I worked with him a long time ago in the BaBar group when a student at Manchester and have happy memories of those days. Very sad to hear this news.

“In our experience, it usually does take quite a while for prosecutors, justice departments and governments to sit up and take notice of what Private Eye has been saying all along.”

🧵4/5

Doesn’t have to be that way. Why isn’t shutting the facilities that serve other councils on the table instead? If they need them perhaps they should contribute to them by reallocating their grant funding lines.

What are those mechanisms?

The letter is not going to quell the anger in STFC physics communities. It seems to confirm they want to defund this area in favour of other areas.

From what I have read they want instead want to fund much more applied science and build lots of large compute centers.

Supposedly curiosity driven research funding is not shrinking, according to UKRi. With STFC also announcing big reductions in grant funding where then us the curiosity driven money being diverted?

She was also president of the institute of physics and resigned a few days ago.

I hope they do, but I’m unsure they do. Have heard labour supporting people saying things like physics research is a luxury we can’t afford when the nhs needs money etc.

I would guess they mean future grants. Eg the next particle physics CG is in two years and they may say the UK will withdraw from specific collaborations. So no new grants for those.

This only works if they actually care.

There is an issue too that when grants are awarded the money it now takes many months to be released, which is causing problems on long term projects where core expertise gets new funding every grant cycle and suddenly there is 3 month gap in funding. This is a new problem that started last year.

Yesterday MRC and BBSRC also announced very big cuts to their grants programs. Yet UKRI claims curiosity driven research is not being cut in favour of other things?

Depends what you use it for. In particle physics people are studying using it as an alternative to traditional simulations. Very different from generating AI slop papers.

Given the hostility to universities the sector seems to have not done enough to communicate this sort of thing.

Doesn’t mean they want a leadership drama. I didn’t like any of the Tory leaders and also didn’t like the fighting to get at the top job.

We had years of Tory leadership dramas. I think the electorate won’t be happy about yet another leadership drama.