Date published: 2011/05/13
The BBC says:
Deep funding cuts could put the UK's prominence in astronomy and particle physics at risk, MPs have said.
The Science and Technology Committee says astronomy funding will fall by 20% over four years - the science budget's average real-terms cut was 14.5%.
The MPs say some of the resulting cuts are likely to deter leading scientists from working in the UK.
...
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who is president of the Institute of Physics, gave evidence to the MPs that these projects could be reinstated for a relatively small amount of money."It only takes £2-3m to keep several Northern Hemisphere telescopes operating," she told BBC News. "The amount seems to me remarkably little and I observed when we met with the select committee that it would be no more than a banker's bonus."
It is embarrassing that someone like Bell Burnell would make such a pathetic argument. If you take any budget and split it into smaller and smaller pieces then eventually you get to the point that any given piece of the budget "only" costs a few million pounds and so should allegedly remain. It completely misses the point that the total budget is (in effect) being cut and so some budgetary items therefore have to be cut. Astronomy, and particle physics, like everything else paid for by the UK government, has to justify why it should be given the money it is given, and it should do so with real, not fatuous, arguments. (Well, unfortunately with astronomy, and particle physics, there is no really good reason to fund it, other than that it deals with somewhat sexy "fundamental" science, but that argument wears thin after awhile.)
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