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

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.