses of all levels are in a great need for highly qualified workforce (e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2016/01/26/129547/a-look-at-the-education-crisis/). That is why business leaders and businesses of all levels are calling for transforming current state of STEM education (e.g. http://www.stemx.us/2014/01/pharmaceutical-industry-issues-call-to-action-on-stem/). Transforming STEM education requires a MoonShot approach! The first step toward this goal is to be establishing a Coalition for Teaching Physics, which in the coming years should evolve into formally structured an Institute for Teaching Physics, which in the following years should evolve into an Institute for Teaching STEM courses. The immediate goal of this Coalition is to be gauging the current state of physics education at a middle-and high-school levels (starting from the number, level and quality of available physics courses). At first, the members of the Coalition would develop the strategy for gathering and assessing all available data. Then all data would be collected and analyzed. In parallel with these steps, the member of the Coalition would be working on the improvement of the data processing strategies (in the future this experience will become available for the analysis of the state of school education within other STEM subjects). Based on the results of the analysis the members of the Coalition will develop the strategy for improving the state of physics education (starting from a set of syllabi for courses available to students, programs for teacher professional development; incentives for becoming a physics teacher). The ultimate goal of the Coalition is to reach the state of physics education when physics courses twill become available to all middle-and high-school students. The measure of the success is to be the visible increase in the number of students entering STEM related fields, and succeeding in pursuing the corresponded careers. The scope and the volume of the work, the timeframe of the project, the development and the use of the assessing strategies will eventually require a centralized management. That is why it is naturally to expect that, when started, the Coalition eventually will be institutionalized with the formation of a specific organization with a designated funding and a formal structure (" an Institute for Teaching Physics "). NB: AAPT does NOT pronounce " Bringing Physics to All Students " as the goal of the association. In its current state AAPT represents a place for communication, inspiration, experience and ideas exchange, but it is NOT an agent for a societal change.
Scientometrics, 2019
This study describes the increase of research productivity of latecomer countries (latecomers) in the high-energy physics (HEP) community by research strategies based on a national system and international collaboration (IC). The INSPIRE system, a bibliographic database for HEP researchers was used to obtain the number of publications and citations as indicators of research productivity. Our bibliometric estimates highlight two main results. First, latecomers' national systems of public research institutes play a major role, and initially produced a large proportion of the research output, but this influence declined as IC increased. Second, IC greatly increased both the quantity and quality (number of citations) of research output in all latecomers. In most countries, the IC strategy has shown a strong correlation with the research output. The findings highlight the importance of a national research-support system and development of IC as strategies for new states that are entering the HEP field, and provide comparison of the two strategies. Further bibliometric research, such as examination of the strategic patterns of the leading countries will broaden the understanding of the national units of the HEP academic community.