Wednesday, December 16, 2009

UK Physics Hit With "Savage" Cuts

Rather depressing news coming out of the United Kingdom and their science funding in general. Severe cuts in the physics funding will cause UK to withdraw from several prominent research programs.

Savage cuts have been made to the UK's physics research programme that will see the country withdraw from over 25 leading international projects in astronomy, nuclear physics, particle physics and space science. The cuts were announced today by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which is facing a £40m shortfall in funding. The cash crisis will see the UK pull out of the ALICE experiment at CERN, axe funding for the Boulby Mine in Yorkshire, which is searching for dark matter, and withdraw from the European X-ray Free Electron Laser project at the DESY lab in Hamburg.


This sounds rather devastating. The bad news coming out of the UK doesn't seem to let up these past few years, including the state of A-level education over there. One can only speculate the ramifications on UK science from this act.

Zz.

1 comment:

Huw Bowen said...

Our government badly misunderstands science and technology - they're all a bunch of humanities graduates, sadly. It's a very depressing situation for anybody who cares about science in the UK.