The Crisis of Government-Funded Science

eldavojohn writes "The New York Review of Books has an article penned by Steven Weinberg lamenting the future of physics, cosmology and this era of 'big science' in which we find ourselves. A quote from Goldhaber sums up the problem nicely, 'The first to disintegrate a nucleus was Rutherford, and there is a picture of him holding the apparatus in his lap. I then always remember the later picture when one of the famous cyclotrons was built at Berkeley, and all of the people were sitting in the lap of the cyclotron.' The article is lengthy with a history of big physics projects (most painfully perhaps the SSC) but Weinberg's message ultimately comes across as pessimism laced with fatalism — easily understandable given his experiences with government funding. Unfortunately he notes, 'Big science has the special problem that it can't easily be scaled down. It does no good to build an accelerator tunnel that only goes halfway around the circle.' Apparently this article mirrors his talk given in January at the American Astronomical Society. If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?"

Comments

Why just OUR government?

[crazyjj]

If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?"

I presume by "our government" he means the U.S. government. Why is it that that so many of those who lament science funding only talk about U.S. funding, as if the U.S. is supposed to fund everything by itself? He cites the SSH as a bad example of the U.S. cutting funding, but to me that's actually one of the better examples of other countries picking up the ball. Would CERN still have funded the LHC in 1995 if the U.S. hadn't cancelled the SHH in 1993? Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. And to me CERN is an excellent model of countries pooling their resources, rather than relying on one actor to foot the entire bill.

I'm not saying that the U.S. shouldn't be funding science at adequate levels, but way too many of these sorts of articles talk about science as if it's the exclusive purview of the U.S. Instead of asking if the U.S. can continue funding the big physics projects, maybe the question he should be asking is why more countries aren't POOLING their money to build these projects. After all, as long as the science is open and shared, why shouldn't it be in everyone's interest to fund these projects (including, but not *exclusively* including, the U.S.)?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has always been a US-centric site. It was even in the FAQ for a long time (note sure if it still is).

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

What US site isn't? ;-)

Re:Why just OUR government?

[crazyjj]

Slashdot is U.S.-centric, but science (and science funding) shouldn't be. You would think a physicist, who relies on the work of so many predecessors or so many different nationalities, would recognize that. Why more scientists aren't recognizing CERN as a great model for the future is beyond me.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[BigSlowTarget]

I think the history of US sole funding projects and so having sole control over them might make us less willing to chip in with others because we would lose that total control. It might make no sense given limitations in governmental science funding but for politicians big science is about the pursuit of glory, economic advantage or political leverage not about the pursuit of knowledge. They also don't seem to share well or work together much these days.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[dkf]

In this case, it's reasonable for The New York Review of Books to be somewhat US-centric. After all, its primary audience is in the US.

However, there continues to be a strong case for pooling scientific funding (and projects and instruments and ...) across many countries, especially when those projects are very large. You're not going to get all the best people in the world working in one country in any mature field (for all sorts of complex reasons) and you do want the best people talking to each other. Once they start talking, they will come up with ideas for areas to research; those are the seeds of proposals and projects. Given all that, pooled funding also makes sense. Well, provided the various funding agencies agree; that doesn't always go smoothly...

Given all the above, the disappointing thing is that tNYRoB didn't pick up on this matter. It's a reasonably well respected publication that at least tries to be not too parochial. Pity they failed this time (if only perhaps in the choice of Steven Weinberg).

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Severus Snape]

I don't think it is a problem with the CERN model not being recognised, I think it's more just the case of the U.S being huge, CERN is the answer to compete with the U.S. I hate to use the word compete, as I don't believe the way to move science forward is through competition, but hey, we operate under Capitalism at the end of the day.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are exactly right about why should the U.S. government fund large science projects. We are already funding a war in Afghanistan and cutting
taxes for the wealthy. It's about time that China starts paying for large science projects as well. They already have first
class super computers and a decent space program. They should fund additional large projects and get credit for
the advancement of world science in the process.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because CERN is a terrible model for the future. Particle Physics has gotten so big that it is impractical for doing this research at the university level. That means you cannot train future the next generation of scientists. Further more you can't make a name for your self when each publication has 1000 authors.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[captbob2002]

Given our (US) history of working with others...who'd want to partner with us? We don't keep long-term commitments, we want to full control over everything

Congress says NASA should partner with someone for space exploration, then turns around and asks "why are you giving away the store?" - either way funding gets cut.

I fear the days of great scientific (or any other) advances coming out of the US are over. NO NONE - gov't or business, R or D, looks at the long term anymore.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[orasio]

The country that builds the large labs is the country that willl get the super smart scientists to tinker with it.
The world doesn't need the US to fund big science. China will do it, eventually. The thing is that it would give them a competitive advantadge over you, meaning better scientists, better universities and stuff. I wouldn't want to lose my edge if I was the US.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[DesScorp]

I presume by "our government" he means the U.S. government. Why is it that that so many of those who lament science funding only talk about U.S. funding, as if the U.S. is supposed to fund everything by itself?

BTW, for those that weren't around when the SSC was being built, and then canceled, you should know that the firestorm over the SSC was not from anti-science budget cutters, but from other scientists... chemists, biologists, etc... that were angry that physics was getting so much of the budget pie. These other scientists went on TV shows and to the press complaining that the SSC was a boondoggle, and that it should be canceled and the funds spread out to other fields "equitably". One of their prime arguments was that, just like defense spending, post Cold War "big physics" should shrink as it was viewed as nothing more than a race with the Soviets for prestige. With the big military drawdown in the early 90's, that argument sold. And SSC died.

Rather than a desire to kill science, the SSC died in part at the hands of jealousy from other scientists.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

According to libertarians, the tech companies of the world should spontaneousely fund it. Lol. I think we know how impossible that little fantasy plays out in modern society..... wait for the comical reply about how some free market would spur billion dollar physics projects.... yea right.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not enough of a sociologist to say how much, as a matter of particular historical fact, was purely jealousy/grant competition; but there is a reasonably compelling strand of argument to be made in favor of the anti-physicist's view:

Namely, that the need to build very large apparatus suggested that physics had exhausted(whether by superior study or by a quirk of the laws of nature) the low-hanging fruits earlier than some other subjects, which put it further up the unpleasant slope of diminishing returns. If the biologists, say, are in the situation where they can barely send a grad student anywhere on earth without turning up a few dozen novel species; or the chemists have a variety of plans that involve nothing more exciting than a small-bore NMR apparatus and a few tens of thousands in reagents, it isn't entirely illogical to feel slighted by multi-billion dollar plans to conduct ever more subtle bug-hunts for subatomic particles.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[tqk]

Pity they failed this time (if only perhaps in the choice of Steven Weinberg).

You would expect that a physicist would know what's been going on in astronomy, yes? Almost all of the big telescopes for at least the last twenty years that I've been watching have been multinational efforts. Mauna Kea, Chile, ... Lots of countries chip in if only for the right to get their researchers into the game.

And now, I think it's time I fired up "Contact" again. :-)

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

LHC is the last collider, the benefit grows in low in size while costs grow linearly. The other problem with their complaints is that LHC cost billions of dollars while we know that particles hit the earth with about 10J/particle at about 1/(s m^2), while LHC is a wimpy uJ/particle. So the universe is giving away a 10 million times stronger source term that physicists could use. Could be build one this large? Not even using the entire mass of the planet. So why pay for more accelerators? Astronomy is the future of high energy physics.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[bitingduck]

Large ground-based observatory development has also had significant private funding for much of history, and especially in the last century. The two large telescopes that are being developed now by US-led organizations (TMT and GMT) both have significant private participation.

High energy physics largely has been driven by the DOE in the US and has been generally government funded.

Condensed matter research in the US is sort of in between -- fundamental physics tends to be academic, but the semiconductor industry drives a lot of applied research.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

derr...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Broad

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gtall]

Yes, other sciences were against the SSC mainly because they only needed smaller dollops of public funds per project. However, what really irked Congress was Phil Gramm. When it was clear that Fermi Lab outside of Chicago made the most sense because the equipment there could be utilized for the SSC, Brother Phil ramrodded the language to choose Texas instead. As soon as that happened, other Congress Critters decided that they'd had enough and killed it.

Not putting a hefty blob of research funding in one basket like the SSC made sense, something of that scale should be international. However, Congress then proceeded to cut total research funding. This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible. And it was the beginning of Conservatives thinking that research was merely another political institution that could be made to say whatever they wanted said.

The Conservatives arguments are varied and specious. They would argue that any research worthy of funding will get it in the private sector...from Business School Product whose idea of research is the secretary's bra size. The controversy over global warming was merely the researchers telling them that while G-d told them humans inherit the Earth, the humans could still screw it up and G-d wouldn't be there to save them. The controversy over evolution was the researchers telling them that the Bible could not be read literally, that somehow G-d was screwing with them by burying fake dinosaurs bones, etc.

And worst of all, research was also giving women choices over their own reproductive systems, in direct contravention of G-d telling them that Man wore the pants in the family and hence they could order Women around as they see fit.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Why is it so important to make a name for yourself? Why should the government be funding that? Fund the science, to hell with popularity contests. Yes i am a scientist.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

You don't get the brightness you need for the statistics. You would need to wait millions of years to detect the highs particle for example. Not all that practical.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The US funds CERN, in particular the LHC. The give quite a bit in fact.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you statist. You want to believe in the "value of science" then DO IT WITH YOUR MONEY. Stop stealing money from the rest of us who are happy with the depth of knowledge we have now just to fund your pet elitist academic excercises. This is why I am a libertarian, to OPPOSE people like you who want to destroy the rich to prop up the lazy and the stupid.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[tqk]

And now, I think it's time I fired up "Contact" again. :-)

Large ground-based observatory development has also had significant private funding for much of history ...

... Which leads right back to "Contact". lt was a private investor that funded her projects when no-one else would.

The Keck interferometer was kickstarted with private funding too, as were many others.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not China's bag. All their technology is stolen/borrowed/lifted/cribbed from other nations.

And if my experiences with Chinese hackers tells me anything (both as colleagues, and defending a major US commerce site from constant attacks from the 'state funded omg cyber war hackers'), it's a nation that consists of billions and billions of uncreative folk who can't do much more than follow instructions and click on scripts.

China hasn't and won't do shit. I'd expect to see India muscling around the world of high science long before China.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the AC above was implying that the incentive for the future generation of scientists is celebrity. AC is most likely USian and doesn't know any better.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[asylumx]

So... Scientists are lazy and stupid? I mean, they certainly aren't rich, so by your "logic" they must be, right?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Beelzebud]

Another fine example of why I hold right-wing libertarians in utter contempt.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

... people ... who want to destroy the rich to prop up the lazy and the stupid.

Sounds like a good thing to me. Robin Hood, anyone? :-)

Re:Why just OUR government?

[crunchygranola]

Fuck you statist. You want to believe in the "value of science" then DO IT WITH YOUR MONEY. Stop stealing money from the rest of us who are happy with the depth of knowledge we have now just to fund your pet elitist academic excercises...

Care to show the courage of your obscene convictions and post under your screen name Coward?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[DesScorp]

This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible.

This simply isn't true. First, it was killed in 1993, when Democrats controlled both chambers in Congress. Second, the vote didn't break down by partisan lines, but by chamber lines. The Senate supported it, and a majority of both parties in the House opposed it. In the Senate, the support for the project was overwhelmingly on the Republican side.

The House of Representatives voted three times in 1992 and 1993 to kill the SSC; the final pivotal vote was 159-264 (139 Cong. Rec. H8124 (daily ed. Oct. 19, 1993)). The Senate voted to rescue it each time; their last vote in favor was 57-42 (139 Cong. Rec. S12,760 (daily ed. Sept. 30, 1993)).

