🚀 go-pugleaf

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/04/28/ecfgravb28.xml
"Did Einstein get all his sums right?.....Last week, an American probe
began an 18-month mission to put Einstein's prediction to the test, 90
years after he unveiled his ideas in Berlin. Gravity Probe B was
blasted into space from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on
a Boeing Delta 2 rocket and will orbit the Earth for more than a year.
The $700 million joint mission between Nasa and Stanford University,
conceived in 1958, uses four of the most perfect spheres ever created
inside the world's largest Thermos flask to detect minute distortions
in the fabric of the universe.....Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer
Royal, said: "The project's a technical triumph, and a triumph of the
persistence and lobbying power of Stanford University. But its
gestation has been grotesquely prolonged, and the cost overruns have
been equally gross. I recall hearing a talk about the project from
Francis Everitt (principal investigator) when I was still a student -
and it was already well advanced. "Back in the 1960s the evidence for
Einstein's theory was meagre - just two tests, with 10 per cent
precision. But relativity is now confirmed by several tests, with
precision of one part in 10,000. It's still, in principle, good to
have new and different tests. But the level of confidence in
Einstein's theory is now so high that an announcement of the expected
result will 'fork no lightening'. "Moreover, if there's an unexpected
result, I suspect most people will suspect an error in this very
challenging experiment rather than immediately abandon Einstein:
There's now so much evidence corroborating Einstein, that a high
burden of proof is required before he'll be usurped by any rival
theory. "So the most exciting - if un-alluring - outcome of Gravity
Probe B would be a request by Stanford University for another huge sum
of money to repeat it."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,2245044,00.html
"No cash rescue for physics funding crisis. The Science and Technology
Facilities Council (STFC) will not receive any funding to plug the
£80m shortfall in its budget over the next three years, research
council chiefs have confirmed....The Science and Technology Facilities
Council (STFC), is the key public funding body for physics in the
UK.....Leading physicists have expressed outrage at the STFC's
decision to cut the number of university grants by 25% as a
consequence of its deficit, saying the loss in funding could cause
some university physics departments to close."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w
Silly Walks Applicant: "Well sir, I have a silly walk and I'd like to
obtain a Government grant to help me develop it....I think that with
Government backing I could make it very silly." Silly Walks Director:
"Mr Pudey, the very real problem is one of money. I'm afraid that the
Ministry of Silly Walks is no longer getting the kind of support it
needs. You see there's Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing,
Education, Silly Walks ... they're all supposed to get the same. But
last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of Silly Walks
than it did on National Defence! Now we get 348,000,000 a year, which
is supposed to be spent on all our available products."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2271596,00.html
"A ray of hope. "How do you solve a problem like physics?" is a
question that has confounded the government and funding councils for
considerably longer than finding the musical heroine Maria. A string
of university science department closures, culminating in the axing of
Reading University's physics department in 2006, led to fevered
warnings from the Institute of Physics about the threat to the
subject. As departments went to the wall, both the government and the
funding council had their knuckles rapped by the Commons science
select committee for failing to act. The higher education minister,
Bill Rammell, was forced to insist there was no "science crisis" and
that the government had no right to meddle in any case. Sir Howard
Newby, then chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council
for England, even went as far as to say: "We intervene in this process
with some caution and even at some peril." Today, the funding council
is intervening enthusiastically in the physics market - under its new
motto "Hefce sustains science" - with a £12.5m initiative to link up
six university physics departments in the south-east of England.
"[Reading] was the final straw as far as Hefce was concerned," says
Professor Malcolm Coe, head of physics at Southampton University.
"There had been a steady flow of 10 or 12 departments closing down. It
was time to try to stabilise the situation and figure out what the
problem was and how to address it."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com