Please help save British Science

[e_pepys]

I was going to call this "Please help save my job", but having been the victim of a previous cut, I am hoping that even if this thing goes through, I'll still have a job. But you never know. In any case, some of my colleagues won't be so lucky.

There's a petition to 10 Downing Street to reverse an £80M shortfall in funding for UK research into

Comments

[e_pepys]

Thanks!

[zengineer]

I've signed since it is my job too - maybe.

[e_pepys]

Most of the noise seems to have been from Particle Physicists, though that may just be selection bias (those are the articles that have been pointed out to me). Or maybe Astrophysics isn't so hard-hit. I hope for your sake that is the case.

[zengineer]

Astro will probably be worse hit. They have already announced a withdrawl from Gemini, the Canaries telescopes and ground based solar observation. Unless a renegotiation is made UK astronomers will have access to no telescopes observing the Northern sky. The astrophysicists are less organised and less vocal than particle physicists.

[purplecthulhu]

The RAS has actually done a pretty good job so far. There are quite a few blogs out there covering the astro side (see links on my blog) and the initial 'paxoing' of the science minister was at least party thanks to the RAS president. To be honest I haven't seen much of the particle side. I guess we're suffering from selection effects...

[colinbj]

Done. Looks to me like signatures are coming in at a rate of several per minute.

[sesquipedality]

I might be missing something, but as I understand it the "shortfall" is as a result of the Research Council spending based on the assumption that their grant would be increased, and is thus self-inflicted. As such I don't feel as though I can support this.

Please feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood the situation though.

[e_pepys]

There does seem to have been cock-up somewhere. Unfortunately I was away when our Chief Executive explained all of this (by all accounts, it was a non-explanation, explanation), so I shouldn't try to speculate where the cock-up occurred.

What Particle and Astro Physicists are annoyed about is that having been forced into a merger (which was an initiative that came out of the blue from the Treasury a couple of years ago), we are now responsible for (and one of the chief victims of) the cost overruns in the Diamond Light Source (which is used by other areas of science). Particle Physics has very long schedules for development and exploitation of new facilities, so do rely on stable funding.

[uitlander]

Yeah, I'm afraid I had come to the same conclusion. I also recognise a number of the names on the petition, and know for a fact that at least one of them managed to 'lose' a million pounds somewhere when I worked with him... and this from a man with a first class degree in mathematics who claimed in their defence that 'accounting was too complex'. I do feel rather strongly that the idiots/institutions who thought that 'someone else' should pay for the shortfall they ran up should be penalised for the loss, but that this shouldn't be clawed back through swingeing cuts across the subject.

[purpletigron]

The rumours I'm hearing is that there's an unpaid VAT bill, but that it's a lot more complicated than that.

[emily_shore]

I would sign it, but alas I am not a British citizen or permanent resident, so I don't think I'm eligible...

[e_pepys]

Come back to the UK Sophia, and start working on obtaining permanent residence status!

Sorry to have enticed you to a site where you were disenfranchised. I promise I'll sign the next US-only petition you point me at (as long as it's not too wrong).