Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
Q20 Mr Flello: Indeed, thank you for
that. The funding for Aurora may have come at the expense of other
projects. Is that a reasonable statement to make and if the Aurora
funding has come at the expense of other projects would Bepi-Columbo
be a good example of one that it has come from?
Professor Mason: No, Bepi-Columbo
is entirely decoupled from funding for Aurora. The situation on
Bepi-Columbo and the difficulties that I believe you are alluding
to that we have in funding it in the UK really stem from the Spending
Review 2004 and the fact that within the PPARC budget there was
a lot of money for science in the Spending Review 2004 but it
was all aimed at fixing the infrastructure, which needed fixing,
and I am quite happy with that. Apart from this ear-marked money
for Aurora there was no increase in the baseline for the rest
of the PPARC programme, which effectively means that the volume
of the programme is declining by twice the rate of inflation because
the subscription element is protected. In those circumstances
we just do not have the level of resource that we really need
in order to service programmes like Bepi-Columbo, which means
that we have to make hard choices, as I said earlier. We are funding
involvement in Bepi-Columbo, but only at half the rate that we
thought we really needed to.
Q21 Mr Flello: In terms of the capabilities
developed by the Beagle project, how can PPARC ensure that they
are fed into the Aurora programme?
Professor Mason: Despite the fact
that Beagle did not work it ultimately was a huge success in bringing
up our capabilities in this sort of area. I do not think we could
have really been a serious player within Aurora without the capability
that was generated by Beagle, so we have raised the bar in terms
of capability, we are using the expertise of the people who developed
Beagle and we want to feed those into Aurora to make sure that
we have a very strong role there.
Q22 Mr Flello: In terms of the longer
term funding of projects and long lead times for many projects,
do you feel that PPARC responds sufficiently flexibly to the opportunities,
or do you think that the necessary lead time makes that impossible?
Professor Mason: This is a long-standing
problem of course and we must put ourselves in the situation where
we can both plan for these long term opportunities which will
be the ground-breaking opportunities in 10, 20, 30 years time,
but also retain sufficient flexibility to be responsive when new
developments come up. For example, over the past few years we
have discovered that there is a whole new component of the universe
that we did not realise was there, dark energy, which actually
dominates the whole universe in terms of the amount of energy
that is involved, and we clearly cannot be so fixed in our goals
that we cannot respond to such a major discovery, and we are doing
so, we are adapting the powers that we have in order to take this
into account, in order to address these problems and make progress
with them. It is a continual balancing act and within PPARC we
have to develop the discipline so that we are not short-termists
and we are not long-termists but we have some sort of middle ground
which allows us to take a considered view of the whole programme
and make sure that we are active in all of these areas.
Q23 Mr Flello: It is interesting you
referred to dark energy rather than dark matter.
Professor Mason: We still have
not solved that one and then we have got another one to solve.
Q24 Mr Flello: I just wanted to return
to a point you were discussing a few moments back about the industrial
return to UK companies and their positioning and, obviously, the
likes of Alcatal in Italy benefit from their largest contribution.
There was a deficit in terms of UK companies' return from the
ESA subscription; is that still the case and why did that develop,
what was the reason behind that?
Professor Mason: First of all
let me clarify that for Aurora it is a subscription programme,
so there is a very hard link between what you put in and what
you get back, so the under-return issue will not arise in Aurora.
There has been an under-return in the ESA mandatory science programme,
which is improving but it is still not as good as we would want.
It is a matter of concern as to why this has arisen and, ultimately,
because these contracts are awarded in competition it means there
are industries not competing with the rest of Europe and we need
to address that. It is beyond the PPARC remit, but we need to
seriously look as to what sort of R&D and underpinning investment
goes into these areas in industry in order to prepare them to
be competitive, because we have a different way of doing things
in the UK compared to many other European countries, it is not
a level playing field, so we have to look and see what is there.
The other issue is just marshalling industry, making them aware
of the opportunities and making them aware that they put their
resources in, they see the market opportunities, and they see
the spin-out benefits to their own performance that can be gained
by working in these areas. What PPARC can do is to work in that
area to make sure that industry is aware of what our requirements
are, what the requirements of the science programme are going
to be so that they are in a position to know that they can prepare.
We cannot force them to prepare, but we can certainly provide
them with the information.
Chairman: We will return to this in just
a second, but can I just bring you in quickly, Bob?
