Archive for Cormac O’Raifeartaigh

Ireland and CERN

Posted in Maynooth, Politics, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 30, 2022 by telescoper

Not long ago I posted an item about Ireland’s potential membership of CERN. There seems to have been some progress at political levels in this direction. In Mid-December, the Seanad called for a detailed proposal for CERN membership to be drawn up. More recently still, Minister Simon Harris has indicated that he will bring such a proposal to Cabinet on the matter.

There’s an article in yesterday’s Irish Times by Cormac O’Raifeartaigh reviewing the situation.

As I understand things, if the Irish Government were to decide to take Ireland into CERN then it would first have to become an Associate Member, which would cost around €1.5 million per year. That’s a modest contribution, and the financial returns to Irish industry and universities are likely to far exceed that. This Associate member stage would last up to 5 years, and then to acquire full membership a joining fee of around €16.8 million would have to be paid, though that could be spread out over ten years, along with an annual contribution of around €13.5m.

While I support the idea of Ireland joining CERN I feel obliged to stress my concerns. The most important of these is that there seems to me to be a real danger that the Government would simply appropriate funding for CERN membership from within existing programmes leaving even less for other forms of scientific research. In order to reap the scientific reward of CERN membership the Government will have to invest the additional resources needed to exploit the access to facilities membership would provide. Without a related increase in research grant funding for basic science, the opportunity to raise the level of scientific activity in Ireland would be lost and science overall may end up worse off.

Ireland recently joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a decision which gave Irish astronomers access to some amazing telescopes. However, there is no sign at all of Irish funding agencies responding to this opportunity by increasing funding for academic time, postdocs and graduate students needed to do the actual science. In one respect ESO is very like CERN: the facilities do not themselves do the science. We need people to do that. CERN membership could turn out to be like a very expensive Christmas gift that looks very exciting until you open the box and find that the batteries are not included.

P.S. At least Cormac’s employers in Waterford have been quick off the mark in exploiting the potential of CERN by renaming their entire institution after it…

3 Comments »

One Hundred Years of the Cosmological Constant: from ‘Superfluous Stunt’ to Dark Energy

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on November 21, 2017 by telescoper

Some months ago I did a little post on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the cosmological constant which included a link to the original paper on this subject by Albert Einstein. A nice thread of well-informed comments followed that post and one of the contributors to that thread, Cormac O’Raifeartaigh, is lead author of a paper that has just appeared on the arXiv. It’s quite a lengthy paper (62 pages) that gives an account of the cosmological constant in the context of modern observational cosmology. You can get a PDF of the paper here. It’s well worth reading!

The abstract reads:

We present a centennial review of the history of the term known as the cosmological constant. First introduced to the general theory of relativity by Einstein in 1917 in order to describe a universe that was assumed to be static, the term fell from favour in the wake of the discovery of cosmic the expanding universe, only to make a dramatic return in recent times. We consider historical and philosophical aspects of the cosmological constant over four main epochs: (i) the use of the term in static cosmologies (both Newtonian and relativistic; (ii) the marginalization of the term following the discovery of cosmic expansion; (iii) the use of the term to address specific cosmic puzzles such as the timespan of expansion, the formation of galaxies and the redshifts of the quasars; (iv) the re-emergence of the term in today’s Lamda-CDM cosmology. We find that the cosmological constant was never truly banished from theoretical models of the universe, but was sidelined by astronomers for reasons of convenience. We also find that the return of the term to the forefront of modern cosmology did not occur as an abrupt paradigm shift due to one particular set of observations, but as the result of a number of empirical advances such as the measurement of present cosmic expansion using the Hubble Space Telescope, the measurement of past expansion using type SN 1a supernovae as standard candles, and the measurement of perturbations in the cosmic microwave background by balloon and satellite. We give a brief overview of contemporary interpretations of the physics underlying the cosmic constant and conclude with a synopsis of the famous cosmological constant problem.

7 Comments »