In 1993, the two houses met in a conference committee twice; the first time the Senate negotiators won and the SSC was left in the bill. The second time the House won. In the end the conference report was adopted by both houses with large majorities: 332-81 in the House, 139 Cong Rec H8435 (daily ed. Oct. 26, 1993), and 89-11 in the Senate, 139 Cong Rec S14483 (daily ed. Oct. 27, 1993).

From Lexis-Nexis, here is the roll call for the 57-42 Senate vote, which worked out to 26-29 among Democrats (voting to preserve the collider) and 31-13 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Here's the roll call for the 159-264 vote in the House, which was 98-153 among Democrats and 61-111 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...

Without an agreement, funding died. The leading voice for the death of the SSC was in fact a Democrat.

Unless you can find evidence to the contrary, I cannot recall a single religious leader protesting the SSC on grounds that it would contradict religious teachings, except for liberal Christians that argued the funds should be better used for so-called social justice efforts. Support for the SSC in most conservative denominations was uniformly high. I recall Pat Robertson lamenting the cancellation of the project on television. History simply doesn't match up to your assertion on this.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

CERN is a terrible model, but for none of the reasons you describe. Yes high energy physics has gotten expensive, that's why grads students and post docs work at big labs to get that experience that they need. Regarding making a name for yourself: trust me, there are some young people that do a lot to make themselves seen as the rock stars, ha! Whether that's good or not depends on if that opinion of themselves jives with the recommendations of others.

The single worst aspect of the way that CERN does things is that it is far less open to the worldwide participation than it could be. It's very difficult to be an accelerator physicist in particular if you are not a citizen of an EU member and that's the sort of post docs that need the experience of working on a large machine the most.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[crunchygranola]

derr...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Broad

Adding up every contribution to science, medicine (not all of it research), and scientific education over the years mentioned I get $655 million, about 15% of the cost of the LHC, and less than the annual budget of CERN. This is 11% of Broad's wealth.

Rather than showing how private wealth can replace public science, it would appear to show the rank inadequacy of this resource for that purpose.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

So should we compare a single rich guy with all the worlds governments? Perhaps not.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Severus Snape]

The US isn't even a member of CERN. After all, it's a European group, they have an "observer" status however. I highly doubt America gives anywhere near the same level of funding as what the UK, France and Germany provide.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[roman_mir]

It's not true actually, that 'the world does not need the US to fund big science', the world could use more of the science that people call 'big', however no nation that does not have manufacturing and production can fund big science, because no nation that has manufacturing and production needs big science. When I say 'needs', I am talking about the market of-course. On /. we can say whatever we like, we can say that US 'needs' big science, but this means absolutely nothing. The only question is: does the USA have enough production capacity for companies to invest in science or does it not?

The answer: USA does not have enough manufacturing and production capacity either to justify or actually to pay for any of this science.

Contrary to a popular belief, money does not grow on trees, money is production capacity. Contrary to another popular belief, government does not create wealth, it does not create anything that the market wants and needs and is willing to pay for properly and thus the government does not have any money. Money that government has comes from productivity of the population of the nation, and if the nation is unproductive, the government can have no money.

USA has been using productivity of other people for decades now, printing dollars and importing products made elsewhere with these fake money, of-course there is debt and deficit and there is inflation, but there is no productivity to pay for any of the consumption, and thus everything that USA is consuming today is borrowed. USA is living on a borrowed time, it can't afford to pay for anything, including ANY science, never mind 'big' science. USA is broke and it needs to cut government spending by a ridiculous amount (I am talking about something nearing a 100% of real government spending). Only this will decrease the government and allow the private individuals to start producing, save and invest again and create enough wealth in order to pay for science.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[butchersong]

Really the US still funded LHC by quite a bit especially when you consider we are only 'observer' status. At a minimum we've contributed what 15-20% I think. Not bad when you consider that there are (according to wikipedia) "21 member states and 7 observers".

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Bootsy Collins]

"You would need to wait millions of years to detect the highs particle for example." one comes, every square meter, every second.

Right. That's too low a luminosity.

I do agree that the current crop of physicists are not up to it because they know very, very rudimentary statistics. But there is hope, they know lots of probability and it isn't a huge leap.

Rephrase? This doesn't make grammatical sense to me -- I can't figure out what you're trying to say.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not China's bag. All their technology is stolen/borrowed/lifted/cribbed from other nations.

As I understand it from history, the same thing could be said of the USA during its developmental period, before it hit its stride.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[budgenator]

He cites the SSH as a bad example of the U.S. cutting funding, but to me that's actually one of the better examples of other countries picking up the ball. Would CERN still have funded the LHC in 1995 if the U.S. hadn't cancelled the SHH in 1993? Maybe, but I tend to doubt it. And to me CERN is an excellent model of countries pooling their resources, rather than relying on one actor to foot the entire bill.

In the early 1980s the US began plans for the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, which would accelerate protons to 20 TeV, three times the maximum energy that will be available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. ... Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

LHC cost the same to build, and will need to run 30% longer to get the same results, assuming that LHC even gets up to speed.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Pete Venkman]

I agree with you. The US is busy enough nation-building, liberating people from oppressive regimes, and showing those North Koreans what's for. And the liberal media whines that we're not funding science too? The only science we need to fund in the US is the kind they show on CSI--that show is awesome. God bless 'Merica.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, ever heard the phrase "knowledge is power"?
Well, in case you did not know, it is true. The fact is that the US is where it is today thanks to it's investment in science. Imagine what would have happened if someone else discovered nukes first, say the axis? Imagine for a second if you can(though I seriously doubt you have the capacity to) what would have happened if it was London and Moscow that had been nuked instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how would that have changed history?

Science is the pursuit of knowledge and if the US allows itself to fall behind then the next "nuclear bomb" will be discovered by China, Russia or maybe even Iran and when that happens if the US has fallen too far behind they will impose their will upon the United States who will be powerless to resist... So you put your head in the sand, it is certainly your right as a free individual to do so but don't dare come whining when someone blows it to kingdom come.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

What am I looking at here? a joke?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

"That's too low a luminosity." You say this and I agree that it is physicist conventional wisdom, but so was, "you can't focus x-rays." Which is to say that the person who sees that it is not will be very famous.

In the second paragraph I'm saying that physicists do pretty basic statistics but very advanced probability. The good news is that if you know advanced probability, you can learn statistics pretty easily, but you have to do it--if you go Bayesian, then you don't even really have to learn statistics at all, it stays all probability. BTW, IWARP (I was a radiation physicist), this is not "fame bait" as some moderator said, I know what I'm talking about. I truly predict that high energy physicists will have to learn to use cosmic rays and that when they do that they will have to learn lots of advanced statistics.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

BTW, he wrote, " You would need to wait millions of years to detect the highs particle for example." but if you have a detector with a one sq-m aperture (ball park typical for a space telescope), you get one per second. There is also ground equipment that detects them and published papers on the topic, refuting both claims.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[Black Parrot]

Yes, other sciences were against the SSC mainly because they only needed smaller dollops of public funds per project. However, what really irked Congress was Phil Gramm. When it was clear that Fermi Lab outside of Chicago made the most sense because the equipment there could be utilized for the SSC, Brother Phil ramrodded the language to choose Texas instead. As soon as that happened, other Congress Critters decided that they'd had enough and killed it.

That's similar to the way I remember it: as the list of candidate sites was narrowed down, the number of legislators that supported it shrank as well.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

Yep, a joke. No one thinks there is value in basic research. There is no one willing to contribute to large scale projects unless forced by government to do so.

Well, that's a strawman. But really, the US science budget is pretty miniscule.

100 million people giving an average of $1500 a year would cover it. Obviously it wouldn't be normally distributed.

How much would you voluntarily give? If not donating, what would convince you to invest?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

My point exactly.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

Well thanks for taking the time to think about it. I'm not sure what that means though.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

You don't understand the problem. You can't know if you saw a single Higgs particle from a single collision. You need to see many many of them then look at the statistics of the jets produced. If you see a single higgs every 1000 collisions for example this will skew the jets "distributions", but you have no power to detect that without many millions of collisions, not matter how advanced the statistics. In particle physics very advanced statistics is used. Why would you think they don't? Its a multidisciplinary field.

A high energy particle is not a Higgs, it will only produce a higgs (with a lifetime on the order of 10^-20 sec) with a fairly low probability.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

We in the EU are smart enough to accept US dollars. The fact the European is in the name does not put anyone off. The Fact is the US does/has been a fairly large contributor financially to the LHC effort.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[orasio]

You sound like a troll, but I will respond anyhow, because there are people who actually think what you say.
I DO IT WITH MY MONEY. I don't live in the US. You can read that in the GP. I don't care that the US falls behind. Living under the US rule, or under the Chinese rule, or the Russian rule makes little difference to Latin America.
About academics, if the US doesn't fund them, someone else will. I was just pointing out the consequences.
Where I live, there is little investment in R&D, it's slowly increasing due to our economy growing steadily for the past 10 years.
The global crisis is good for us in that our exports are more expensive, and we can start industrializing our country. I hope we start investing more in R&D, and I would happily pay a lot more taxes for that. This is already a great country to live in, I would love for it to become more industrialized so it's a great place to work also.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

Yes, if you used current sensing equipment and technology, it would not work. If I were saying that we needed to figure out a way to focus x-rays 20 years ago, you would be saying, "it can't be done, they cannot be focused." But they are, the attention of really smart people was just in the wrong place (i.e., not on astronomy).

"In particle physics very advanced statistics is used. Why would you think they don't?" Everybody with a Ph.D. thinks there are people in their field that use, "advanced statistics." When I last checked it was, "all measured values are normally distributed, all sensors have a boxcar response" and all sensors had to be crammed into this model for their data to be analyzed. Removing background hits with anything but a sledgehammer (necessary for an in situ type source) is not really in the playbook. But I'll grant you that things may have changed since I last checked, it has been awhile.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

No, we have people who are just statistics people, who come from a statistics department, that do nothing but statistics and devlop new methods. You also clearly don't understand the fundamentals of particle physics either. Even with a *perfect* detector, you only get to observe the decay jets produced by the created particles. These are 100% stochastic, as in "God does play dice". You only get to indirectly observe the distribution of primary particles produced in a collisions from these jets. Which are all very similar. You cannot get anywhere without a lot of observations even with perfect detectors. This is what the standard model predicts, its what we obverse.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

"No, we have people who are just statistics people, who come from a statistics department, that do nothing but statistics and devlop new methods." OK, glad to hear it, sounds like things have improved.

"Even with a *perfect* detector, you only get to observe the decay jets produced by the created particles." After the wave functions collapse, yes. Of course this is also the moment of detection using our current technology. Even if detector technology does not change, you can get a million samples in 11 days with a 1 sq m aperture, or 10k/second in a 100m on a side ground facility (750g of air does little to slow down most 10J particles).

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

Sorry,.. I didn't have time to go into detail via. phone.

So this ambiguous, but probably not too inordinate, 150 Billion would be surmised by 100 million americans, at 1500/year.

First, consider that most americans do not generate income, and that burden of taxation/payment is better plotted against households. This is because of children, housewives(or stay at home dads), and elderly dependents, making up a pretty large chunk of the population.

Then imagine, when faced with the idea of buying a new HDTV, or sending 1500 dollars off for research they are too naive to understand they are already benefiting from (lest I refrain from the glaring/obvious fact that americans largely do not have sufficient scientific knowledge to grasp the reality of what made a TV, or wifi, or cancer treatments)----- and then consider this choice is made every single year, except they still have the HDTV from last year, so now maybe a trip to Disneyland.....

Yeah... like I said.. my point exactly. Its not going to happen in libertaria, nor would the large corps do it well either --- as is already evident, large corps siphon what public knowledge is present and then build product-specific private databases of scientific research knowledge...