Q25 Bob Spink: What a wonderful and challenging
concept you just gave us when you said go to Mars and see climate
change in action. Do you think that by going up there and investigating
Mars we will be able to find any sort of causal process for that
climate change, for instance, what part carbon might have played
in that? Do you think this is a very useful area of investigation?
Professor Mason: It is, because
we are clearly very concerned about the evidence for climate change
on the earth, and if you look and see what that evidence is based
on, it is both measurement and modelling. People are developing
quite sophisticated but still on the scale of nature quite crude
models of how the earth's climate system is behaving and how it
will respond to a number of stimuli. The problem with doing modelling
is that you have got to test those models, you have got to validate
them, and the problem with the earth is that there is only one
of it and so it is how it is. You cannot tweak it and say what
would it be like if I had done this or done that, so the only
way to do that is to look at other planets, and both Venus and
Mars have a role to play in that. The whole concept of greenhouse
warming came from trying to understand Venus—that was where
I first heard the term, in the context of Venus in the 1960s.
We have a probe that is on its way to Venus, Venus Express, which
will begin to examine the Venus climate system and, essentially,
make measurements which give you another point to validate our
model. So if you tweak things in the way that we see they are
on Venus, do our models predict what Venus looks like? Likewise,
we can do the same with Mars and say in these circumstances would
we have expected Mars to have lost its atmosphere over the five
billion years of its existence, what would we have expected to
happen to surface water et cetera. That is where the value of
these investigations lies, they give us other examples that we
can use to validate our models of the earth.
Q26 Mr Flello: You talk in terms of what
could be done to change the deficit in terms of the ESA subscription
and I was just wondering what is actually happening now rather
than what could be done?
Professor Mason: That is what
we are doing and this comes down to the knowledge transfer agenda
which I guess we will come onto.
Q27 Dr Turner: You have a roadmap identifying
the large facilities for the future; how effective do you think
this process is? Do you, for instance, think you will be able
to fund all PPARC projects that you have got on your list, or
are some of them going to have to be expendable?
Professor Mason: The idea of a
roadmap is that it is not the list of things you would buy; it
is the list of things that allows you to construct a causal programme.
The purpose of the roadmap is to identify opportunities and to
enable a process which then decides as to which of those opportunities
you go after. A lot of factors come into that, for example, timescale
and money being two very important ones but also the scientific
benefit, the scientific direction that you want to move in. This
comes back to the issue that we have that I mentioned at the beginning,
that a number of these facilities are actually global facilities,
so we not only have to understand what we are doing in the UK
but we also have to understand what we are doing globally, we
have to build consensus, and unless we have a roadmap which identifies
our needs and the possible needs, then it is impossible to go
and have a sensible discussion with international partners about
what we actually do.
Q28 Dr Turner: If you have to drop anything
from your wish list, what would be the first to go?
Professor Mason: That is an impossible
question to answer because it depends on the circumstances. Just
to give you an example, there are three large facilities that
we are thinking about—very large, global facilities—the
International Linear Collider, extremely large telescopes and
a very large Radio Array. The reality is that the world cannot
afford to do all three at the same time, so the issue is what
order you do them in and that is something that has to be established
by consensus with all the partners involved because clearly the
UK cannot decide it wants to go down one road and somebody else
decide the other, so it is not a matter of which do you drop from
the list, we want to do them all at some stage, but it is a question
of what order you do them in. That is what we are working on now;
in the case of all three of those projects we are in the stage
of actually defining what is required to construct them, what
technology will need to be used, what is the readiness of that
technology which sets the timescale and, therefore, what is the
cost. That will determine when we can do them.
Q29 Dr Turner: The UK is continuing its
tradition of building detectors or massive colliders and we are
building ATLAS and CMS for the Large Hadron Collider. Are these
projects on time and on budget?
Professor Mason: They are certainly
on time. The goal is to start operation of the LHC in 2007 and,
just as an aside, I had the privilege of visiting CERN just before
Christmas and actually seeing these things coming together. They
are absolutely amazing; 26 kilometres of magnets to focus this
beam which is only a micron wide and these massive battleship
detectors that fill these huge caverns. It is absolutely incredible.
Enthusiasm aside, they are on track to start operation in 2007,
there will be some upgrades that are required to bring them up
to the full spec and it is no secret that the LHC is costing somewhat
more than was the original estimate, which means that we are essentially
going to be paying for it until 2009-10, but it is such a challenging,
technical thing I do not think we should be surprised by that
and, in fact, the amazing thing is that it is only 10% over budget,
rather than a factor of two like the American project which got
cancelled once. These are very, very difficult problems and it
takes a lot of bright people a lot of effort to actually get to
where we have got.
