A National Research Council committee, charged with charting the course of US particle physics over the next 15 years, has released its report. Because particle physics is a costly business requiring broad support within the intellectual community—not to mention the government—several of the committee’s 22 members, including its chair, economist Harold Shapiro, biologist Harold Varmus, and former Lockheed–Martin CEO Norman Augustine, were not physicists.
Entitled Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space and Time, the 125-page report (available from the National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11641.html) contrasts the undeniable excitement and promise of particle physics at the start of the new century with the unmistakable downward trend of experimental facilities and programs in the US. The Superconducting Super Collider was cancelled in 1993 in mid-construction. With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) about to start operation at CERN, Fermilab’s Tevatron is unlikely to outlive the decade. Neither is the PEP-II asymmetric...
