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Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science
Bruce G Charlton writes "A new paper in Medical Hypotheses suggests that very big cash prizes could specifically be targeted to stimulate 'revolutionary' science.
Usually, prizes tend to stimulate 'applied' science — as in the most famous example of Harrison's improved clock solving the 'longitude' problem. But for prizes successfully to stimulate revolutionary science the prizes need to be:
1. Very large (and we are talking seven figure 'pop star' earnings, here) to compensate for the high risk of failure when tackling major scientific problems,
2. Awarded to scientists at a young enough age that it influences their behavior in (about) their mid-late twenties — when they are deciding on their career path, and:
3. Include objective and transparent scientometric criteria, to prevent the prize award process being corrupted by 'political' incentives.
Such mega-cash prizes, in sufficient numbers, might incentivize some of the very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term — but high-risk — career choices.
The real winner of this would be society as a whole; since ordinary science can successfully be done by second-raters — but only first-rate scientists can tackle the toughest scientific problems."
A lottery for people who ARE good at math!
Restricting mega-prizes to the young may eliminate groundbreaking work by mid-career and early-second-career scientists.
Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The prize system works fairly well for engineering because at the end you have the prize, a product you can sell, and a whole bunch of publicity. Corporations are interested in investing in that.
Science, particularly basic science, is different. Corporations are not nearly as interested in investing in something that won't develop into a product in the foreseeable future. For basic science you need money to replace the corporate sponsors: money up front. There are plenty of young scientists who will happily do great research, they just need some funding to get started. The granting agencies are the ones who have to be trained to take more (intelligent) risks.
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
Firstly, science is a gradual process. The "great man" theory of scientific progress has no more merit than the "great man" theory of history. It is in fact *not* true that those who make the very most important discoveries are better than other scientists (The fools! They mocked my research!), and their advances, even when seemingly revolutionary, are predicated on the gradual accumulation of knowledge through careful, thoughtful and reproducible work. This does not mean that all scientists are equally competent, or that financial or political concerns do not sometimes promote inferior scientists.
Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.
Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This is a really stupid proposal. It is like the lottery, which promises big payoffs but is really a tax on people who are bad at math. Most people lose. If there were mega-prizes for science, then people would have to decide whether to go for the big prize, knowing that there's a >99% chance of getting zilch, or doing something more likely to pay the bills. Do we want to turn science, normally a cooperative exercise, into a casino game?
On the other hand this idea will go over well among the flat earth crowd. They don't do science, but they think high-stakes prizes are the only way to get out of the trailer park.
It usually costs more to win such prizes than it's worth.
Scientists are motivated by discovery. Fund their -projects- and they will happily work away. I don't believe it will be possible to keep such suggested prizes free from political correctness and Survivor-style political corruption. Who is a first-rater? Who is a second-rater? Edison was a failure. So was Einstein. Especially at the young ages described. One simply never knows who might discover something. DARPA and X-prizes are -far- more effective uses of the money, and models for applying the money.
Do we need to raise the stakes any higher in the pursuit of basic science?
What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.
If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform
The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.
The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.
This may work in disciplines where a singular achievement is key. So prizes for proving a math theorem that stood for a century are quite reasonable and are already done. They do not serve as incentives for scientific effort because the effort is prohibitive intellectually rather than financially. Putting up a prize is just a way of saying: this problem is really important. So if you've got a vision and lots of money but no mad intellectual skillz then by all means, put up a prize.
However this will not work for basic research in natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc). The reason is that there are no singular achievements. Experimental measurements are often not trusted until they are repeated by several groups and usually these other groups add key details to the original measurement. Likewise, theories are often explaining the same phenomena from different angles (schrodinger and heisenberg versions of quantum mechanics, Landau and BCS explanations of superconductivity, etc). So large prizes are only likely to sow discord in those communities not foster more productivity.