Q30 Bob Spink: I am going to talk about
the International Linear Collider, and I just want to return to
astronomy very briefly at the end. Has a location been decided
yet?
Professor Mason: No.
Q31 Bob Spink: Where do you think it
will be?
Professor Mason: My guess would
be in the US.
Q32 Bob Spink: What are the major obstacles
to it actually happening?
Professor Mason: We are in the
process, as I said earlier, of doing a technical definition. We
have chosen a technology and now there is a design study going
ahead which, by the end of the decade, will tell us whether it
is feasible, what we need to do and what it is going to cost.
The main obstacle to getting it done is cost.
Q33 Bob Spink: This design stage, the
engineering design, it is targeted for 2008, is it not, and to
build it by 2015?
Professor Mason: 2008 to 2009
is when the technical design study is supposed to be finished.
Another element that will have to be fed into that is the first
results from the LHC because that will fine tune the physics that
we think we need to do, which will feed back into the technical
development. By 2010 I hope we will have both that plus the initial
results of LHC and then we could go ahead and build it; the earliest
possible time that it could be ready is 2015, but my guess is
that it will be somewhat later than that because of the financial
pressures.
Q34 Bob Spink: Is the UK really getting
involved in the engineering design phase? Is it being carved up
so that little modules are done by different teams, or are all
teams looking at everything? Can you explain how that is working?
Professor Mason: A project office
has been set up with a project director, so the whole thing is
being orchestrated from there, and that is currently located in
the US. There is a European centre too looking at specific aspects
of the programme, so it is not quite all being divided up but
it is being done in logical units. The UK is concentrating on
specific elements and the other thing we are doing is developing
capacity and capability. We have funded accelerator centres—
Q35 Bob Spink: Are we going to be able
to do that sufficiently to play a continuing part in this when
it is properly up and running?
Professor Mason: Yes, absolutely,
that is our aim. If we did not feel that we could do that we would
not do it at all.
Q36 Bob Spink: When you bang the electrons
into the positrons, what actually happens? Why are we doing that?
What do we hope to get out of this?
Professor Mason: This is straying
beyond my field, I should say, but basically what you are doing
is creating a very small region which has a very, very high energy
density, so at those very high energy densities you are essentially
trying to duplicate the conditions of the beginning of the universe
and the Big Bang, where the particles that are stable under normal
conditions cease to be stable and you see a different state, you
see their components. That is the essence of what you do with
one of these colliders, the LHC is the same. You create these
very small volumes of very high energy density so that matter
and the particles that make up matter revert to their virgin state,
if you like, and you can understand where they come from and how
they work.
Q37 Bob Spink: The Neutrino Factory is
even more complicated. You have the decay of the muon that creates
this intense beam of neutrinos.
Professor Mason: You know more
about it than I do.
Q38 Bob Spink: Is this going to be located
in the UK? Should it be?
Professor Mason: It could be if
we played our cards right and those cards would need to be funding
to put the infrastructure and the R&D in place in order to
give us the world lead on that.
Q39 Bob Spink: The total cost is estimated
to be £2 billion. If it is located in the UK it would be
about £1 billion, 50%, and if we just take part in it and
it is located somewhere else it is £200 million, so the marginal
cost to us having it is £800 million. Would that be worth
it? What extra value could we get for that best part of £1
billion?
Professor Mason: It could well
be worth it; the extra value is essentially that the focus of
the activity is in the UK. This goes back to what I was saying
earlier, that what we want to do is to ensure that the UK is a
centre of excellence in this field so that we do attract all the
things that gravitate to a centre of excellence which means the
best people and the best ideas. These activities generate an economy
all of their own around them, and a good example which I always
use, going back to the space business, is ESTEC in the Netherlands.
We could have had ESTEC in the UK in the 1960s, but there was
a decision taken not to host it. If you see now what the benefit
of having that centre in the Netherlands is to the economy of
that local area, it is huge. The real benefit is having the people
and the activity centred on the UK so that it acts as a focus
for our own scientists.
Bob Spink: I would hope that you are
pushing on an open door, in this Committee at least on that. Going
back to space and astronomy, what is PPARC doing to try to make
sure that we get involvement in our secondary schools right the
way across this country?
Chairman: Can we just leave that until
a little bit later, Bob, because we are going to deal with the
whole of science in society a bit later if that is okay. Could
I move on now to our financial guru, Brooks.
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