Yesterday was a truely disastrous day for science in austria. Federal minster Hahn announced that Austria will quit its membership at CERN. His reasons are
- well, obviously he needs money (amazing 20 million euros). what a huge number in times of the financial crisis.
- Austria is a small country, CERN is a huge laboratory. Therefore the visibility of an Austrian contribution is "kind of marginal".
- He wants to focus on national projects.
So, here we are.
scientific neo-liberalism has won. From now on we will only do research if we can publish it in nature or science because the visibility of all the other publications is too marginal. From now on we will only do research if there is a clear star researcher and not an anonymous collaboration. From now on research is only valuable if the research group can manage to submit a press release. [Even if a CERN collaboration gets a noble prize that won't be good enough: We want an AUSTRIAN noble prize.]
And most of all: mia san mia. and we clearly need national research. it's dangerous this globalisation anyways.
We throw away all the know-how and knowledge which was collected during the last 50 years because now bio-tech is very trendy. and who wants to be out of fashion?
CERN is a noble place. People who work there work for CERN. That's part of the idea. You are part of a collaboration. And you put the collaboration first and not your name. CERN is a place about the fundamental structures of the nature. It has the most amazig machine to do that research and this is the common effort of thousands of people. It's not about individual nations or individuals. It's an open place. It always has been. even during the cold war.
alas, it's all so devastating.