Re:Why just OUR government?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Look up the collision rates for the LHC. All these other people you seem to think are idiots are in fact not as stupid as you seem to think. You are also not as smart as you think you are either.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

Well I chose 100 million people as an estimate of the number paying substantial income/capital gains taxes.

Personally though, humor me. How much would you voluntarily donate to research causes of your choosing if you knew the government wasn't going to fund it? I'd say your taxes would also be correspondingly lower, but it probably wouldn't go down like that.

There is also the possibility that the current system is grossly inefficient. It is common to "blow the budget" at the end of the year, etc.

Another thing is that grad students and lab techs spend alot of time performing work they are overqualified for. Some of this could be crowdsourced. I have spent alot of time manipulating images so that I can trace and measure things, etc. Perhaps some subset of people would be willing to donate some time to these tasks (in the vein of folding at home) rather than money. Or some kind of reward system could be used. Something like "the top three contributors get x,y, and z rewards".

Re:Why just OUR government?

[gumbi west]

So, straight ad homonym, classy.

I'm not sure you are reading what I'm writing. First of all, I'm not saying anybody is an idiot (though gravity probe B might make one wonder why you would give piles of money to physicists) I'm saying that high energy physics needs a revolution and that the next source is cosmic particles--this revolution will involve learning new things. I agree that current methods will not work and I do not have the answers as to how to get things to work--if I could say that I'd have a several publications in Phys. Rev. A right now. My point is that there will not be support for another accelerator, LHC is the end of the line. But it is not the end of the road, there are other paths, they look treacherous now, but so would LHC have looked before any of the accelerator work started.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

The way you are calculating or assuming is wrong.

You are talking about individuals, despite income mostly being counted relevant across HOUSEHOLDS this is because households are where money is summed, or collected, and then managed. Again, there are far more dependents than you might be considering....

So, looking for 100 million PEOPLE to each afford $1500, year. This is for you based on the way you decided to determine how 100k people might contribute. From some wiki facts:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Personal_Income_and_Disposable_Personal_Income

The following chart shows the income distribution among all 211,492,000 individuals aged 15 or higher who received income in 2010 as recorded by the United States Census Bureau.[10] ... ...
$75k-$100k
5.29% = 11.16 Million People.

$100,000 or more
6.61% = 13.97 Million People.

Total = 25.13 Million People
-------------
Now I wouldn't consider adding in people below 75k, but lets see if we include them too from 50-75k.

$50k-$75k
12.86% = 27.13 Million People

Now that would be 52.26 Million people if everyone that made 50k or more in a year contributed 1500 dollars each and every year. According to those stats, if we included people making 25-50k in there (I think thats very unlikely to even the loosest assumptions) we would just hit over your 100 million people... But I just don't see how you could get 100 million individuals/people to contribute, on average, 1500 dollars. The thing is, whether its a CEO, or joe schmoe, you can't get someone to throw money at a good idea if its not obvious and already sitting right in front of them, whatever that idea should produce... Basic research and the work that has gone into developing what we understand today, is the key, but it is very poorly understood by the public. They wouldn't fund it. They would get the HDTV.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

Thanks for actually doing running the numbers. Thats actually a better way of putting it. If each person making more than $75k/yr contributed $6k to various research causes, we could cover the research budget. That's $500 a month, which is basically the cost of living somewhere for 1 month. This is pretty steep but not impossible, especially if there are rich philanthropists who pick up the slack, or there some investment aspect to it (which of course there is, but would need to be emphasized).

It seems to me you do not think any alternative is feasible. It just won't happen so we shouldn't think of any alternatives to government funding. Very few alternatives have been tried.

I think that researchers are not being creative enough about this problem and they are relying on a government that is getting more and more unreliable when it comes to funding. We need to start devising alternative systems now, before shit hits the fan one day.

Lets imagine living in a world where the US government refused to spend more than a negligible amount on research, but was otherwise similar to our own.How would you, as a researcher. convince people to pay you to do basic research? How could you be convinced to contribute?

And finally, I really just want an answer to the main question. Forget about ignorant Joe Public, how much (% of income) would you contribute to basic research, and under what circumstances?

Re:Why just OUR government?

[joocemann]

I contribute my life to basic research for a drastic pay cut. I would be making over 100k had I stayed kn government work in my previous field. But it was immoral and I went back to univ. and am now a stemcell researcher at UCSF barely making ends meet... so as of right now, 0.

Re:Why just OUR government?

[repapetilto]

Well you don't meet our criteria then. Grad student = $24k/year, Post-doc = $30k/year, associate prof is what? $50k/year.

Oops, meant SSC, not SSH

[crazyjj]

In case anyone thought I was referring to the Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale.

Re:Oops, meant SSC, not SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought you meant the Secure SHell.

NOT cosmology!

[arisvega]

Cosmologists in particular should not complain at all for at least the next 20 years: look just how many cosmology missions get to fly. I think that point in the summary is kind of moot, since cosmology is a very fine example of how much money gets pumped into a field of science with presently zero practical applications; consider how many missions don't get to fly, for every cosmology one that does.

Other's will take over

[Anonymous Coward]

It is more then evident that other countries, mostly Asian, will take science to the next level.

A Pool is Unnecessary & Presents Its Own Probl

[eldavojohn]

From the second page of the article:

We saw recently how a project to build a laboratory for the development of controlled thermonuclear power, ITER, was nearly killed by the competition between France and Japan to be the laboratory’s site.

Also, put another way in the article:

What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong. We saw several members of Congress change their stand on the SSC after their states were eliminated as possible sites.

I think the counter argument to your idea of 'pooling' resources is that this isn't really necessary. We have the resources to do this as the United States or as the EU or probably even as China itself. I don't care what country/countries/bordered region does it, I just care that it gets done. It is, however, very easy to point out that the country that Weinberg is residing in has the resources to do it yet fails to do it. Even when bills are passed to fund it, it fails.

Even as the SSC's cost ballooned up from $4 billion it only hit $12 billion in 1993 or about $19 billion in today's money. US defense budget for 1993 was ~$350 billion but it appears that we can't rely on the military to progress particle physics any further.

Grind to a halt.

[Anonymous Coward]

or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?"

Well, the budget talks have been going during the last few years, and no matter whose in the White House next year, you can rest assured the physics funding will collide to an abrupt halt.

You can argue all you want, have points about "creating jobs", "keeping America in the lead of World Science", or any other thing you can think of. The people are going to ask why are we spending billions of dollars this and not on education or on the poor or healthcare? Others will ask, Show me in the Constitution where it says to fund science.

We have a population that's nervous about our country's finances and they don't want their projects cut - whatever it is. The Teaparty guys wouldn't dare us a big physics project for pork spending, either. I don't see much support for these kinds of things on either side of the isle these days.

Sorry guys, but when it comes to the future battles for Government money, science is going to be losing pretty big, I'm afraid.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[Anonymous Coward]

The people are going to ask why are we spending billions of dollars this and not on education or on the poor or healthcare?

Then those people are idiots. Not because they think we should spend money on those things, but because they not only think that we can't spend money on all of them, but they aren't asking an important question: why the fuck are we spending so much money on defense and wars?

Re:Grind to a halt.

[Brian Feldman]

... and the prison system and law enforcement, subsidizing unsustainable agriculture, funding propaganda-research...

Re:Grind to a halt.

[denis-The-menace]

RE: why the fuck are we spending so much money on defense and wars?

Because the owners of "The Fed" also own military contractors and other companies (Oil, etc) on top of political property.

-They make governments buy weapons for war
-They tell them where to make war (to remove fiscal opponents)
-Wars break things and those need fixing
-Rinse & Repeat

Get rid of *career* politicians and most of these problems will go away.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[Artifakt]

There's lots of political pressure to cut education and health care as well. What isn't being cut is the department of defnese, or the 17 different civilian agencies with people who carry weapons as part of their agent status. The same people who worry that someone from the health Education and Welfare will abuse their vast federal powers and take their home schooled kids away, don't worry about what happens when a BATF or DEA agent, who may be armed with a 30 caliber machine gun, abuses his powers to the same extent
Just look at your own post. Yes, you didn't mention the defense budget, but then you didn't mention the bank bailouts either. You mention the Tea Party that seems to be stagnating at present, or becoming a special sub-brand of the Republican party, but you don't mention any of the Occupy movements. It's like your whole post buys into a Right Wing only model, even though you don't particularly seem to agree with the Right.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[repapetilto]

The same people who worry that someone from the health Education and Welfare will abuse their vast federal powers and take their home schooled kids away, don't worry about what happens when a BATF or DEA agent, who may be armed with a 30 caliber machine gun, abuses his powers to the same extent

This is so true. Another example is that the government's efforts to end racial segregation resulted in corporate personhood. This is how things work out in practice. Government is a tool that can be used for good or bad.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[tqk]

Get rid of *career* politicians and most of these problems will go away.

I've often wondered why US Presidents are limited to two terms, yet the likes of Robert Bird, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain are left to fleece the taxpayers for decades on end.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[Almandine]

The budget for the Department of Defense is being cut though. http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.

Re:Grind to a halt.

[Black Parrot]

The budget for the Department of Defense is being cut though.

http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2013/FY2013_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf

FY 2013 Base Budget has a reduction of $5.2 billion compared to FY 2012. The budget for Overseas Contingency Operations (which includes Afghanistan and Iraq) has a separate budget request which shows a reduction of $26.6 billion compared to FY 2012.

That sounds like a big cut, until you look at how much the defense budget has grown since 2001. You'd have to cut about 60 times that much to put us back where we were just over a decade ago. (Or 100 times that much, if you look at total cost rather than just the budget per se.)

And as for our unbudgeted wars, there seems to be a growing consensus that they've cost us 3 or 4 trillion dollars in direct and indirect costs.

Business/Government Divide.

[jellomizer]

The problem is the schism between Businesses and Government.

The Democrats go. We want to Keep Businesses out of Government, as businesses with their big money will corrupt government.
The Republicans go. We want to Keep Government out of Businesses, as government with their big money will cripple businesses.

For companies to have a True R&D department they need steady funding, During the cold war, the government gave businesses a ton of money to do R&D. The government prospered because they got new technology that can help expand our countries influenced, the business prospered because they got new technology which they have rights too.

Then as the Cold War cooled down and ended. Government started to separate themselves from Business, and Business from government. So those corporate grants have became less reliable. The companies now need to make sure their R&D is profitable, so less spending on just straight R&D and more focus on making sometime that brings profit. Other companies just dropped their R&D all together.

Business key motive is to make money (It isn't a noble motive but simple). The Government has many motives (many of which are noble, some not so, and it is very complicated), Business influence in Government makes sure the government stays efficient. Government influence on business, make sure the businesses do go too far.

I am disenfranchised with both parties. As they are on different sides of the wrong issue.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[pscottdv]

I wish I had some mod points for you.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[Anonymous Coward]

brilliant

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[Anonymous Coward]

You left out:

Government has no competition. No competition usually means less motivation (show up, collect my paycheck). Less efficiency (best worker paid the same as the worst). More waste (GSA, Solyndra). More corruption. Government always goes on, no matter how bad they screw up (it's very easy to spend other people's money).

You can see this daily in millions spent on interesting science projects like the shrimp on a treadmill, or studies in teaching african men how to wash their genitals, studies of vietnameese male prostitutes, and the perennial favorite-- college drinking studies.

Businesses (in general) must remain competitive, profitable, and efficient, or they will cease to exist (exceptions being when big business colludes with government [aka Crony Capitalism] to protect a market, subsidize failure, or prevent competition from entering or succeeding). Private R&D is generally tax deductable, which is a good way to offset the monetary risk to the business (which unlike government, cannot print money).

I don't buy the line that "government" must fund everything. You can easily find Billions in existing budgets to fund large scale science projects-- if you cut out the wasteful garabage that is identified every year. Apply KISS to government, and you'll find more than enough $$$ for science.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[Goldsmith]

You're close, but not quite there.

