Is British physics in crisis? You might have thought so, judging by the recent laments of astronomers at threats to curtail projects and withdraw from international facilities. Yet a new report prepared for Research Councils UK by a team chaired by Bill Wakeham, vice chancellor of Southampton University, says the subject is in a "generally good state of health."
This is not a whitewash. British physicists produce more publications per capita of population than any country bar Germany and the Netherlands, and their university departments enjoy international prestige. So what's the problem?
At root, it's that astronomy and particle physics each cost more than most of the other branches of the discipline put together. This is partly why these two fields have their own research council, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). Much of its expenditure is on subscriptions to institutions such as Cern, the European Space Agency and astronomical telescopes, all of which amounted to £154m in 2006-7.
In late 2007 the STFC admitted to a shortfall of £80m, and announced cutbacks that threatened many astronomical projects. British astronomers were angered not just by the cuts but by the high-handed way they were introduced. The Wakeham report acknowledges that, expressing concern at the STFC's "ability to engage with the broad community it serves." The furore, it says, damaged Britain's international reputation, irrespective of what holes the funding changes might eventually leave. It goes on to question the STFC's management structure, currently itself under review. Unusually, four of the ten council members are not university-based academics.
Yet the report is a welcome reminder that there is more to physics than the Large Hadron Collider. Indeed, most of the revenue from "physics-based sectors," estimated at £70bn in 2005, doubtless comes from activities outside the remit of the STFC. The report says that standard measures of academic merit, such as citation statistics, tend to "corral academics into specific clusters of research activity" that aren't necessarily those with the biggest economic impact. Science is not about making money, but it's worth asking whether academic priorities risk distorting its broader social obligations.
Particle physics gets the gongs
All the same, the particle physicists got the gongs this year. The Nobel committee's choice was seen by some observers as almost wilfully recondite, rewarding Japanese researchers for their study of "spontaneous symmetry breaking" in subatomic physics. But that just goes to show how poorly physics has explained itself. The prevailing perception is that the subject is a ragbag of theories and observations, mostly about black holes and new particles, hampered by the persistent failure to unify quantum theory with an understanding of gravity.
But the Nobel award speaks to the one genuinely unifying concept of modern physics, one which applies equally to, say, magnetism, the atomic nucleus, and the early rapid inflation of the universe. Symmetry breaking is the process in which a single entity—a force or particle, for instance—splits into two or more distinct ones. In mathematical terms, this demise of unity corresponds to a reduction in overall symmetry.
The concept even applies in biology—a human being, for example, emerges from a spherical single cell. Symmetry breaking is also the means by which the elusive Higgs boson gives other particles their mass. Simply put, it is why there are lots of things instead of one single thing. It is time physicists figured out how to convey this story properly.
An old controversy laid to rest
In all honesty, the Nobels delight the most when they come spiced with controversy. This year's prize for medicine didn't disappoint, with half of the award going to French biologists Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for discovering the Aids virus HIV. (The other half went to Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the human papilloma viruses responsible for cervical cancer.)
It is rather astonishing that the discovery of HIV has not been rewarded before, but it may be due to the difficulty of assigning credit. Nobody questions that the work of Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi in the early 1980s was pivotal; the issue is whether it was more so than that of researchers led by Robert Gallo of the US National Institutes of Health.
Montagnier and Gallo had a very public row over priority. The French researchers isolated the virus in 1983 from the lymph nodes of patients in the early stages of Aids, but definitive evidence for its causative role in the disease came only in subsequent work by Gallo. The row was not purely academic; also at stake were patents for HIV testing procedures. In 1987 Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac were asked to broker a compromise, which ended with the biologists agreeing to share credit.
Some scientists were surprised by the decision to omit Gallo. But it doesn't seem likely to re-open old wounds—Gallo has accepted it with good grace, while Montagnier has expressed regret that his old adversary was passed over.
