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Austria must not leave CERN!

Some of you may yet not have paid any attention to the fact that I'm living, working and teaching in beautiful Vienna, capital of Austria. No surprise, as I usually don't blog about .at-specific topics on this blog. But today I have to make an exception as Austrian minister of scientific affairs Johannes Hahn recently announced – as a complete surprise to all involved parties by the way – that Austria will quit the CERN project. Naturally, a massive wave of protest has risen among Austrian scientists and a petition has been put online.

CERN explained in 3 minutes

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJFllPVIcpg[/youtube]

Even though the page is in German, signing should be quite doable. It's a simple online form, after clicking on the approval list your name is going to appear on the list of supporters which will be presented to the Austrian parliament soon – these guys are the only ones able to stop Hahn's completely erratic plan. There are plenty good reasons for this:

  • The ministry of scientific affair's budget has been raised by 15% percent this year. CERN project accounts for a mere 0,47% of that sum or, in absolute numbers: 16 mio Euros. But from 1994 to 2007 Austrian industry grossed an average total of 6 mio Euros per year via direct CERN projects.
  • The kind of experiments conducted at CERN are so expensive that one single country could hardly handle such a project. Austria has been a partner for 50 years now. The CERN is seen as the top European science cooperation showcase – being a part of that has huge benefits for a countries scientific community.
  • In the past, many great inventions were direct or indirect results of CERN: among them the world wide web, computer tomography, new cancer therapies – to name just a few. And thanks to Prof. Oberhummer I got some more I got some more numbers to put this situation into perspective: 16 Mio Euros is the sum the Austrian public railway company is currently losing – every 3 days.
cern

By the way: Albany, a much poorer country than Austria, recently applied for a CERN membership. Pls Mister Hahn, don't be short sighted. The Austrian scientific community will suffer for years from the aftermaths of this historic misjudgment! As Prof. Herman Feshbach, physics Nobel Prize winner in 2004, puts it:

Scientific prospects at CERN have never been brighter and more exciting, as the great Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project approaches its operational phase. Many years' investment in research, development, and construction are about to bear fruit. There are good reasons to anticipate discoveries that will dramatically advance our most basic understanding of what the physical world is made of, how it works, and even how it came to be. While the primary goal of CERN is to address such fundamental issues, the laboratory is also a treasury of engineering marvels. It has been a seedbed of innovation in computer and communications technology, cryogenics, and large-scale, high-tech project management. Young people learn cutting-edge skills at CERN that they take back to businesses and schools of their home countries. For these reasons I believe that CERN has yielded, and will continue to yield, excellent long-term returns on investment, just as a matter of economics, even apart from its unique scientific value. In addition, since its origins in the aftermath of World War II, CERN has been an inspiring, visible symbol of European unity and cultural vitality. It would be a great loss for Austria, and a blow to Europe and the scientific world, if short-term thinking and lack of vision caused Austria – birthplace of Ludwig Boltzmann, Erwin Schr?dinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Victor Franz Hess, and Lise Meitner – to pull out of CERN now.

Particle Hunters: the CMS-experiment at CERN

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nifTTSfqubM[/youtube]