During the Cold War, the government required business to set aside a certain percentage (I think 15%) of funding from defense contracts and spend that money on internal research. They could do anything they wanted, as long as it was R&D.

After the Cold War, we removed that requirement. It cut 15% off the cost of defense contracts, but also removed the incentive for big companies to spend on high risk R&D.

The "official" government funding for R&D has been pretty good since the Cold War, and big companies still get a lot of it. The problem is a $250k research grant doesn't go as far as 15% of a $100 million procurement contract.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[radtea]

The problem is the schism between Businesses and Government.

No, the problem is that everyone thinks they can solve the problem with some simplistic ideological prescription.

Weinberg's suggestion--raise taxes--is pragmatic and sensible, which is why it will never be done: American politics is about ideology, not reality. It doesn't matter if policies have the effect their ideological promoters say they ought. It matters only that they conform to the dictates of their ideology. Thus, Obama bailing out home-owners or Bush invading Iraq aren't judged on their actual outcomes, but on how the measure up to the input condition of ideological conformance.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[crunchygranola]

I don't buy the line that "government" must fund everything..

Therefore it shouldn't fund anything? Shall we have a straw-man dance battle?

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[roman_mir]

During the cold war, the government gave businesses a ton of money to do R&D. The government prospered because they got new technology that can help expand our countries influenced, the business prospered because they got new technology which they have rights too.

- so the government prospered because it STOLE money from LEGITIMATE market needs and instead funnelled it into what it perceived to be the priority: standing armies, weapons programs, social programs, all this requires massive amount of executive power, new departments, programs, all this requires huge amounts of people as well.

So all of this money, that could have been spent by the market itself on products that market voted for.

All of these people, who could have been employed by the market not to develop WORTHLESS WEAPONS to increase the size of government and grow political power, but instead these people would be employed in the market with that same money (just not removed from the market via government taxes and inflation) to produce products that the market wanted.

Yes, the market always wants more products. The demand always grows. There is always space for more and more new products and services, things we can't even imagine today become reality tomorrow.

But instead of going that route, people are looking at the government and telling it: sure, here is our money we'd rather spend on things we want, take it and waste it on more wars.

My point is this: there is no legitimate reason for government pushing economic agenda.

Government does not know what jobs should exist.

Government does not know what products should exist.

Government does not know what prices should be set.

Government does not know what the wages should be.

Government does not know what interest rates should be.

More than that - government is explicitly prohibited from any of this activity, because it is unauthorised to it by the Constitution. Unfortunately the people have spoken, the politicians have heard them and the courts turned into politicians, and without rewriting a word in the Constitution the system simply abandoned it and the government became what it is - a dictator in terms of what money is, what prices are, what wages are (same as prices, just prices for labour), what money price is (interest rates), how much can government AND people through government spend on things WITHOUT producing anything (fake interest rates, debt, deficit).

There is no wealth production in anything that government does or ever did. That's right, I discount the TCP/IP just as well, it's not worth destruction of economy to have a few success stories even as significant as ONE of many possible Internet protocols.

Re:Business/Government Divide.

[Anonymous Coward]

And when the highest marginal income tax rate was 85-90%.

AC

Economic growth

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the multitude of reasons that the Federal Reserve set growth targets and promise to buy US Gov't bonds until the growth level target is hit. We're in a recession (started in late 2007, technically we've never dug out of the hole we fell in) and that means the government has less tax revenue, and cuts get made. If the economy had continued to grow, at least physics and "Big Science" wouldn't need to be fighting for an ever-shrinking pool of dollars.

Economic growth needs to get back on track! And the Fed can make it happen!

Re:Economic growth

[plopez]

Or maybe tax revenue can be increased to increase funding for not just R&D but bridges, paying off 2 wars, education, the arts, etc. and stop mortgaging the future.

Re:Economic growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe tax revenue can be increased...

I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.

Additional tax on "the 1%" would yield about $5bn/year. Considering our hole is in the trillions of dollar range, that $5bn is a drop in the bucket.

If you consider a tax increase across the board, increasing the tax rate by 1-2% for everyone would yield an additional $150bn - $300bn annually, which is probably enough to start digging ourselves out. It's also the surest way to drop the economy back into a recession.

The only voter-friendly choice left (mostly because it's generally invisible to voters) is to inflate our way out of debt. The value of your dollar is going to be worth a lot less over the coming two decades, but the rate of change will be so slow that by the time you realize what is happening it will be too late to do anything about it. That car you need to buy in retirement is going to cost you $100,000, and that will get you a Honda Fit.

Re:Economic growth

[plopez]

How about making corporations actually pay taxes. Close the loop holes. Expire the Bush tax cuts. Inflation might help a little, and piss off the Chinese which would make me happy, but too much would be a disaster.

The AC missed a large number of options.

Re:Economic growth

[crunchygranola]

Or maybe tax revenue can be increased...

I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.

Additional tax on "the 1%" would yield about $5bn/year....

Only if you agree that the Bush tax cuts should expire this year - the baseline against which this claim is made (i.e. the expiration of the cuts erases much of this tax inequality). But the people making this claim - Republicans - are insisting that those cuts must not expire for the rich.

This is intellectual dishonesty.

Re:Economic growth

[Black Parrot]

I'm interested in hearing your proposal for this.

Just rolling back the Bush-era tax cuts would put a huge dent in our deficit.

We could also tax capital gains at the same rate we tax people who actually have to work for their money.

And tax profitable corporations rather than subsidizing them.

Unfortunately, this country has become a cream-skimming operation for the rich. When their wholly-owned legislators have bankrupted us, they'll throw us away and move on to the next country, just like they do when the acquire a business, squeeze it dry, and discard the husk.

Any central authority will do

[concealment]

The point of central authority is that we all pay in a certain amount of our wealth, and it concentrates that wealth and does great things with it. Whether that's Roman emperors building temples, or NASA, it's the same principle.

It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.

Re:Any central authority will do

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize tax-deductible is not a $1 donation = -$1 tax bill right? Right?

Re:Any central authority will do

[NatasRevol]

I'm pretty sure most of america doesn't realize that a tax deduction isn't the same as a tax credit.

Re:Any central authority will do

[asylumx]

Please mod parent up -- you have to donate almost all of your income to charity in order for the two to cancel out on your tax bill. This is because charitable contributions come off of your total taxable income. You'd have to donate enough that it dropped your overall income into a non-taxed bracket.

It's not that I don't agree with the notion of pooling our money without government, but the idea that...

Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.

...isn't even close. It's a deduction, not a credit.

Re:Any central authority will do

[Cigarra]

You do realize tax-deductible is not a $1 donation = -$1 tax bill right? Right?

I certainly don't. Would you care to explain?

Re:Any central authority will do

[Almandine]

I'll give an example. Assuming your tax rate is a flat 20% and your income before taxes is $100,000, then your tax bill will be $20,000. If you donate $10,000 to a charity, the $10,000 is tax deductible and reduces your taxable income from $100,000 down to $90,000. At $90,000, your tax bill is $18,000. Therefore, your $10,000 tax deductible donation reduced your tax bill by $2,000.

Crafts Stores

[Anonymous Coward]

Reliable and professional China crafts stores where you can buy craft merchandise and dropship them anywhere in the world!

Government OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the free market decide. This country is great because of private business research. We haven't needed government funding till the socialist fascist democrats took over. Before then it was science for miles funded completely by virtuous businesses.

If the American people don't want the Higgs then why should government force them to have it?

Ron Paul 2012!

Re:Government OUT!

[plopez]

In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel. If they had let the private sector sort it out we'd be sipping cocktails on Mars already!

Re:Government OUT!

[skids]

The "Free Market" most people rave about is a mathematical fantasy that is based on incorrect assumptions. No "Free Market" would have created nuclear power, for example, as the initial investments were too much for any business ledger to survive.

Take for example, Google -- they regularly take media heat for spending down on basic research. If they just ignored this pressure from stockholders, their stock would tank, so occasionally they back off. The "Free Market" punishes too much ambition, or any large amount of spending directed at creating a marketplace that benefits the world at large more than it benefits the individual company.

Occasionally visionary company executives manage to convince investors that something good for the economy at large is worth investing in. Most of the time they fly smaller projects under the radar. The Government has the same problem, in that politicians have to deal with pressures from the public over the debt. Corruption in either sphere has long turn deleterious consequences because it increases adversion to big speculative projects.

Certain types of progress absolutely require levels of effort beyond what the corporate sector is able muster. If we want top make these kinds of progress we have to pool resources. So we should not complain that that gets done, we should just complain when it gets done wrong, most especially when the mistake was easily preventable.

Re:Government OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Business is great in the United States because there's a legal environment and infrastructure to support business. Guess what creates those? It ain't the free market. There's a reason you guys aren't taken really seriously most places. You might be over-represented on the Internet (trust fund babies with time to burn?), but you never see a Libertarian getting more than a couple percent of the vote ... and there's a reason for that.

Re:Government OUT!

[0123456]

In the same way the government disincentivzed space travel.

Uh, they did.

Being first to the Moon was the biggest single incentive for private manned spaceflight; someone would have done it sooner or later for the prestige. But the government threw vast amounts of money at NASA to do it without leaving any usable infrastructure behind that would allow such flights to continue.

So if any company says today 'we want to raise billions of dollars to go to the moon', people just shrug and say 'so what? we already did that years ago'.

Re:Government OUT!

[the eric conspiracy]

If the free market were such a great thing then there would be a country with a great economic success record as a result of practicing it.

Hasn't happened.

Re:Government OUT!

[chill]

Impressive, a +4 Insightful post that is nothing more than a quick troll. Not a very good one, either.

Bravo, sir! Bravo!

Re:Government OUT!

[NeutronCowboy]

Indeed. I think the most impressive part about this troll is that it actually managed to be taken seriously and modded UP.

Re:Government OUT!

[firewrought]

Let the free market decide. This country is great because of private business research. We haven't needed government funding till the socialist fascist democrats took over.

Parent is troll with little knowledge about the history of government-funded research. Mod down.

Re:Government OUT!

[plopez]

That whoosing noise was th sarcasm going over people's head.

Re:Government OUT!

[repapetilto]

Free market /= publicly held corporations. Even if we accept your assumption that no "free market" (as you say none has ever existed) would have created nuclear power, as fossil fuels are depleted the value of such an industry will rise, thus increasing ROI. Is this not obvious?

Re:Government OUT!

[plopez]

Hmmm... well you could consider the billions spent on R&D infrastructure. Safely getting people to and from space created a technology which the private sector can now take advantage of. As well as leasing launch sites to the private sector.

If any CEO had said, "We will have a man on the moon and safely return in ten years", they would have been fired and possibly locked up in the looney bin. Only the government had the muscle and the lack of commercial pressures to do a job like that. The private sector is incapable of building something like a Hadron accelerator because there is NO PROFIT in it.

No profit, no progress. That's how the private sector operates.

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

No "Free Market" would have created nuclear power, for example, as the initial investments were too much for any business ledger to survive.

- nonsense. Nonsense.

Without the government stealing money (production) from people through taxing productivity, the companies can create anything that any government can just fine.

It WILL take more time in some cases, but it must take more time, because things must become actually profitable so that nobody is required to be a SLAVE in order to fund whatever pet program that some government official is interested in.

This absolutely includes nuclear. There is nothing about nuclear that is more difficult than any other innovation and discovery that people have done on their own throughout history of humanity. From basic chemistry, to locomotives, to air flight, to electric motors, to telegraph, to radio, to TV, to freezers, to transistors and microprocessors, to cruise ships.

How much does it cost Intel to build a new Fab site? A few billion. It's private money.

Certain types of progress absolutely require levels of effort beyond what the corporate sector is able muster. If we want top make these kinds of progress we have to pool resources.

- nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

1. There is nothing that tells the government that it is doing anything worthwhile at all. They are not price sensitive, they are not profit sensitive, they are not asking the market: Am I doing the right thing when I am investing my resources for the last 5-10 years into this project, are you willing to buy?

There is NOTHING that really can stop a government short of complete bankruptcy (it happens much faster with governments that don't issue 'reserve currency').

2. There is absolutely nothing standing in the way of investment capital to be pooled WITHOUT any government involvement at all.

In fact, the more government there is the harder it is to have legitimate savings that can be used as an investment capital pool.

Government destroys savings via inflation, it prevents innovation via regulations and taxation schemes, it prevents all sorts of real viable economic activity while insisting on running its own insane projects. How expensive is that new F22 exactly and WHEN will it stop? How much did the entire 'space shuttle' program cost and what has it actually accomplished that couldn't be accomplished with non-reusable rockets much cheaper?

Etc.etc.etc.

Re:Government OUT!

[skids]

They are not price sensitive, they are not profit sensitive, they are not asking the market:

Were the market perfectly rational, your argument would hold water. It is not. Nor is government. Both have failures, because they are made out of apes.

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

Market doesn't need to be perfectly rational or even right all the time, market only needs to be not tempered with by government with a fake money printing press and a war and social programs agenda.

Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market.

Worse - in the market you can opt out of any insanity that ensues.

With the government running an insanity you can't really opt out. You can't opt out of bombing Iraq and Afghanistan and being all over the world. You can't opt out of SS and Medicare and EI and minimum wage and price controls, and fake money and price control over the money (interest) and it's worse even.

With government you can't opt out even if you find a way for you personally not to participate, because 99% of people can't opt out, and because they can't, you are a victim of their suicidal herd behaviour. What I mean is that they won't stop destroying the economy and society and waging the wars even if you figure out how not to participate at all (say you are in the woods somewhere, gathering your own food, etc., when the society crashes because of gov't, you'll be subjected to all sorts of unpleasantness, say a civil war around you, you may get shot even if you didn't participate in the destruction process).

Re:Government OUT!

[skids]

Market doesn't need to be perfectly rational or even right all the time

Yes, actually, it does, for the claims of "Free Market" proponents to be true. They took an academic game theory paper, didn't bother to read the assumptions, and just assumed that everything in it would come true. Even the simple presence of information latency throws off the model's emergent behavior quite far from the ideals that such as the AMI would have us believe will magically happen if we just cut their taxes and let them dump chemicals wherever they see fit.

Serious economists have long known that you need both government intervention in the market and private ownership of the market, or the whole system falls to crap.

Again, we need to be getting angry at incompetence, corruption, and avarice in both the public and private sectors, and stop wasting times dealing with the handwaving from either set of wingnuts.

Re:Government OUT!

[Black Parrot]

Without the government stealing money (production) from people through taxing productivity

Tell us more about this ethical system that views taxation as stealing.

Presumably you're posting from the anarchist's paradise, Somalia, where all you have to do is pay off the local warlord and pirates.

Re:Government OUT!

[Black Parrot]

Government doesn't have ANY ability to know what is right and what is wrong in terms of project, and almost all government projects end up being wrong by the way, government has much worse track record in terms of some value returned per dollar spent than the market

Evidence? I've worked for companies large and small, and waste, mismanagement, and bad investments are the norm.

Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?

And as far as value returned per dollar spent, if both the government and and the market do the same thing, the basic costs will be about the same (except that private sector employees are generally paid better). But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.

And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.

It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

If you live in USA, then you live in that 'anarchist paradise', except in that country in 1913 the freedoms of people were bought with a promise of bread an circuses.

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

Even the simple presence of information latency throws off the model's emergent behavior quite far from the ideals that such as the AMI would have us believe will magically happen if we just cut their taxes and let them dump chemicals wherever they see fit.

-

wait, so you have 'perfect knowledge' in your totalitarian paradise right now? And clearly there are no special interests that are part of the elite there, who are not even constrained by the system?

Before 1913 USA wasn't a 'perfect free market', but it sure had a much better economy, without income/corporate/payroll taxes, without EPA, FHA, FDA, HUD, FBI, FDIC, SS, Medicare, EI, dep't of education, energy, commerce, interior, agriculture, transportation, small business, without wage and price controls including the minimum wage and artificial interest rates, etc.etc.

US money was appreciating in value, prices were dropping, unemployment was minimal, conditions were constantly improving as there was more and more competition and profit made. US became largest exporter and creditor in the world. Almost all of that happened just between 1870 and 1913, and before 19 century USA was just an afterthought to Europe.

Today the closest approximation to free market is China with all its manufacturing, Switzerland with its culture of freedom and Somalia actually, after it was ruled by the British until just about 50 years ago and then by Communists that were removed from power in a huge bloody civil war 20 years ago, so it's a poor nation with lots of problems, but at least without one crippling totalitarian government structure and it's getting better there.

Serious economists have long known that you need both government intervention in the market and private ownership of the market, or the whole system falls to crap.

- of-course by 'serious economists' you do mean Keynesians, who are basically part of the totalitarian regime, as they provide the necessary academic backing to this insane idea that government can print money towards prosperity and buy whatever with fake money while diluting everybody's purchasing power.

USD lost about 98% of its value in gold since 1913.
USD lost about 99% of its value in oil since 1913.

Same goes for most of other products, from bread to milk, etc.

That's purchasing power that is lost. The unemployment is always higher and higher since the Fed came to power and created one recession after another, and then the Fed and government turned every recession into a depression (except the one from 1921, which only lasted for about a year, because Harding cut gov't spending by 70% instead of doing what Hoover and FDR and Johnson and Nixon and Clinton and Bush and now Obama were doing together with their respective Feds.

Inflation has been in 11-15% range for about 20 years now, real rates of return are negative on all this insane debt, the currency is fake, the investments are destroyed and coupled with the highest effective taxes in US history and with regulations, this pushed almost all production and productivity out of the country.

So is the Fed and this insane government succeeding in anything? Sure, they are succeeding in destroying the US economy and society.

And what about those 'serious economists'? Well, they provide the necessary theoretical and academic base to support these policies. These economists are nothing more than shills and trolls for the government.

Again, we need to be getting angry at incompetence, corruption, and avarice in both the public and private sectors, and stop wasting times dealing with the handwaving from either set of wingnuts.

- more blame shifting.

The righteous anger should be directed inwards, because it's the people that allowed the government to consist of those, who destroyed the Constitution. At this point the system will be destroyed, there is nothing in the way of destruction. AFAIC the faster the better, this government cannot be removed from power peacefully and without destruction of currency and economy, so the faster that happens the faster it can be rebuilt, but already without the crippling enormous government.

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

Also, do you have evidence that "almost all" government projects go wrong?

- because there is no profit.

But people in the private sector expect profit on top of the actual expenses.

- profit is the only indicator that something is being done that is worth all of the time, money and resources that is spent on the project.

And so we're seeing news stories about outsourcing that ends up costing more for lower quality results than what we had before the outsourcing fad got started.

- really? iPads, iPhones, iPods and other electronics are getting better, not worse.

Cars are getting better, not worse. Same with everything. Quantity becomes quality at some point, because increase in production requires increase in quality of production lines, and increase in quality of production lines creates demand for more and more engineering and this in turn requires more and more basic science.

The profits that are made in production can be then used to pay for all the training of workers, engineers and scientists, and this eventually leads to better quality.

Quantity becomes quality eventually and lack of quantity destroys quality, and that's what is rotten in USA and Europe.

It is, after all, just a scam for putting you tax dollars in some rich man's pocket. All the crap about the free market is just propaganda to sell the bad deals to the suckers^w taxpayers.

- the bottom 50% of earners in USA only pay 3% of all income taxes. The top 20% pay over 80% of all income taxes.

The only scam you should be worried about is inflation - money counterfeiting by the Fed, that's the real tax on you as it destroys the economy and your purchasing power as it grows fake government spending (fake, because it's done with fake money).

Free markets exist now outside of USA, that's where the prosperity is. USA used to have it, I explained more in this same thread.

Re:Government OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

- because there is no profit.

Nah, there's TONS of profit... for the politicians and their friends who are in on the racket

- profit is the only indicator that something is being done that is worth all of the time, money and resources that is spent on the project.

Since the politicians and their friends are seeing profit, it is well worth their time, money, and resources to continue doing what they're doing

- really? iPads, iPhones, iPods and other electronics are getting better, not worse.

Likewise, politicians are getting better and better at pushing regulations through for their own profit.

Quantity becomes quality eventually and lack of quantity destroys quality, and that's what is rotten in USA and Europe.

Nah, USA and Europe has lots of quantity - in politicians and regulations. That quantity of politicians becomes quality, as politicians are, again, better and better at pushing regulations through for their own profit.

The politicians and their corporate friends will only continue to get richer and richer. This is what's happening in USA and Europe.

The people in China and other countries can only dream of becoming like an American/European politician or corporate exec. You know this because lots of rich Chinese people want to immigrate to America and elsewhere, but not the other way around - rich Americans/westerns only outsource their business, but few of them immigrate to China. They're quite content with all the cushiony deals the American government gives them (deals the free market loving Chinese wouldn't give)

Free markets exist now outside of USA, that's where the prosperity is

Nah, USA is the most prosperous place there is. People in US are getting a lot of stuff, for very little to no actual work. That's prosperity. All the other countries (many of which are "prosperous" by selling stuff to US in exchange of all that fake money) are the ones doing the work, but get very little in return (especially when they get fake money in return)

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

Nah, there's TONS of profit... for the politicians and their friends who are in on the racket

- profit from government theft and profit from legitimate business activity are different things, and I am not talking about government theft.

Re:Government OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

- profit from government theft and profit from legitimate business activity are different things, and I am not talking about government theft.

Same difference. No matter how you got the profits, it's all for personal benefit

And that's all that matters. Only by acting for our own self interests can we achieve freedom.

You're only holding your own freedoms back when you refuse to do something because it's not "legitimate"

Re:Government OUT!

[roman_mir]

Same difference. No matter how you got the profits, it's all for personal benefit

1. Profits are not a measurement of increase of personal wealth, they are a measurement of health of business idea and implementation and willingness of the market to buy into the idea.

thus

2. Profits that are not received out of legitimate market activity cannot be used as a feedback mechanism to tell us whether this market activity is worthwhile or worthless. If the profits are not coming out of VOLUNTARY market transactions, then the don't tell us anything about viability of the business.

And that's all that matters. Only by acting for our own self interests can we achieve freedom.

- I know that you are hunting after my comments, trying to be a smart ass with plenty of nonsense responses, but you are actually completely off pretty much always. Our own self interest dictates that we do not allow some to gain from government stealing and divvying up the proceeds of the theft. Our own self interest requires that as people we set up a government structure that does not favour one individual over another based on government decree, only this allows for freedom for all, and thus only this allows maximum profits, maximum market efficiency.

You're only holding your own freedoms back when you refuse to do something because it's not "legitimate"

- you are completely confused.

I am not talking about any one particular person who can get into a position of power and abuse it for his benefit, if he can do it HE MUST. Well, there will be those who will.

I am talking about the 99.9% of all people, they will never be in these positions of power and it is in their best interest that these positions of power do not automatically grant ability to the politicians to abuse those positions.

By giving up our own freedoms and allowing politicians to above and beyond what the law states they can do in government, (the law, being the contract between the people), we create tyranny and destroy economy.

Re:Government OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Profits are not a measurement of increase of personal wealth, they are a measurement of health of business idea and implementation and willingness of the market to buy into the idea.

thus

2. Profits that are not received out of legitimate market activity cannot be used as a feedback mechanism to tell us whether this market activity is worthwhile or worthless. If the profits are not coming out of VOLUNTARY market transactions, then the don't tell us anything about viability of the business.

