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That every man has the keys to heaven, and those same keys open hell. Paraphrasing, hope I didn't butcher it.

Feynman was quoting someone, probably a Buddhist.

The Meaning of It All - Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, By RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

Once in Hawaii I was taken to see a Buddhist temple. In the temple a man said, "I am going to tell you something that you will never forget." And then he said, "To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell."

And so it is with science. In a way it is a key to the gates of heaven, and the same key opens the gates of hell, and we do not have any instructions as to which is which gate. Shall we throw away the key and never have a way to enter the gates of heaven? Or shall we struggle with the problem of which is the best way to use the key? That is, of course, a very serious question, but I think that we cannot deny the value of the key to the gates of heaven.

Feynman didn't shy away from making religious references as above, or addressing religion as shown below.

THE RELATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION - Some fresh observations on an old problem, by RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

There's one that spins so fast it's more like a discus than a classical sphere, named Haumea. The only one so far discovered that's (arguably) larger than Pluto is Eris, and that's considering a margin of +/-30km.

Source: The most complete list ANYWHERE.

You win!
  Here's a map of California earthquakes for the last week:
http://scedc.caltech.edu/recen...

Well... This website says that it is 207 million kilometers from earth. Probably unreliable though... http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu... (spitzer.caltech.edu) Hmfff... What could they know.

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: figure 37.3, page 1014 of "Gravitation", by Misner, Thorne & Wheeler (classical text on general relativity).

Long answer: this thesis..

In other words, it requires GRT to be correct. Which is precisely the point.

The idea of the experiment is described in Misner et al (Gravitation, Misner/Thorne/Wheeler), and a comprehensive explanation of the LIGO experiment is given here, in this Caltech course. But feel free to disprove Kip Thorne and all the others professional physicists who have been working on this experiment for decades, by all means.

First, instead of linking a page that gives you eye strain and is generally a boil on the ass of the internet, please link to the actual source, as has been pointed out before.

And second, I think this link (the one mentioned above, not the one in TFS) should go to as many leaders of state as possible, just to help them put their own imagined importance into perspective.

And the page with download links for the full-res images (468M-1.38G in size)
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu...

Here is the real link.

I agree with another comment that what you are experiencing is a consequence of supply relative to demand for academic labor. This reflects a "big crunch" in the words of Dr. David Goodstein from 1994, then vice-provost of Caltech. He testified to Congress about this then too. Essentially, US academia had been growing exponentially since around 1900, but that era of exponential growth stopped in the 1970s, yet the production of PhDs continued at an exponential rate. There are other consequences of this trend, including "creeping credentialism" in all areas of US American life, including the social need for a college degree (or even sometimes masters now) as screening for the most basic entry-level jobs. I feel one answer to the pyramid scheme nature of all this is a "basic income" for all, because then anyoen who wanted to research or teach could live like a present day graduate student, but without the new to kowtow to a specific academic hierarchy just to survive economically (publishing in prestigious journals or getting access to expensive lab equipment might be a different issue...)

From the Goodstein article:
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover, much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights sent a whole generation back to college transforming the United States from a nation of elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education. Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education. The American academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and technology. The expanding academic world in 1950-1970 created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D.s, whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American corporations such as AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to create or expand their central research laboratories to solve technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal government itself established a network of excellent national laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities for aspiring scientists. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless continuation of a hundred years of exponential growth of American science. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research. To make matters worse, the country is almost 5 trillion dollars in debt, and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary spending left in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands about impending shortages of trained scientific

The quote I used comes at the conclusion of a mathematical demonstration - here's the link. I've now had the time to read the new paper (TFA), and they actually credit Feynman right at the start for having the general insight. Feynman's discussion is for a single uncertainty relation (position and momentum for a "particle" composed of a finite wave train), while TFA is broadly general and cached in terms of the modern entropy-based approached to uncertainty. So I think you're right, in that Feynman's treatment can't really be called a "framework" - it only deals with a single problem.

Really the only problem here is gross overstatement in TFS...but what else is new.

I don't know about the parent, but Feynman explained this one to me years ago. (See Feynman Lectures, Volume 3, Section 2-2).

The base-pair sequence of DNA determines its biological function. As you say, this sequence determines what kinds of proteins get made, including their exact shape (and more broadly how they behave).

But TFA is talking about the conformation (shape) of the DNA strand itself, not the protein structures that the DNA strand is used to make.

