ESF release on tapping early universe (23 May)

[marcus]

http://www.esf.org/research-areas/physical-and-engineering-sciences/news/ext-news-singleview/article/europeans-unite-to-tap-early-universe-for-secrets-of-fundamental-physics-442.html

this release reports on the European Science Foundation exploratory meeting held
27-29 March on ASTROPHYSICAL TESTS OF FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS
(announced here: http://www.astro.up.pt/investigacao/conferencias/esf2008/ )
which basically was looking at the diminishing returns of further earthbase collider work and thinking about policy directions for the future where instead of building bigger accelerators you turn to the universe and put more sophisticated instruments in orbit

So they got together a lot of European particle physics people and astrophysics and science policy/funding people and tried to scope it out

and Carlos Martin, the main organizer, gave a summary of the conclusions in this 23 May report

Good indicator of how things are going.

[wolram]

Good and bad news, they are going to do what they should have years ago, but on a reduced budget, the spaced based experiments may be pie in the sky, or at least for decades.

[Chronos]

I think this is a rational decision. The universe provides incredibly energetic colliders for free. We merely need to invest in better instruments to observe the results.