Wrong. Profit is simply a measurement of costs vs revenues, risks vs opportunities, benefits and drawbacks, You take the good stuff and subtract the bad stuff, and the result is profit (or loss if the bad out weights the good) . It doesn't have to be about businesses or markets. It's applied everywhere in life (or you can say life itself is a business venture all the time)

Even under your definition, that's what the politicians are doing. Between starting a "legitimate" business or going into their business of what boils down to racketeering, they find that the latter leads to more personal gain - aka more viable.

Their results are obvious: politicians and their corporate friends on average live much better lives than "legitimate" folks across multiple measures.

- I know that you are hunting after my comments, trying to be a smart ass with plenty of nonsense responses, but you are actually completely off pretty much always.

Oh please, you think too highly of yourself. I'm 110% correct all the time. I couldn't be so correct if I was hunting after your comments.

Our own self interest dictates

No, not "our" self interest. YOUR self interest. Your self interest dictates nobody else but yourself. MY self interest dictate me. And the government's self interest dictates them (and the gov's self interest told them to steal, so they did)

Our own self interest requires that as people we set up a government structure that does not favour one individual over another based on government decree

Again, you're confusing your self interest with everybody else's. The government's self interest has no such requirement. There are also people outside of government who has plenty to gain from government, and so their self interest will not coincide with yours.

only this allows for freedom for all, and thus only this allows maximum profits, maximum market efficiency.

Self interest doesn't care for freedom for all. Self interest cares for freedom for yourself (and maybe people close to you... *maybe*) Self interest cares not for a market maximum. Only personal maximums.

- you are completely confused.

I am not talking about any one particular person

Nope. I'm completely awake and aware. I know you aren't talking about any one particular person.

I am talking about the 99.9% of all people

Right. I'm talking to a OWSer. Again, stop thinking so highly of yourself. Stop pretending you speak for everyone

they will never be in these positions of power and it is in their best interest

Again, you're pretending to speak for what other people's best interests are. (it's funny, you're acting just like the government you despise... "oh think of the children! We have to think in their best interests!")

By giving up our own freedoms and allowing politicians to above and beyond what the law states they can do in government, (the law, being the contract between the people), we create tyranny and destroy economy.

Now notice how the politicians don't have to give up their freedoms? As I said before, you're only limiting yourself which in turn limits your own freedoms

You limit yourself to be part of the "our" group. You don't consider what it could be to be one of the politicians,

Govt gets too much credit

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that "government" itself really isn't anything other than wealth collected by force. For some reason people have come to think of it as a problem solver, when all it can really do is collect and spend money... usually inefficiently and recklessly. It has very little interest in spending money wisely as the political winds blow different directions every day. Government exists to protect the rational from the irrational.
I see a need for a separation of science and government. Get it out of setting policies regarding stem cells, cancer treatments, etc. Those that argue it is needed to advance science have forgotten the lessons of the past. The repression of science and new ideas from kings, popes, and populist insanity. Sure it is nice to get a phat grant from the endless US coffers, but at what *real* cost? Government has no place amongst the rational.

Re:Govt gets too much credit

[lessthan]

amongst the rational.

When have you been among the rational? Is there a Rational-land? Can you give me directions? Human beings are NOT rational.

Who would build your roads? Who would care for the orphans? Who would insure that the burger you eat isn't half rat? Who would arrest the wicked? A lage enough percentage of people are shit-heels without a basic notion of decency, that we (humanity as a whole) require an outside ordering influence. We need government.

Asmov Covered this one.

[KDEnut]

Asmov went on a small rant on this very subject years ago in a short novelette called The Dead Past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

Re:Asmov Covered this one.

[NatasRevol]

Who's that?

First google hit for asmov:

ASMOV is an automatic ontology alignment tool which produces class-to-class, property-to-property, individual-to-individual mappings.

Disabusing you of false notions...

[SuperKendall]

The Democrats go. We want to Keep Businesses out of Government, as businesses with their big money will corrupt government.

You claim that when the Democrats have:

1) Had the government purchase a whole car company.
2) Wrote a health care law to funnel money from consumers to the insurance industry.
3) Given hundreds of millions in loans to green companies who donated sufficiently to the Democrats.
4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.

Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.

The Republicans go. We want to Keep Government out of Businesses, as government with their big money will cripple businesses.

But not all Republicans. There are also Republicans willing to interfere in business or to prop up large companies at the expense of the smaller.

Also I have never heard a single person say you should keep government out of business because the government money "cripples" the business. It's more than companies that are over-regualted cannot function.

To label the two sides like that is absurd because you can find counter-examples in each party. You SHOULD NOT mention party when complaining about this kind of issue, instead you should point out both sides have flaws in this regard and it's up to the people voting to look and see what each candidate stands for when they are voting.

Basically you have I think way too simplistic a view of how the world is currently for what is really going on.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[operagost]

5) Created a "jobs council" that has the sitting CEO of a huge American-based international corporation on it.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[jellomizer]

You missed the subtle differences.
The Democrats don't want business to interfere with government but they want more government to interfere with business. "We are from the Government and we are Here to help"

The Republicans don't want government to interfere with they business, however they want business to interfere with government. "Don't tax me, and don't tell me what to do, as it effects my bottom line, however if you can change this law that gives me an advantage then all the better"

The issue is that Government the organization (Not the political parties) will try to keep their distance from companies as much as they can. As you pointed out it doesn't happen, however what does happen is more behind the curtains wheeling and dealing, not and R&D isn't the issue, as the Government wants to appear distant from the company, so R&D spending is quite visible, to citizens and share holders.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh.

Those four points you made?

Switch company names, and therefore party names.

I think you have way too one sided view of how things are.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.

Huh. I was always under the impression that Bush was a Republican and that the Congress has been under Republican control through filibuster threats and parliamentary tactics for almost 20 years. Who knew I was all mixed up?

The Democrats of 2012 are the Republicans of 1972. Shit, the last liberal President we've had was Richard Nixon.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, was Bush secretly controlled by a Democrat all those years? THAT explains his slow, robotic speech--- it was the Mind Control! He went out without his foil hat!!

In case you missed it, the bailouts were set up by W.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[me3head]

4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.

Um, you do realize that this was Bush, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[gumbi west]

"1) Had the government purchase a whole car company."

It was free.

"2) Wrote a health care law to funnel money from consumers to the insurance industry."

Most of the text is actually about reducing fraud and closing loopholes. Very little money is actually involved in the individual mandate because age is permissible as a method of adjusting your premium and that is the main indicator of health and likelihood to buy health insurance in the first place.

"4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not."

I don't buy this, but if you do, that was President Bush's treasury secretary.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[thoth]

The Democrats go. We want to Keep Businesses out of Government, as businesses with their big money will corrupt government.

You claim that when the Democrats have:

1) Had the government purchase a whole car company.
2) Wrote a health care law to funnel money from consumers to the insurance industry.
3) Given hundreds of millions in loans to green companies who donated sufficiently to the Democrats.
4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.

Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.

1. That bailout was a loan that has been paid back.
2. The biggest health care giveaway in the history of the country was the Medicare prescription drugs law, and that happened under the Republicans.
3. Oh I gotcha... Halliburton and other "no bid" contracts are NEVER issued to companies formerly run by Republicans. And you can spin this several ways, how about this one: Obama invested in the the future of the country; Halliburton contracts were flat out corruption.
4. Also happened under Bush.

If you are going to pass yourself off as the "voice of reason" amidst various issues, it would help if you had a fucking clue and an actual semblance of neutral comparisons.

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[crunchygranola]

4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.

Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.

4) would be TARP, proposed by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson during the global financial crisis in September 2008, and signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008.

But, hey when was the last time a right-winger let facts get in the way of a rant?

Re:Disabusing you of false notions...

[Anonymous Coward]

4) Basically dictated to banks they WERE going to take a huge sum of bail-out money, like it or not.

Never before have LARGE business and government been so twisted together, and that happened on the Democrats watch, mostly while it had total control.

4) would be TARP, proposed by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson during the global financial crisis in September 2008, and signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on October 3, 2008.

But, hey when was the last time a right-winger let facts get in the way of a rant?

Not to mention the fact that if a large bank turned down the money, it would still get the benefit of depositors and wholesale lenders knowing that the government was prepared to fire buckets of money at Wall Street to keep the financial system intact. In effect, it would "free-ride" on the benefits of the government's confidence building efforts without sharing the cost.

Silver lining

[jbeaupre]

There was a silver lining to the cancellation of the SSC. There has been an explosion of quantum, solid state, and low temperature physics in the last 2 decades that might not have happened if all those great minds had been dedicated to just a single project.

Physicists have been forced to throw huge amounts of creativity at science. In a sense, they have probably done more with less. I'm not advocating cutting spending further, just seeing the silver lining of the cancellation of one project.

Re:Silver lining

[bware]

There was a silver lining to the cancellation of the SSC. There has been an explosion of quantum, solid state, and low temperature physics in the last 2 decades that might not have happened if all those great minds had been dedicated to just a single project.

And a great number of them went off to become quants on Wall Street, developing models for CDOs and derivatives ("the whole Harvard physics class of 94" one fellow who would know recently told me - I'm sure he exaggerated a bit, but that was my experience too).

How's that for a silver lining?

Re:Silver lining

[jbeaupre]

this probably sums it up: http://hikinghq.net/images/pessimism.jpg

The pools already exist

[dlenmn]

Many of the big experiments (LHC, ITER, etc.) are already funded by many countries. Steven Weinberg is a US Citizen, so he deals with his government. Other scientists complain about their governments. It wouldn't make sense to do it the other way around. No one thinks the US should be solely funding all the experiments.

Physics for now

[fermion]

Galileo just sat in church watching chandeliers swing. One of my professors when I was in school got a paper out of watching the pool while he was vacationing in Mexico. My high school sent a getaway special a couple years after I graduated. Sometimes Physics is just mathematical models, sometimes it is big expensive experiments. I tWe are in a time of big experiments at the moment because the years 1900-1950 or so were spent rewriting the classical laws of physics into Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, then after that time continuing to figure out why they do not mesh.

What we are seeing now is a few decades of really big science to test the models and discover which are correct, which are not, and which need to be rewritten. This is not going to be a forever process. At some point our experiments will result in data and we will have another direction to go in. Cyclotrons are not going to get arbitrarily big. Spacecraft will eventually need to be sent out and we are simply going to have to wait. We may see a time when the theoretical physicists have to work for a few decades to understand what we need to build next.

Re:Physics for now

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is not going to be a forever process. At some point our experiments will result in data and we will have another direction to go in."

How about starting today by ceasing government funding for string theory?

It's a setup!

[Anonymous Coward]

All a deception... =D

Government Science Complex

[argStyopa]

While I sympathize with the point of TFA's author, I'm not sure if it's that simple.

More government funding, which is the source of big dollars, isn't an unalloyed good.

From Eisenhower's famous speech about the (dangers of) military-industrial complex:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

The more that funding is a result of the POLITICAL process, all the more will science be politicized. For scientists to expect money "no strings attached" would be staggeringly naive.

Pure science is absolutely critical to the continued advancement of our society.

Considering the diminishing returns and extraordinary numbers required to push out the boundaries of human knowledge, I don't know where the dollars could come from WITHOUT government, but funding from government is invariably a tarbaby that makes everyone sticky and dirty.

Re:Government Science Complex

[Anonymous Coward]

The key is diversity. There are times when progress comes from the stereotypical lone-inventor-in-the-garage. There are times when it takes a massive group effort and lots of expensive equipment.

Massive group efforts historically came from either Big Business R&D departments or from Government (usually funding academia). Big Business wanted to Own the Future, so they'd indulge in the occasional "Blue Sky" project.

These days, Big Business rarely cares about owning anything further out than the next quarterly bonuses, and their main means of ownership is via Merger and Acquisition, not by superior new products, but in the mean time, government funding is under a 2-pronged attack from ideologues that think we can shrink ourselves to greatness and/or don't want any "inconvenient" discoveries being made.