In living organisms, the long DNA molecule always forms a double-helix, irrespective of the base-pair sequence within the DNA. DNA double helices do actually twist and wrap into larger-scale structures: specifically by wrapping around histones, and then twisting into larger helices that eventually form chromosomes. There are hints that the DNA sequence itself is actually important in controlling how this twisting/packing happens (with ongoing research about how (innapropriately-named) "junk DNA" plays a crucial role). However, despite this influence between sequence and super-structure, DNA strands essentially are just forming double-helices at the lowest level: i.e. two complementary DNA strands are pairing up to make a really-long double-helix.

What TFA is talking about is a field called "DNA nanotechnology", where researchers synthesize non-natural DNA sequences. If cleverly designed, these sequences will, when they do their usual base-pairing, form a structure more complex than the traditional "really-long double-helix". The structures that are designed do not occur naturally. People have created some really complex structures, made entirely using DNA. Again, these are structures made out of DNA (not structures that DNA generates). You can see some examples by searching for "DNA origami". E.g. one of the famous structures was to create a nano-sized smiley face; others have 3D geometric shapes, nano-boxes and bottles, gear-like constructs, and all kinds of other things.

The 'trick' is to violate the assumptions of DNA base-pairing that occur in nature. In living cells, DNA sequences are created as two long complementary strands, which pair up with each other. The idea in DNA nanotechnology is to create an assortment of strands. None of the strands are perfectly complementary to each other, but 'sub-regions' of some strands are complementary to 'sub-regions' on other strands. As they start pairing-up with each other, this creates cross-connections between all the various strands. The end result (if your design is done correctly) is that the strands spontaneously form a ver well-defined 3D structure, with nanoscale precision. The advantage of this "self-assembly" is that you get billions of copies of the intended structure forming spontaneously and rapidly. Very cool stuff.

This kind of thing has been ongoing since 2006 at least. TFA erroneously implies that this most recent publication invented the field. Actually, this most recent publication is some nice work about how the design process can be made more robust (and software-automated). So, it's a fine paper, but certainly not the first demonstration of artificial 3D DNA nano-objects.

It's "Caltech." Not "Cal Tech." http://www.caltech.edu/

My main point is not to argue for more copyright; it is to say that, like Rodney Dangerfield, API designers "no respect". :-)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R...

Granted, so many APIs suck for all the reasons the Google engineer said they were hard to make that it's understandable why people don't respect them. It's like how general tankers in World of Tank have so little respect for Artillery (another hard job). :-)
http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/i...
"Arty seems like the best choice to blame at for some idiot players who have no idea where to go in battle and cock up the whole battle. Arty is not air strike, it takes time to aim and reload, most importantly, i cant shoot at target that i cant even see on my map. For those noobs who always blame at other player in order to feel good abt their own IQ, stop pissing ppl off and learn how to play."

I get the feeling you perhaps have not designed any complex software more than one, especially software libraries intended to be supported for years? Otherwise you might not so easily dismiss the creative challenge of creating good APIs. Sure, implementations may require hard work up front, but a sucky API generally creates massive amounts of hard work for everyone else for years to come. A bad API in that sense is much, much worse than a bad implementation, which as Linux shows, can be fairly easily replaced eventually. While it may look trivial, creating a good API demands immense amounts of understanding of the problem space, the limits of computers, the user community, and so on, including imagining future needs. And choosing the right simplification can be the hardest, most creative act of all -- which is just as true for programmers as it is for painters, novelists, architects, screenwriters, illustrators, actors, and so on.

Actually, it is more and more rare that someone can get anyone to pay something for what want to get paid for in the USA. See for example, from the 1990s by the then Vice Provost of Caltech
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ..."

Sure, you can always point to funding successes, but as a successful percentage of aspirants, the odds get longer and longer with more qualified people and less global-scale opportunities as big winners dominate the landscape.

BTW, people did get funding for creating triple stores and similar thing, just not me (not that I ever tried to raise funding for the Pointrel System, in part because I wanted it to be free and open source).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Besides, in a world of so much potential plenty, why make people justify what they want to do based on the possibility that "investors" who are already financially obese can monopolize it for a profit? Also, in a supposed democracy, why should a system like "Freedombox" get the left-overs while phones and tablets full of essentially spyware get vast amounts of money poured into them?
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...

But regardless of funding issues, this whole case shows how valuable the Java API had become, given Google took such pains to use it exactly... Part of the value of that API was the immense amounts of marketing put into Java by IBM and Sun for a decade (given Java sucked at the start, and is not that great even now although it has become OK-ish after vast investments). For good or bad, Oracle bought that Java asset, including communit

like most of the people with a loose grip on reality

reveal you to be a positively uncivilized person to interact with.

