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At Jodrell Bank on Tuesday, the government committed £165m to the European Spallation Source (ESS), which is being built in Lund, Sweden. It also committed £119m to the construction of the Square Kilometre Array, (SKA), an international radio telescope to be built in South Africa and Australia. And finally, it promised £25m to PLATO, a space telescope mission which the European Space Agency (ESA) has just approved, with a planned launch date around 2023.
Three weeks ago I wrote about the future of particle physics, where practically every experiment is multinational, and many are global. But this announcement shows you that particle physics is far from unique in having large-scale international projects.
I have to declare an interest here. Not only am I generally interested in the science from these projects, but UCL is a partner in both SKA and PLATO (though in fact in my own department we had a bigger involvement in the competitor EChO mission, which unfortunately wasn’t selected). Plenty of us will use those neutrons, too.
A beam of neutrons is a powerful tool for tackling many challenges in science and engineering (or coffee) because unlike a beam of photons or electrons, they interact mainly with the atomic nuclei in a material, rather than the electrons around the nucleus. So they provide complementary information compared to, for example, light sources like Diamond. The ESS funding will cover 10% of the construction cost, but a lot of that (hopefully as much as 70%) will be contributions “in kind”, that is, ESS components built in the UK. UK scientists will be contributing a lot to the instruments that will make essential precision measurements of the neutrons. In addition the Swedes, who are of course investing a lot in ESS, will also be contributing £2-3m per year to enhance operations of the ISIS facility at Harwell in the UK. This should be enough to run ISIS for an additional 30 days, which is very welcome given problems the UK has paying its running costs. It is even possible that when ESS is operating there could be a joint ESS/ISIS proposal process to direct users to both neutron sources. It’s a good example of the international horse-trading and cooperation that large scale science needs. John Womersley, the CEO of the STFC (the research council which runs ISIS) tells me that they will also be setting up a new international governance framework for ISIS, which should involve our other international partners. Italy has just signed up for another 5 years.
As Pallab Ghosh mentioned at the BBC in his piece on this announcement, there is a worry when governments make specific announcements on scientific projects; it is generally seen as better that scientific priorities are set by scientists, not politicians, as this is probably the best way to get the highest quality science done. There is even a principle - the Haldane Principle - supposed to guarantee this, though with big international projects there will always be a need for political involvement. In any case, there can be no such worries with SKA, which has a very impressive science case. It has long been a top priority for UK astronomers, and is certain to be confirmed as such when STFC’s programmatic review is finally released in 10 days time.
Finally, PLATO. The UK is a major partner in ESA, and when a big science mission is selected - in this case to find more planets beyond the solar system - UK science and industry need to be involved, both from our own point of view and because our expertise is an essential part of Europe’s space capability. As I mentioned, UCL’s Mullard Space Science Lab is quite strongly involved in PLATO, as well as the UK company e2v. The mission science is led by Don Pollacco from Warwick University, Cambridge University has a major role in the complex image processing software while the Open University will work on public engagement.
All this is good, and shows how we can make more of a difference by working well with international partners. When it comes to economic benefits to the UK, the government press release says that
every £1 spent on research generates 50p for the wider economy every single year after.
I don’t know how such a number is calculated or what assumptions go into it, and there’s presumably a huge margin of error either way (tell me in the comments, if you know!). But it should be obvious the benefits are substantial and I think the government have this right, that maintaining and expanding our research capabilities has to be part of any credible long-term plan. Together with other announcements in the recent spending review, such as maintaining the “ring-fence” around research funding (albeit at a level declining by the rate of inflation), fully funding our international science subscriptions (to ESA, CERN, ESO, ILL and a few others), continuing to support big facilities in the UK such as Diamond and ISIS, and putting money into new Quantum Technology centres, these announcements do look like a pretty strong statement of support for basic research. They are putting at least some of your money where their mouth is, and I think we will all benefit from that.
Also, while such economic arguments are important - both from the point of view of fairness in tough times and because we need to appreciate scientific research as a contribution to, not a drain on, the economy - some of the science from these projects will be thrilling, and I’m looking forward to it.
Jon Butterworth’s book, Smashing Physics, is out on 22 May. You can order it now!
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