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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?"
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.)?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
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
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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:
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.
-Styopa
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?
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?
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
The military will advance particle physics when they can shrink the accelerator small enough to mount it in a turret.
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.
Someone had to do it.
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.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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).
You can't handle the truth.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
You can't handle the truth.