I wonder if part of this PhD glut is a delayed effect of the recession, which decreased employment opportunities over the last 6 years or so.

No. This has been going on for a long time and is getting worse by the year. From the linked article:

I would like to present to you this morning a rather analogous theory of the history of science. According to this theory, modern science appeared on the scene, in Europe, almost 300 years ago, and in this country a little more than a century ago. In each case it proceeded to expand at a frightening exponential rate. Exponential expansion cannot go on forever, and so the expansion of science, unlike the expansion of the Universe, was guaranteed to come to an end. I will argue that, in science, the Big Crunch occurred about 25 years ago, and we have been trying to ignore it ever since.

What is happening now is that the situation is becomming more extreme, and so even the best efforts at denial are crumbling.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since. ...
    To most of us who are professors, finding gems to polish is not our principal problem. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out that financial support for science is not an entitlement program, nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless, the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now consumed by raising funds rather than teaching and doing research. However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch."

See also from 10 years ago!
http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

And somewhat more recently:
http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

A collection of general links I put together on schooling:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Science is more than capable of contemplating the cause of anything. It may not be good at anthropomorphizing natural phenomena and giving it intent (like wondering why the universe was created), but that is simply because scientific reasoning easily dismisses such thought as not only irrelevant but ultimately incorrect.

So you're saying that Richard Fenyman was wrong?

THE RELATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION - Some fresh observations on an old problem, by RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

. I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God; I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God – an ordinary God of religion — a consistent possibility?

Yes, it is consistent. Despite the fact that I said that more than half of the scientists don't believe in God, many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way. But this consistency, although possible, is not easy to attain....

Why are you right, and he wrong? Why are you right and the many sciences that believe in God are wrong about that?

Perhaps the answer is here:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
  - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

Being an atheist doesn't make you smarter any anyone else, it just makes you an atheist.

Yes, I guess there is a spectrum of implementations of retina-like processing. On one side, there is the retina and on the other side, a digital camera followed by Photoshop. This is being done algorithmically in FPGA so is closer to the Photoshop end of the spectrum.

There are silicon models of retinal processing. See
http://authors.library.caltech...
And there is a book by Carver Mead (I think he was the thesis advisor for above dissertation) called "Analog VLSI and Neural Systems" with a chapter on in silico retinal processing. This is what I would call an artificial retina.

What they made at CERN would more honestly be called a real-time FPGA implementation of retina-like processing. The length of the wires have little to do with it.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...

http://disciplinedminds.tripod...

From the last:
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
      In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
      The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
      Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

I should point out that my final comment about updating some of the figures only applies to some of them - the majority of the updated SVG versions are actually quite nice as they are, which I noticed as I looked through volumes 2 and 3.

I was thinking in particular of the monochrome photographic images such as Fig 52-1 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which could probably be updated with a photo of the same models using a modern camera, or perhaps a nice 3-D rendering of the same molecules. Another example would be figure 51.4 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which I can't really make out at all.

I should point out that my final comment about updating some of the figures only applies to some of them - the majority of the updated SVG versions are actually quite nice as they are, which I noticed as I looked through volumes 2 and 3.

I was thinking in particular of the monochrome photographic images such as Fig 52-1 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which could probably be updated with a photo of the same models using a modern camera, or perhaps a nice 3-D rendering of the same molecules. Another example would be figure 51.4 from http://www.feynmanlectures.cal..., which I can't really make out at all.

I was reading about the project to put these lectures online. It's amazing how well these lectures have held up over time.

This excerpt from History of Errata is quite enjoyable:

It is remarkable that among the 1165 errata corrected under my auspices, only several do I regard as true errors in physics. An example is Volume II, page 5-9, which now says “no static distribution of charges inside a closed grounded conductor can produce any [electric] fields outside” (the word grounded was omitted in previous editions). This error was pointed out to Feynman by a number of readers, including Beulah Elizabeth Cox, a student at The College of William and Mary, who had relied on Feynman's erroneous passage in an exam. To Ms. Cox, Feynman wrote in 1975,3 “Your instructor was right not to give you any points, for your answer was wrong, as he demonstrated using Gauss's law. You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities. You also read the book correctly and understood it. I made a mistake, so the book is wrong. I probably was thinking of a grounded conducting sphere, or else of the fact that moving the charges around in different places inside does not affect things on the outside. I am not sure how I did it, but I goofed. And you goofed, too, for believing me.”

Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.

Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."

But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,

but how could they possible determine how much mass in each galaxy wouldn't be seen by using light within the bounds of the visible spectrum?

Such "dark matter" would show up on Xrays infrared or radio, so that's not a problem. If, however, the "dark matter" does not interact with electromagnetism, but only with gravity and the weak force, (which would be an extremely odd, and frankly, a not very believable aspect of cosmology) things would get a bit tricky.

Eyes.nasa.gov/exoplanets is a great web site to visit. Now you can map the exoplanets in your night sky and fly to far away systems with a click of your mouse. Sadly no voting there, just stunning 3D visualizations driven by the data in the Caltech Exoplanet Archive.

You make good points. See also: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past."

I think a "basic income" for all could be part of the solution, because a BI would make it possible for anyone to live like a graduate student and do independent research if they wanted.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition. ...
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
    It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad political consensus that pure research in basic science is a common good that must be supported from the public purse. The second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science, not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who must form that broad political consensus. ..."

So, the academics you knew were from before the "Big Crunch". Such people advised me, from their success, and meaning well, to get a PhD. But the world I faced was post-Big-Crunch and so their advice did not actually make much sense (although it took me a long time to figure that out).

More related links:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

"The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscationâ"that is to say, in crime."

"Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient."

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."

The Criminality of the State, Albert Jay Nock, American Mercury, March 1939. http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ck...

"What we call a government is after all nothing but a group of individuals, who, by a variety of sanctions, have acquired the power to govern their fellows. The sanctions range from the fraud of divine right to that of sheer conquest; from the imbecility of hereditary privilege to the irrationality of counting voters. In most cases the extent to which these sanctions produce capable legislators, judges, and administrators will not bear critical examination. Nominally, government exists and functions for the public. Actually it exists and functions for the benefit of those who have in one of these absurd ways acquired power to govern. It is accepted mainly because of the sheer inertia of great masses of people. Ostensibly, of course, it is accepted because it confers a sufficiency of visible benefits upon society to make the officials who operate it tolerated in spite of the selfish and idiotic exercise of the powers conferred upon them."

Ralph Borsodi, "This Ugly Civilization", Ralph Borsodi, Simon And Schuster, 1929. http://www.schoolofliving.org/...

There is plenty of money. The shadow banking system creates hundreds of trillions of dollars out of thin air, with no hyperinflationary consequences. The key is the advance of knowledge and technology, because knowledge allows us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change, and technology improves our standard of living.

Use created money to provide people with a basic income, and promote the realization of the genius of every individual with challenges to stimulate creativity.

Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...

Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...

More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

We can and should do better than this as a society.

My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

From Dr. David Goodstein, 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
Recently, however, a vastly different picture of science education has been put forth and has come to be widely accepted. It is the metaphor of the pipeline. The idea is that our young people start out as a torrent of eager, curious minds anxious to learn about the world, but as they pass through the various grades of schooling, that eagerness and curiosity is somehow squandered, fewer and fewer of them showing any interest in science, until at the end of the line, nothing is left but a mere trickle of Ph.D's. Thus, our entire system of education is seen to be a leaky pipeline, badly in need of repairs. The leakage problem is seen as particularly severe with regard to women and minorities, but the pipeline metaphor applies to all. I think the pipeline metaphor came first out of the National Science Foundation, which keeps careful track of science workforce statistics (at least that's where I first heard it). As the NSF points out with particular urgency, women and minorities will make up the majority of our working people in future years. If we don't figure out a way to keep them in the pipeline, where will our future scientists come from?
I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows

The ending of exponential growth of academia around 1970: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Actually, during the period since 1970, the expansion of American science has not stopped altogether. Federal funding of scientific research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic researchers has also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth (controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) is not, however, consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers have evolved. The average American professor in a research university turns out about 15 Ph.D students in the course of a career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D is basically training to become a research professor. It didn't take long for American students to catch on to what was happening. The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since."

If words were spelled fonetikly up until the 20th century, we wouldn't still have words like 'knight' or 'night' written at all. Fact is, even in the early 1800s people were already complaining that spelling didn't match the way words were pronounced. Here is a famous example towards the end of that century.

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.

Just looked at some of the questions and they look mostly like standard read input and spit out an optimization answer. As someone else said on Slashdot years ago, the problem with such puzzlers is they select for people who like solving complex tasks, not for people who like avoiding such tasks and like helping others avoid them (as in people full of diligently applied hard-working laziness). For a company like Google that supposedly prides itself on making easy to use software, this would seem to indicate they generally are hiring the wrong sort of person (as much as the world and/or Google needs some great algorithm designers and implementers). What about the skills to know what is a good question to ask? Of course, our entire mainstream pipeline of schooling engineers and scientists has that sort of problem...

