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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."
It wasn't clear to me in the synopsis. However, reading the award site, it's clear that Yuri has given 27 million dollars - 3 million to each of 9 winners.
some theorists fear it could distort the field
Spoken like a true theoretical physicist.
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
What the summary doesn't mention is that the prizes will be handed out in pennies. Each prize will weigh 7.5 * 10^5 kg, and have a measurable gravitational pull.
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...
"Fully operational" doesn't mean "well-tested, safe and reliable".
Just look at the Death Star.
Fully operational? Yes. Able to be blown up by craft a fraction of 1% of it's size? Twice in a row, even.
Do you know how much RAMEN that will buy?!!!
That's enough to feed me for ten thousand years !
I might just have seconds.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
While one off prizes for fundemental research is nice and all, it doesn't really help the art.
Here's what I would do instead.
I would organize some private organizations around my parent country as a pilot program, with the goal of making expensive lab equipment and utilities available to the researchers, with the goal of driving down the innate costs to perform the research.
"Grant money" is the cancerous vice that kills academia. It makes professors steal the thunder of brilliant students. It makes people distort reeported findings. It stifles controversial findings being published. It kills the bread and butter of real science, which is the repeated testing of published experiments for veracity.
And without it, no research at all would get done.
As a philanthropist seeking to promote science, I wouldn't contribute to the vice of academia in the form of exclusive prizes. I would make research hardware and lab space available for cheap. 1st year chem students and dedicated researchers alike would profit, and science would be much better for it.
Research is expensive. Subsidize it smartly, and make it cheap. Researchers will research everything, instead of cherry picking for grant money. Science will improve.
I would provide equipment and lab/office space like follows:
It is important that the science being done is quality. That means the people using the equipment and lab space need to be competent. University degrees in the field of research, or concurrent university enrollment with passing grades in the field are a basic requirement for application. It won't stop degree holding crackpots getting labspace, but it should keep out most rifraff that think they can violate thermodynamics with magnets and tinfoil.
Academic dishonesty, getting scooped, and predation on academic works are very real and ever-present risks in academia, fundemental research in particular. For that reason, secure and locked offices can be rented for a small fee, comparable to renting a storage unit. They would be fully furnished with a nice desk, several file cabinets, a personal bookshelf, computer equipment, and a laser printer. Disposables like paper and toner are the researcher's responsibility. Internet access would be provided through an aggressive firewall.
The labs themselves would be tiered.
Tier 1 labs would be equipped for basic physics and chemical research. Access to calorimeters, glassware, reagents, force meters and the like are available. These are meant mostly to assist students with homework and independent research within their skill level.
Tier 2 labs would have access to mass spectroscopy equipment, provisions for experimental small scale fusion devices, nanotechnology devices, like AMFs, electron microscopes, etc.
Tier 3 labs have the really fancy toys in them. A small silicon lithograph is available to producing experimental nanotech structures and devices for fundemental research, large contained fusion devices, etc.
Tier 1 would be the bread and butter. Tier 2 would catch most advanced students. Tier 3 would take awhile to fully provide, due to the extreme costs of the equipment, and would be reserved for published researchers only.
It is not meant to replace university equipment; it is meant to suppliment it, and provide a "professor free" environment for independent research for later publication.
I think doing that on a big scale would do way more for science than cash prizes would.
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.
The list of winners contains all the recent heavy hitters in string theory research. This isn't as limited as it seems since they're mostly trying to figure out how plain old QFT works. And succeeding. Nima Arkani-Hamed's recent work in particular simplifies the calculations for scattering amplitudes greatly and are already in use for background calculations in the LHC.
They'll have quite the weight in the field in the future, especially since the current / original winners are all on the board for deciding future winners. Not that getting someone like (Fields medalist) Ed Witten interested in your work hasn't meant instant recognition before, but now he has the money to fund the research as well.
All in all, I think this gives the most influential people in the field a channel that makes them actively wield their influence.
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.
Unfortunately, no. Many intelligent young students are already going into high-energy theory and string theory (the primary recipients of this prize). In fact, there are far more students than jobs. I'm a recent PhD from a top physics (and particularly string theory) school. My classmates in string and high energy theory who recently applied for postdocs applied to 100 in order to receive 1 job offer; none of their jobs were in the U.S. These are not permanent jobs; they are usually 2 or 3 year positions, paying $40,000 or so. At the end of this time, you may then enter the lottery for the (literally) one string theory faculty job per year (see http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4701 for job statistics). This is what causes students to leave to go to Wall Street, and piping in more money to the already-established best of the best of the field will not change this.
The purpose of this award seems to be to raise the profile of so-called "fundamental" theoretical physics; perhaps it will cause more funding to be directed in that direction, which might be good. More likely, it will simply encourage more optimistic, talented students to step into the meat grinder of a particularly depressed job market, making it even worse, and eventually redirecting another generation's best minds into Wall Street.
I'm not saying don't celebrate physics (I love physics, and am continuing in the field, though on a much more applied topic, where there is more funding) - but there is already enough hype for string theory, and it burns out enough students already.
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.