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Internet Billionaire Creates Huge Physics Prize
gbrumfiel writes "Billionaire Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner has spontaneously awarded $3 million prizes to nine prominent theoretical physicists. The new Fundamental Physics Prize dwarfs awards like the Nobel, which this year is estimated to be worth some $1.2 million (and that's before it's split by up to three winners). It's so much money that some theorists fear it could distort the field. Milner says that his only purpose for the new prize was to promote the field, which he studied in the 1980s: 'The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,' he told Nature."
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
If he wants to promote the field, he needs to make the rewards more broadly available: i.e., instead of 3, $3M awards, how about 300 $30,000 awards? It's enough to provide good incentive while not removing the need of the winners to ever have to work again!
That's the problem with the current economic model. A few "winners" at the top and everyone else lives on the crumbs. .1% better than the next guy below him.
Consider, those "winners" are maybe only
But the next guy below him? His reward is NOTHING, not $2M.
How about you make "winners" out of the top 50% instead instead of just the infinitesimal ever-so-slightly-better????
--PeterM
We have a perfectly fine tested method of doing nuclear power safely using a thorium reactor.
Actually, no. There are many thorium reactors in development, but there are no well-tested designs at all yet, so we don't really know how safe they will end up being (in theory, pebble-bed reactors are perfectly safe, non-contaminating too, but they turned out not to be quite so good in practice). And at best, they are no-where near as good as fusion could be.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
While it would be nice to stem (honestly, unintentional) the brain-drain into designing ever more esoteric securities, I have to wonder whether the allocation in prize form is the best way to do that:
Specifically, does physics have a bigger problem with promising people who have done good work(the sort who would stand to win prizes) slacking off and/or selling out, or does it have a bigger problem with fresh blood burning out or selling out during the (by all accounts) highly arduous and ill-compensated PhD/postdoc stage?
It is my (admittedly, quite possibly naive) suspicion that you would be more likely to get more and better physics done by spending relatively modest per-person amounts, but doing so predictably, in order to ease the path for aspiring physicists, rather than offering low-probability jackpots to those who have already done notable work. Especially if you can't compete with the magnitude of the low-probability jackpots offered by Wall Street, it seems like you'd be better off focusing on the areas of the field where people have effectively zero money and thus a very high marginal utility per additional dollar...
How exactly does this award help anyone? He's given a prize to a bunch of professors who already have tenure. They do not need incentives to do original work. Meanwhile, grad students and postdocs (who do most of the real work in the field and are the most capable, and motivated) live hand to mouth, have no sense of job stability, and no possibility to pursue truly creative work. Instead they live under the thumb of just those kind of people that received this award. They're forced to pursue old, dead ideas that have not gone anywhere (but are favorites of their advisers/supervisors). Theoretical physics has been stagnating for decades. The Higgs boson is a 40-50 year old idea, and virtually all new ideas in the meantime have been utter bullshit (string theory, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc). The field is grasping at straws because the majority of the people working cannot pursue long-term goals, or risky ideas.
A better award would be to give say $500k to 54 promising postdocs who do not have tenure, to encourage them to go in new directions.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I am a physicist.
Almost none of us who get PhDs and go through postdocs in the hard sciences do it for the money, we do it because we love our chosen field.
Because you'd be retarded to go through this much effort and sacrifice if you didn't love your field.
That being said, as university, science, education and national lab budgets keep taking it up the ass year after year (while budgets for the police state, the War on Drugs, the Pentagon and old people's entitlements remain sacrosanct), I'm not surprised that some physicists would jump ship. It must be nice being well paid from the start, and not having the teabaggers that control half of Congress trying to destroy the institute you work for.
Even the cleanest, most efficient thorium reactors would produce hazardous waste in the spent fuel, much less than a uranium reactor, and it would only take a few hundred years to decay to safe radiation levels instead of a few hundred thousand like current uranium reactors, but that's still a pretty big stretch to call them "clean". Fusion on the other hand has no spent fuel issue to deal with at all, and there are several potential reactions that could be harnessed that produce no significant neutron flux either, though they mostly involve cross-sections unlikely to be conductive to use in the tokamak-based reactors that are the current focus of main stream fusion research.
In the short-term though, yeah, Thorium makes far more sense, and the readily-available ore deposits should last us a least several centuries, plenty of time to move towards something more sustainable. Yes, a ton of granite contains as much energy in Thorium as 50 tons of coal, but extracting it is likely to be difficult and environmentally damaging (not nearly as bad as coal mining, but still) Do we really want to go that route when there's an unlimited, virtually free, and truly clean fuel supply in Hydrogen just a Manhattan Project worth of funding away? One whose "spent fuel" is inert helium gas, a valuable resource in it's own right? Think airships - the required quantities are large enough that the cost difference between hydrogen and helium is a large part of the reason the industry mostly died with the Hindenburg, and once it enters the atmosphere helium rapidly escapes to space, so unlike iron, silicon, etc it's a consumable resource.
Plus, if the Polywell fusion research goes well we may actually be closer to having fusion reactors than Thorium ones - the US Navy has kept a pretty tight lid on it, but the minimal status updates indicate that the latest generation test reactor shows that the phenomenal scaling law predicted by Bussard's theory is holding (1000x more fusion events for 8x stronger magnetic field), and they should be testing the viability of p-B11 reactions this year, if they haven't already. The next proposed step would be a full-size (10m) energy-positive test reactor. Actually that was the last proposed step, but instead they got funding for this intermediate reactor to test the scaling laws, and which is hopefully capable of reaching the energy levels needed to initiate p-B11 fusion, which would *really* get people interested since it's something mainstream tokamak-based research is unlikely to be able to manage.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The intention was to say that science is as important as a shares rating on Wall Street,
Science is only as important as "shares rating on Wall Street"? Scientists do real work - they make new discoveries that in time benefit us all in uncounted ways. Investors, bankers and stock brokers, on the other hand, produce nothing and discover nothing; they live by siphoning nutrients out of the money stream, so to speak - they are best compared to filter feeders or parasites. Science is many orders of magnitude more valuable than what goes on in Wall Street.