Story thread · 3 reports / 2 sources

Science funding cuts will harm Britain’s global standing | Letters

theguardian.com · 8dShare

Readers respond to an editorial about the threat to research funding, including plans to close the Jodrell Bank Observatory Your editorial rightly criticises the decision to cease funding the Lovell telescope from March 2028 ( The Guardian view on the Lovell telescope: budget cuts to physics are bad science and worse politics, 31 July ). There are additional reasons why this decision is so shortsighted. Modern astronomy is no longer simply physics. It brings together physics, chemistry, biology and computing to understand how the universe evolved and where we came from. The universe is an inexpensive laboratory in which we can study the interaction of physical, chemical and biological processes under conditions that can never be reproduced on Earth. Understanding how galaxies formed and evolved requires complementary observations across the radio, optical and infrared spectrum. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As a PhD researcher at Jodrell Bank in the 1960s, I saw first

First report: The Guardian view on the Lovell telescope: budget cuts to physics are bad science and worse politics | Editorial — theguardian.com, 11d