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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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.