There never was a perfect solution. Big projects invariably attract people with agendas, people with selfish goals, and people who can quash possibilities by sheer weight of numbers. On the other hand, what we have been doing lately is limiting our options. At best that only works until someone less limited takes over.

Re:Government Science Complex

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, how I wish for a truly robust Government-scientific complex! And I'd happily put Weinberg personally in charge of as big a budget as we can spare! I'd even go further and say that I'd prefer a full dictatorship of scientists to the governing system we have now.

Not just in US

[PiMuNu]

I recently gave a similar talk to the UK Institute of Physics conference on High Energy Physics. The fact is that particle physics costs too much. The problem, in my view, is generated by particle physicists. We have underinvested in the basic technology of accelerator-driven HEP, namely superconducting magnets and to a lesser extent high gradient RF cavities. This underinvestment has lasted for several decades.

For example, there are a bunch of folks working on HTS (High Temperature Superconductors) in the US with the potential to increase magnet field strengths by an order of magnitude - and hence particle accelerator fields by an order of magnitude. But the program is poorly funded if at all. In Europe, there are similar programs but they are disjoint (as so many things in Europe) between different countries.

Sadly, the SSC and LHC were both disastrous in this respect. They basically bankrupted the HEP community. Now the US is more-or-less withdrawing from HEP and European accelerator driven HEP seems to have nowhere to go after LHC.

The impact to HEP community is clear, but what about the impact to society? Where will we be in a world where we no longer have the capability to push back the fundamental frontiers of knowledge. Is that it?

For the US, that's predictable

[FridayBob]

With a succession of US governments willing only to lower tax rates and thus only being able to cut spending in order to cut their deficit, and being populated ever more frequently by anti-science religious nuts, obviously they're no hurry to invest in any more huge science projects, such as the SSH.... I mean the SSC.

Holding "the apparatus in his lap"

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wanted a picture of that?

Re:Holding "the apparatus in his lap"

[Black Parrot]

Who wanted a picture of that?

It's a popular meme. Ann Romney says we won't really know her husband until they unzip him for us.

Inevitable?

[Bob-taro]

If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?

Yes, if the cost of pushing the frontiers of science continues to increase, we'll hit a limit where we can't fund the next step. However, I don't think we're there yet. The world economy just isn't doing that well now. When the economy picks up again, the funding will probably come back.

Political or physical?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is this really a political problem?

We haven't been building steadily larger, more complex, and harder-to-get-funded physics machines just for giggles, we've been building them because the previous ones failed to smash particles hard enough.

It's not as though scientists like grantwriting and political money-grubbing to get their science widgets built. It's just that, so far, each generation of Big Apparatus has managed to peel back another layer of detail that bears no signs of being the deepest one. There is, after all, absolutely nothing that requires the laws of physics to be discernible with apparatus(or minds) of modest size. It is entirely possible that this isn't just the comparatively petty matter of deciding which politicians sign the checks; but of whether we will be able to declare victory within the limits of all the mass and energy within our reach. If it turns out that chasing elementary particles into their spider holes requires an accelerator that runs around the edge of the Kuiper belt, or a Pulsar caliber beam source, who do we get to complain to?

The simple solution to many problems is...

[3seas]

... first recognize its not government funding by rather misuse of tax payer contributions to funding.

Next crowd source funding direction, each tax payer instructing government where their share is to be spent.
Congress will like this as they no longer have to fail at budgeting and accounting, we the people will do it instead.
The government and other previous and current government funded projects will have to educate the people where it is they need funding and why.
Amendment 16 of the US constitution empowers congress to lay and collect taxes, but it does not and cannot define where the funding is to be used nor can they strip the people of their right and duty to say, otherwise we the people will have no choice but to follow the recognition and instructions the founders left for us in the Declaration of Independence, upon such wide scope government failure.

There is need for: organized structures for the optimization of teamwork benefits shared among the contributing members and citizens of the membership. There are many shared benefits we do have, but given the waste and misuse, budgeting and massive accounting failure.... we the people can certainly do better. It is our right and duty to.

What we need is forms that allow us "the people" to instruct government at all levels (local, state, federal, etc...) where they are to spend our taxes.

Scientific research will may or not benefit at first, but its gonna get better when the individual tax paying people learn they have voice that literally counts. rather than an illusion of a politician claiming to be representing the people.... by lying to the people. Which does NOT equate to "no taxation without representation"

At least once a year, during and with income tax returns... tell the government at the levels you pay taxes to... where to spend your money and if they cannot validate it.... we can work through credit unions to do so.

Educating the public in a manner of asking for their democratic participation in the direction of the Republic of the United States... WILL BRING THE AMERICAN SPIRIT BACK.... And we know research does a lot better when the spirit is there, as does many other aspects of the environment we live in.

danger of a monoculture

[Goldsmith]

Weinberg points to some un-named Congressman for the line on finding priorities in science funding, but that's not necessary. He should be looking at his colleagues in a physics department, many of us feel the same way!

What particle physics has lacked is true oversight. At this point, their papers aren't really peer-reviewed, their grants aren't competitive, and their results are borderline relevant to actually understanding new physics. Their culture is so monolithic that they actually believe internal competition and review is all they need.

Astronomy is an example of a field of physics where oversight and competition have been beneficial. Weinberg is incorrect, we do not need space based resources to do the top level work. There have been some creative solutions to doing astronomy cost-effectively. Astronomers and the spin off field of cosmology have effectively taken leadership on research of fundamental physics away from particle physicists using small and moderately sized projects, with a few exceptions.

The social and funding effect which we're seeing now in particle physics can be found in any other big field of physics. Superconductivity research is famous for it. At a certain point, it's not really worth continuing fundamental research in a given field; funding and interest drops. It's not that everything is solved, but simply that creative research is no longer encouraged by the community and funding agencies get tired of seeing the same proposal every year. Eventually, more interesting research plans are accepted; funding and interest increases again. That will happen with accelerators, but first this old mindset needs to be challenged.

is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[cinnamon colbert]

cause that is the true question; science is $$, and, even more importantly, there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?) I would say that spending a lot on cosmology is less important then cancer, but thats my bias

Re:is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?)...

Well, no one can hit a major league fastball with 100% success. But some people have a higher probability of success than others.

In a baseball game, the goal is to identify the person with the highest relative probability of success. But if the goal was simply to get as many fastballs hit as possible, it might be more effective to hire a million people at minimum wage and have them all spend 8 hours a day swinging like crazy. I mean, suppose only 1% got a hit all day. That's still 10,000 fastballs hit. Could one single major league player hit 10,000 fastballs in a single day?

Depending how you count, there are tens of thousands of human genes. And many of them are still not characterized (e.g. assigned a function). Are we really expecting that some single Nobel prize winner is going to come along and characterize all of them by himself? I'm sure, the way the Nobel prize is structured, there can only be a few winners a year (it's a relative prize, after all). But does that mean that only a few people a year are qualified to do science? If that's true, it's going to be a long wait for a cure for cancer.

And, leaving aside talent, as someone who does science for a (rather meager) living, it's heart breaking to see all the people who have made decades of sacrifice in order to do science be unable to find jobs because of lack of funding.

Bottom line: when it comes to scientists, the problem isn't lack of supply, it's lack of demand.

Re:is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[fearofcarpet]

cause that is the true question; science is $$, and, even more importantly, there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?) I would say that spending a lot on cosmology is less important then cancer, but thats my bias

You also have to keep in mind that there is a profit motive for curing cancer and thus the private sector is also hard at work on that problem. No private entity is going to cough up tens of billions of dollars to do fundamental research in high energy physics. Analogies between physical science and disease are also difficult because so much can be done through awareness and prevention; cancers are intertwined with lifestyle as well as genetics, AIDS remains a much larger problem in countries that lack effective public education and prevention, etc. Big Science requires the upfront investment of a huge pile of cash in exchange for long-term gains that are often difficult to perceive, particularly to Congress, who are up for election every two years.

As to your other point, it has been my experience (as a professional scientist) that you're spot-on; the greatest minds in a particular field are often people who are just wired to think that way. One who is naturally gifted at math and solving puzzles might make a great theoretician, but fail miserably as an experimental biochemist. But I think that countries should be competing for these minds, particularly in this globalized and connected world and in science, where passionate people will absolutely move across an ocean for the chance to take a crack at an intriguing problem. The US got lucky after WWII and basically inherited many of the world's greatest scientific minds by default; no other country was left with enough resources to support scientific research or a serious university system. And now those people are retiring and dying, and Europe and Asia are quickly rising and surpassing the US in many areas of science.

Re:is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[Anonymous Coward]

agree a lot with last paragraph.
To me, there has always been something a little racist (if you will pardon the term) in the mainstream idea (espoused by both clinton and obama) that we can outcompete other countries by focusing on education; this has always seemed to assume both that our unique university system won't be replicated, and that Asians are not that smart (in the 70s, when detroit was under assault, one frequently heard that asians were hard working drones, but not creative - truly astonishing explicit racism)
You look at science and innovation, I don't see any reason China can't replicate silicon valley; they ahve dynamic biz guys willing and able to invest, lots and lots of great minds, all they need are some universisties - we shall see what happens !!!!

In terms of people moving - over the last year or two, I have seen a few quotes from top guys at places like mit, about how the best students, who could be on the tenure/national academy sciences track at a top school, are now moving back to asia..when the best young people vote with their feet, that tells you something

Re:is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[quacking duck]

cause that is the true question; science is $$, and, even more importantly, there are a limited number of talented people who can do science (I mean, how many guys can hit a major league fastball ?)
I would say that spending a lot on cosmology is less important then cancer, but thats my bias

I hope you don't believe that advanced-level scientists can be moved to a different field just because another field is "more important." I once read a comment on a story about the shuttle program shutting down, "just move the NASA scientists to other fields, like cancer research". It displayed an absolutely mind-boggling level of ignorance, sheer stupidity even, about people in fields of science and research. A physicist is not a chemist is not a biologist, they didn't choose their field because of the money, they chose it because they have the skills and passion for it.

You used a sports analogy. Well, how many pro basketball players would be any good at pro ice hockey?

Re:is cosmology more important then cancer ?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I'm glad that you , in your response, maintain a civil tone, appropriate for swaying the views of other people
reminds me of theold joke:
a freshman is crossing harvard yard, and he asks an upperclassman, "can you tell me where the librarys at ?"
the upper classman replies, snooty accent, heah at hahvad, we do not end a sentance with a preposition
Ok, then the frosh says, "can you tell me where the librarys at, asshole ?"

I'm not quite sure I see the connection between my idea and your outrage. To take your specific example, if we shut down the shuttle program, yes, many of those people could be retrained in other fields; that is what a professional is - somoene who can take on new challanges.
And there is alot to do in cancer and biology and condensed matter physcis; as Feynman remarked, next time a physicist is boasting about how he can predict the first 5seconds of the universe, ask him what happens when you push water thru a pipe - he can't tell you.

Also, why do those people on the shuttle program deserve jobs, or are more deserving then other people ?

I guess I'm to tired to respond properly to your post, but you sir, are an ass.

Re:A Pool is Unnecessary & Presents Its Own Pr

[Nadaka]

The military will advance particle physics when they can shrink the accelerator small enough to mount it in a turret.

False dichotomy

[J'raxis]

If not our government, will anyone fund these immense projects or will physics slowly grind to a halt due to fiscal constraints?

Or, they can try to find some other way to do this research that doesn't involve such immense construction. But without establishing this alarmist false dichotomy, Mr. Weinberg won't be able to scare us into giving him more money.