Related by the then Vice-Provost of Caltech, David Goodstein:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

See also: http://books.google.com/books/...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. "The Difference" is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
"The Difference" reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences f

This was the old news...

Basically sifting through information gathered from older CMB detectors, they discovered a statistical B-mode in the data that could have come from gravitational wave that occurred during inflation, but the data was really too noisy to be sure.

The new news is they used a new detectors which are capable of making cleaner measurements to convince themselves that the detected B-mode was unlikely to come from gravitational lensing after the big-bang. The current evidence apparently is consistent with the B-mode coming from a gravitational waves that are predicted to occur during the inflationary period of the universe.

http://www.starlite.nih.gov/
"Work with your colleagues (some humanoid, some not) to complete quests in a lab. The STAR-LITE laboratory can be chaotic and safety violations will occur. You will make critical safety decisions to ensure that you and your colleagues work safely in a lab. STAR-LITE (Safe Techniques Advance Research â" Laboratory Interactive Training Environment) is an innovative and groundbreaking method to learn about laboratory safety techniques. STAR-LITE was inspired by and is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth R. Griffin."

And:
http://www.ergriffinresearch.o...
"The Elizabeth R. Griffin Research Foundation, Inc. (the Foundation) is a non-profit organization which is involved worldwide in promoting safe and responsible practices for handling biological materials in institutions such as hospitals, public health agencies, and research laboratories. The Foundation works to support the expansion of safe, secure, responsible laboratory capacity in under-resourced countries where diseases emerge/re-emerge. The Elizabeth R. Griffin Research Foundation, Inc. was formed in loving memory of Beth Griffin, whose vibrant, young life as a researcher was prematurely ended after contracting the rare macaque-born B virus (previously known as Herpes B Virus) from an ocular exposure to Macaque monkey secretions while doing research."

There is quite a bit about proper eye protection in the simulation.

I'd agree from what I've seen first-hand that academic labs tend to cut corners and take risks that would not be acceptable in industry. Cover ups might be easier too with less people involved and with the grad students living more on the edge and in more fear due to David Goodstein's "Big Crunch" in academia.
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

But part of it also may be poor training coupled with a youthful sense of invulnerability of students.

Anyway, my kid and I played through that STAR-LITE simulation. It's a bit slow paced, but we both learned a lot. If it was open source (which I don't think it is despite being charitable funded), perhaps someone could improve the game dynamics of it? It's OK as is, and well worth anyone's time, but I feel it could just be better. That website also had troubles a while back including the download link not working, and we asked someone we knew at a government lab to ask them to get it back up. An open source safety simulation could have greater availability, although it would be good for any modules for it to be vetted by safety experts.

See also my essay from a dozen years ago on open source and charitable dollars:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to m

Just because it's ridiculously hard to prove doesn't mean that it's false. For example, most physists believe gravity needs a force carrier which they've called a "graviton", the same way light (electromagnetic radiation) consists of photons. That theory is 80 years old and still totally unproven but as long as nobody has a good competing theory we still kind of assume that's how it works.

Gravity waves have already been proven to exist. The 1993 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the study of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar that showed indirect confirmation of the existence of gravity waves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H....

Not that we're not trying to look for gravitational waves and other clues, but most of it is so far off the scale of what we can experimentally detect that it'll probably still be unproven in a thousand years.

Gravity wave detection is expected within the next 20 years from the LIGO programme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G..., http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.... It won't require a thousand years, nor is it beyond existing technology. LIGO is already taking measurements in the US, at Hanford and Livingston, and advanced LIGO will increase the sensitivity of the LIGO interferometers by a an order of magnitude, and is expected to increase detection rates from a few per year to 100s per year by increasing the detection volume a thousand fold. If advanced LIGO doesn't detect anything, then it will be time to review the theory.

(I worked for ~6 years at the University of Western Australia in the physics department in collaboration with the Australian LIGO research group)

Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) did it better:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Twain_english.html

Of course it probably helped that I am both a christian and believe in evolution.

How do you pull that off? I mean, evolution on one hand and a personal god on the other are really incompatible ideas. Sounds to me as if you are just deluding yourself.

Go ask Fenyman how he feels about it. Or has there been some discovery in the last couple decades that discounts his line of thought?

