Wednesday, April 20, 2011
LISA to go because of US cuts
"Unlike LIGO, which strains as hard as possible and hopefully will detect something once it's upgraded, LISA would be bombarded with gravitational waves, and the trick will be picking out the interesting signals from above the ambient noise. (That’s a problem we don’t mind having.) ...
LISA’s science is not just achievable, it’s incredibly interesting. It would detect thousands of binary systems within our galaxy, as well as numerous inspirals of middleweight black holes into supermassive ones in other galaxies, giving us incredibly detailed access to the space-time metric near a black hole. As a side benefit, the wavelength is just right for looking at gravitational waves that might be produced in the early universe if the electroweak phase transition is especially violent."
MSNBC.MSN.com say
"We invested 14 years in LISA and now — poof! — it's gone. Is it the end of the world? Not likely. It's just one more step down the long road of decline, as the U.S. gets left behind in cutting-edge research and exploration.
Who knows? We could see a lot more scientists migrating to Europe, China and other countries that still value investment in science and technology".
IMO: In the long run, hopefully some scientists will migrate to India. I prefer India to UK, FWIW. I believe India's space budget is now larger than that of Russia (from BBC radio) and India is a democracy, unlike the USA - which used to have the rudiments of democracy but these seem to be fading along with General Motors and US world power which does not even extend to Libya, rightly or wrongly. (Gadaffi has obviously primed the African nations with money, and there are other rudimentary problems).
LISA’s science is not just achievable, it’s incredibly interesting. It would detect thousands of binary systems within our galaxy, as well as numerous inspirals of middleweight black holes into supermassive ones in other galaxies, giving us incredibly detailed access to the space-time metric near a black hole. As a side benefit, the wavelength is just right for looking at gravitational waves that might be produced in the early universe if the electroweak phase transition is especially violent."
MSNBC.MSN.com say
"We invested 14 years in LISA and now — poof! — it's gone. Is it the end of the world? Not likely. It's just one more step down the long road of decline, as the U.S. gets left behind in cutting-edge research and exploration.
Who knows? We could see a lot more scientists migrating to Europe, China and other countries that still value investment in science and technology".
IMO: In the long run, hopefully some scientists will migrate to India. I prefer India to UK, FWIW. I believe India's space budget is now larger than that of Russia (from BBC radio) and India is a democracy, unlike the USA - which used to have the rudiments of democracy but these seem to be fading along with General Motors and US world power which does not even extend to Libya, rightly or wrongly. (Gadaffi has obviously primed the African nations with money, and there are other rudimentary problems).
# posted by uv : 10:39 PM
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