Is it “stingy” and “unfair” of the US not to contribute to the operating costs of the Large Hadron Collider? Robert Aymar, director general of CERN, the LHC’s host laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, has been quoted saying so in French and Swiss newspapers in recent months. Among US policymakers and scientists, the allegations are not meeting with much sympathy, but they are causing concern that the public airing could be harmful to science.
Aymar says the newspapers misquoted him. Still, he does think the US should help pay for running the LHC, which is set to go on line next year. Starting in 2008 or 2010, he notes, after the planned closures of, for starters, Fermilab’s Tevatron and SLAC’s BaBar, “the LHC will be the only frontier high-energy physics machine.” Roughly 750 US researchers are involved in the LHC—the largest number from any country, says Aymar. Countries will benefit from...