The Big Crunch by David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Depends how you look - if any capital gain of an investment is reinvested, it's exponential growth. Maybe that's one reason why all the wealth is "bubbling up" and look what a role money plays....

The Big Crunch by David Goodstein: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

What or who should you revere? That is a good question you may spend a lifetime answering... From Albert Einstein:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

On broader change to make economics work for more people, see stuff like:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/

On the pitfalls of academia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds

There are many spheres of life. Or as another analogy, life is like a city with lots of different districts and back alleys and night clubs and homes. Even if conventional academia is not your forte, you might find others where you can build a meaningful life that is a healthy success (parenting, being a good friend or neighbor, etc.). Many inventors did not "fit in", so you might fund some other creative niche outside of the formal academic related career path.

For many people, the promise of academics has become a scam. However, diplomas are still used as gatekeepers to many jobs. For a deeper view of the scam in progress, see thsibook (free online) by John Taylor Gatto:
"Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

And this:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Anyway, I sympathize with your feeling and frustrations. Even with a dipl

http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
    The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy."

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Although hardly anyone noticed the change at the time, it is difficult to imagine a more dramatic contrast than the decades just before 1970, and the decades since then. Those were the years in which science underwent an irreversible transformation into an entirely new regime. Let's look back at what has happened in those years in light of this historic transition.
    The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science [due in part to continuing exponential growth that was soon to end]. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. ... Since we began with a cosmological analogy, let us return to one now. An unfortunate space traveler, falling into a black hole, is utterly and irretrievably doomed, but that is only obvious to the space traveler. In the perception of an observer hovering above the event horizon, the space traveler's time slows down, so that it seems as if catastrophe can forever be put off into the future. Something like that has happened in our research universities. The good times ended forever around 1970, but by importing students, and employing Ph.D's as temporary postdocs, we have stretched time out, pretending that nothing has changed, waiting for the good times to return. We have about as much chance as the space traveler. ..."

Cosmic rays (they are actually particles, not electromagnetic radiation) cover a whole range of stuff, with individual particles varying extremely widely in energy content. Primary cosmic rays originate outside Earth's atmosphere. When they collide with the atmosphere, secondary cosmic rays are generated. Primary cosmic rays are mostly (99%) nuclei of various atoms. The remaining 1% are mostly free electrons (beta particles). In turn, 90% of the nuclei are free protons (hydrogen nuclei), just because most of the matter in space is hydrogen. 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei), and 1% are the nuclei of other (heavier) elements. There is also a very small fraction of more exotic stuff, like antimatter.

While the mean energy content of a cosmic ray particle is in the range of only about 10^-11 to 10^-10 J, extremely rare single particles with energy content up to 50 J exist. This energy is truly astounding, as it means a single submicroscopic particle has the same kinetic energy as a slowly pitched or fairly briskly thrown baseball!

Cosmic rays are some of the most penetrating radiative phenoma known. Just compare their mean atmospheric penetrative power to that of other radiative phenomena. The following represent rough mean values of what are actually widely distributed ranges; in other words, some fraction of cosmic rays penetrate hugely in excess of the figure quoted below, just as some fraction falls far short.

cosmic "rays" - 10,000 m (about the same for both primary and secondary)
gamma rays - 1000 m
x-rays - 100 m
alpha particles - 0.1 m

It should also be noted that significant sources of radiative phenomena are generally point sources, or at least localized sources. They are attenuated in concentration, not total amount,by distance, even in a perfect vacuum. This arises due to spreading out according to the inverse square law. For example, if you want to escape the radiation from a nuclear explosion, even in outer space, you can just move away from it. Cosmic rays are completely different in that they are diffuse. They are not "radiating" from a single point at all. They are distributed in concentration and direction everywhere. There is no attenuation due purely to distance. The attenuation of cosmic rays by the atmosphere is a result of collisions of cosmic ray particles with the atoms in the atrmosphere.

Cosmic rays, or better stated, cosmic ray products (neutrinos) have been detected in deep mineshafts after penetrating kilometers of rock. Clearly the beta particles are not penetrating very much at all, and even the nuclei have limited penetration, but some of the subnucleic particles ain't stoppin' for nobody.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
    The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."

I've collected some other quotes on social problems in science here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science

It is a simplistic view. I feel Feynman puts it more maturely than I can... http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm

This page says Caltech holds the copyright. Presumably they require(d) that faculty transfer copyright of works they did in the course of their employment to the university. My guess is that's probably standard provision for faculty, though I'm not positive.