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Dear Colleagues, First, let's plan to meet together after the wine and cheese on Thursday at the Brookhaven meeting. I will ask Sally about an appropriate location, on or off site. Now to the important point of this message: I am reporting an item from the phone meeting of the Snowmass conveners that took place today. There is also homework for you. Steve Ritz and Jonathan Feng had the idea that it would be useful to pose sharp questions for each frontier and for issues that overlap frontiers. They gave this request to their group of Cosmic Frontier working group conveners. I attach the list of questions generated by this exercise as a plain text file. Some of these questions are very sharp. Steve Ritz characterized them as "The questions should produce discomfort, but they should promote productive rather than unproductive discussion." These questions are mostly on the physics frontiers, but sharp questions could also be asked to Instrumentation, Facilities, and Computing. The reaction of the conveners group to these questions was very positive. The general reaction was that Snowmass should try to provide answers to these questions. I think that the questions to the Energy Frontier groups (HE1-6) enunciate well things that I hear people asking. Many of these are issues that your groups are already working on. But it is one thing to have them on your list of questions, and it another thing to be told that leaders of other Frontiers would like to hear the answers. The conveners group imagined two uses for such lists of questions, first, to bring forward questions that must be addressed in the working group reports, second, to suggest that sessions at the Minneapolis meeting should be devoted to discussion of these issues. We were all asked to go to our working group leaders and obtain similar lists of questions, which could then be merged and used in these ways. So, please begin to make your own lists of sharp questions about issues for the future of HEP. If you send these to me and Chip, we will assemble the list and iterate it back to the group for approval. Don't pull punches; if we feel that a question is too harsh, we can scale it back in a later iteration. The due date for completion is mid-April. Please send your first round of suggestions soon so that we can discuss a first complied list when we get together at Brookhaven. Thank you, Michael ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael E. Peskin [log in to unmask] HEP Theory Group, MS 81 ------- SLAC National Accelerator Lab. phone: 1-(650)-926-3250 2575 Sand Hill Road fax: 1-(650)-926-2525 Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA www.slac.stanford.edu/~mpeskin/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ######################################################################## Use REPLY-ALL to reply to list To unsubscribe from the SNOWMASS-EF list, click the following link: https://listserv.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SNOWMASS-EF&A=1