Re:False dichotomy

[Tommy Bologna]

There is also the possibility that we shovel more money into these 'big science' projects and physics slowly grinds to a halt anyway. Ingenuity is as likely to drive big discoveries in 'small science' as a lack-of-ingenuity is to thwart big discoveries in 'big science.'

Look at the US Space Program. There was a time when that was a well-funded jewel in the crown of US scientific achievement. Now due to lethargy, nebulous organizational mission, poor management, and a dearth of imagination, NASA has become something of a scientific backwater whose colossal screw-ups garner more attention than any experimentation it does. Arguably it is currently overfunded given the full scope of its administrative competency.

Re:False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look at the US Space Program. There was a time when that was a well-funded jewel in the crown of US scientific achievement."

Um no, it was a well-funded military program that was wrapped up in jingoistic PR. There was very little "science", lots of engineering though.

"Now due to lethargy, nebulous organizational mission, poor management, and a dearth of imagination,"

The same can be said of 19th century coal locomotives. We don't use them anymore because they make no sense, not because of your reasons. Imagination doesn't move mass, energy does. We simply have hit the limits of what's possible. There are no exotic sci-fi "fields" and bizarre particles to enable the delirious sci-fi "technologies" that sci-fi "promised" us.

That's why space is dead. Space is huge, it's mostly empty and we've been there. We know, we have pictures. Reality suggests we move on and concentrate on the real jewel, our planet.

Re:False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

... Reality suggests we move on and concentrate on the real jewel, our planet.

Like pills to mitigate male pattern baldness & erectile dysfunction...

Re:False dichotomy

[Tommy Bologna]

"Look at the US Space Program. There was a time when that was a well-funded jewel in the crown of US scientific achievement."

Um no, it was a well-funded military program that was wrapped up in jingoistic PR. There was very little "science", lots of engineering though.

To say the space program involved very little science (nice scare quotes btw) is simply wrong and bespeaks a certain ignorance about the program. Your statement is more political spin than it is fact.

"Now due to lethargy, nebulous organizational mission, poor management, and a dearth of imagination,"

The same can be said of 19th century coal locomotives. We don't use them anymore because they make no sense, not because of your reasons. Imagination doesn't move mass, energy does. We simply have hit the limits of what's possible. There are no exotic sci-fi "fields" and bizarre particles to enable the delirious sci-fi "technologies" that sci-fi "promised" us.

The space program involved much more than moving mass, demonstrating again you're not particularly familiar with the topic.

That's why space is dead. Space is huge, it's mostly empty and we've been there. We know, we have pictures. Reality suggests we move on and concentrate on the real jewel, our planet.

Sanctimonious pablum.

Re:False dichotomy

[J'raxis]

NASA, like all bureaucracies, has grown to serve only one purpose: Provide safe, secure jobs to bureaucrats.

Funding crisis?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we've just hit the plateau. There's nothing more revolutionnary coming. This isn't the late 19th/early 20th century anymore. You can't gain insights by exposing a photographic plate to a glowing rock anymore. We KNOW where to look and we HAVE looked, a LOT. There's nothing left to do but tidy up the last few decimal places.

Sorry guys. There won't be magical fusion breakthroughs, improbable new ways of moving mass (doing F=ma has been done the same way for decades now, ie fossil fuels and combustion in engines, same principles for decades).

Time to move on.

Biotechnology needs funding. How does matter organize itself into life? What is aging? Can we control it?

Social sciences need funding. How do we transition from the old cheap high-energy source social model (cars, suburbs, 100% employments, careers, subsidized universities) into the inevitable expensive low-energy source, yet high-tech world to come?

Mental health sciences will need funding when Space Nutters eventually realize that their delirious 1960s fantasies will never, ever become true, ever. World Haloperdiol supply won't be enough.

It's a big world.

[couchslug]

Instead of trying to carry the world on our (figurative) shoulders, it would be better for the spread of Science itself to work cooperatively.

As the US government is gradually corrupted by the Christian Taliban and corporate budget cutters, mankind needs research to continue.

The US has ceased to be a global force for good, so route around the damage. Political entropy is not new, so work to enhance Science in DEVELOPING countries.

Myopia

[the eric conspiracy]

The field of high energy physics requires these ever increasing expenditures almost by definition.

However it is silly to correlate this with all of science, or even all of physics. There is lots of perfectly good science that doesn't requires this scale, and in fact it might well be that allocation of these vast sums of money to these types of projects is a mis-allocation in the sense that you may get far greater return on the investment in other areas.

Kickstarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously - if a few tens of top physicists got together with a serious, multi-billion-dollar plan for a massive experiment, they could tap into huge crowd funding. The LHC cost about $6 billion. If you got 5 million people across the entire planet to pledge $10/mo for ten years, you'd have your LHC. Easy? Heck no. Possible? Absolutely.

An example

[dlenmn]

Here's an example of a pool for a medium sized project, IceCube -- an experiment that uses a large chunk of ice at the south pole to observe neutrinos.

Here's a list of the 39 organizations in 11 countries involved:

http://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/collaborators

The funding comes from 5 countries:

http://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/funding

Yes, the US's National Science Foundation provides the largest chunk of the funds, but it's a US based experiment (notice the wisc.edu) and the US is the world's largest economy to boot, so there's nothing crazy about that. Other experiments are primarily funded by other countries.

This is common for experiments that need large pieces of equipment. The notion that only the US funds science and the rest of the world are just funding parasites is simply false.

Maybe somebody will find ...

[Anonymous Coward]

a Higgs boson in his lap

Diminishing returns.

[hsthompson69]

What if we challenge the assumption that more money == more scientific progress? It's quite possible (nay, quite common) to spend vast amounts of money and make little or no progress, even if measured by "useful failures".

Does anyone really believe that if we dedicated 100% of the earth's GDP for 5 years, we'd cure all cancers? End aging? Cure Jerry's Kids? When we imagine that science is simply determined by the amount of resources we're willing to throw at it, we're making a fatal error.

At a certain point, scientific breakthrough is a combination of creativity, genius and luck, and you simply can't *buy* that.

Re:A Pool is Unnecessary & Presents Its Own Pr

[TheTurtlesMoves]

This would such a useless weapon compared to just about anything else. About the only thing it could do is kill everyone on the ship/whatever with cancer in a single shot.

Misleading title

[feranick]

The crisis is NOT in Government-Funded Science, but eventually in funding extremely large projects. Funding small (intended in terms of size) basic research is a flexible and effective way to move forward an idea into something that can become a product. It proved essential for the development of high tech companies and to spur innovation in general. When the government either takes the job of venture capital (in funding R&D) or takes on multinational resaerch projects, it will end up not performing as expected. With this in mind, I am glad NSF budget has risen in recent years (despite the economic situation). It's the way to go.

Re:A Pool is Unnecessary & Presents Its Own Pr

[crunchygranola]

...

I think the counter argument to your idea of 'pooling' resources is that this isn't really necessary. We have the resources to do this as the United States or as the EU or probably even as China itself. I don't care what country/countries/bordered region does it, I just care that it gets done.

And the counter to that is that there is a limit on how large share of its resources that any nation is willing to devote to a given class of science projects. The combined subjective limits of multiple nations will always be larger than the limits of any of the individual ones.

Exploring new regions of science (in physics and astronomy/space exploration at least) inevitably drives up costs with time, and it is inevitable that it will hit a point that only the combined science budgets of all major nations will be sufficient to fund that next (and perhaps last) Big Project.

After that last Big Project, only long-term world economic growth, and ever longer project schedules, will allow follow-ons. (Or else we get smarter and figure a way to do it cheaper.)

Governments are broke

[acoustix]

The US government is broke. So is most or all of the European governments. Of course, they are all spending money like its going out of style. Where is the money supposed to come from for government funded science?

Yes, government priorities are screwed up. But that isn't going to change anytime soon regardless of how much you hope for it. (yes, that is a dig at the current POTUS)

Libertarian view

[barv]

It's not government's business to use taxpayer's funds to subsidize science.

KICKSTARTER

[painandgreed]

It doesn't need to be government. In fact, any tax-deductible cause will do. We need a big science lobby with a big science 501(c)(3) non-profit to collect money and administer it to these projects. Because it's tax-deductible, it's roughly the same thing as paying it in taxes, so no net loss to the citizen.

Naw, what we need is a huge Kickstarter for various things like the SSC. There could be various levels of donation where you get your name written on the collider, tours of the building once completed, special VIP tour if donations are high enough, mentioned in the paper written with data collected, bits of old electronics as the device is upgraded, science lessons by the scientists working there, etc. I could really go for a "I'm an SSC Backer, ...and you're an anti-science numnut." t-shirt after the thing is funded.

If not our (bankrupt) government, WHO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard to say. Maybe a bunch of bored billionaires. Or maybe not. In which case, no one will ever fund it, ever. We'll never find the super-duper god particle, and little Nelly will never get to go to Disneyland. The world will descend into another dark ages, and people will go back to living in caves. Game over.

Conspiracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is high energy physics support petering out naturally due to cost, or was this by design, John Titor?

Remember Bell Labs?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did a _lot_ of Basic Research. And AT&T decided they would prefer to concentrate on the Development side. So bye-bye Bell. And it just wasn't Bell Labs that lost support. Lawrence's first Cyclotron was privately funded. Hale funded the Mt. Wilson observatory. Lick's bequest funded the Mt. Hamilton Observatory. And what these benefactors got out of it wasn't usually money, but rather prestige. And naming Rights. The Free Market types don't get this, and will never get it. All that they care about is money, the money that they make from developing somebody else's Science, at little or no cost to them.

    The US government _had_ to get into funding and running Big Basic Science, simply because US Private Enterprise had abandoned it.

    There is a great anecdote in Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday". Doc needs a new microscope. He goes to Old Jingleballicks for the funding. OJ turns him down, saying it would cost him too much in taxes to fund Doc. He suggests that Doc set a proper foundation, and then he sent Doc out for more beer.
    Doc's friends got together, raised his funds by passing the hat. Doc got his microscope, a beauty with a six inch objective, and a good tripod.

    There is a lot of Basic Research being done now by unfunded Amateurs, especially in Astronomy, Oceanography, Marine Biology, Archeology- the small Sciences. Even Darwin funded his own work. Well, except for his use The Beagle, which _was_ Government funded.

Fiscal decisions, not constraints

[manu0601]

The article summary tells about "fiscal constraints", where "fiscal decisions" should be used. Remember the story about Warren Buffet tax percentage being inferior to its secretary one? This does not result from a natural law, but from political decisions.

Little Science

[Lawrence_Bird]

blah blah blah BIG SCIENCE blah blah blah waa! waa! That is all we hear. The vast majority of research is not big science and small scale science makes the biggest contributions to society. Not the Space Torch. Not Hubble. Not FNAL or CERN. The bottom line is we are well past the point of diminishing returns with particle physics, cosmology, astrophysics, etc. They cost way too much and what is learned is of minimal value. Does it really freakin matter if they find Higgs (or not) in 2 years, 20 years or 200 years? Will it spell doom if we don't know the answer to 'does dark matter really exist' for another thousand years? Just because the answer might be interesting does not justify putting thousands of scientists on the government dole for decades on end.

We pour astronomical amounts of money into a very few areas where the only 'return' is some degree of speed up in technological innovation necessary to process data from said projects. This would happen on its own for other reasons in short enough order.

If we must spend money that we really do not have, spend it on all the thousands of other science projects which only get a pittance of money because they aren't sexy enough to make the news.

Helps to have scientists in government

[quax]

Germany's chancellor Ms. Merkel is a physicist. To me that is part of the reason that education and science remains a priority in Germany despite tough financial times.

Re:A Pool is Unnecessary & Presents Its Own Pr

[serialband]

They could have built it around 4 corners, then they'd get 4 states actively pooling their money together for the SSC.

There is a difference between Science and Strings

[Anonymous Coward]

Science exists.

String theory is an evolutionary dead end, and a waste of brainpower.