Get a faculty position somewhere. Then, it doesn't matter whether anyone buys your books. Your income will be (partially) based on how many citations and how useful your book is. It's not perfect (because there are many other factors, and many stupid people). But... if you really do want to write a useful trade book (as opposed to fiction, or junk), have it used, and make a living, it's a good field. And, if you're just a jerk and not just worried about putting food on the table, you can force your students to buy your books!
Absolutely right. Even though Elsevier is huge and a fixture in scientific research, this is the kind of ethical breach that could lead to ruin for the company. As big as they are, the NIH is bigger and there are people there who do not appreciate these kinds of shenanigans. It is absolutely an argument for community based open-access journals. All that would have to happen is the NIH putting publication in such journals as a condition in their grants and librarians the world over would rejoice.
There is research being done. To claim that there is not during a discussion of how your work was record breaking is a flat out stupid statement. The knowledge transfer process you describe is research. Whatever the official purpose of the project is, academia (which is who I am talking about, and of which I am part) sees this as just another research project.
For the purposes of this activity, you are not students. What you are doing is bringing prestige (and money, either from Lockheed or someone else) to Cornell. Think about why Cornell is not picking up your salary while you're working for them. They should be. (I was in a similar "class" for solid state physic my first year of grad school, and was paid to be there.)
You're a graduate researcher, there are no "off work hours."
You've claimed to be an amateur, but you've obviously shown great skill in ballooning and you have a job as an engineer at an aerospace company. I know it's "cool" to be an amateur in some technical communities, but don't insist on cheapening your work. I'm just saying you deserve better.
It's really cool and all, but these guys are being paid to do this by an aerospace company (Lockheed) and are graduate researchers. Calling them amateurs and students is slightly insulting (I realize the amateur part is just the way these ballooning things are described, to separate them from NASA, but it's still an unfortunate word in this case).
These guys need to present themselves as professionals for their own sake. Part of the reason school administrators do stupid things like raise grad student tuition and cut grad student benefits is because they do not realize how much on-campus research is done by graduate students. I spent several years when I was in grad school trying to explain to deans, chancellors, and regents that graduate "students" were not just older undergraduates (some of these people were shocked to find out I only took classes for 2 out of 6 years of grad school... they had no idea what science and engineering graduate students do all day).
This kind of stuff drives me crazy. These guys did a great thing, and to play it off as "look what this group of students did" implies this was a small side project done in their spare time, or something a more senior person taught them to do, when this was well funded research which will likely go toward their degrees (and obviously has not been done before). Incidentally, Lockheed Martin's press release uses the phrases: young engineers, early career engineers, and employees. The word "student" is not present, only referenced by "employees' graduate studies." They get it.
The big benefit of the CVD method is that it's actually easy to remove from the growth wafer. Nickel is easy to dissolve. The first papers on CVD graphene did this and demonstrated pretty good transistors. No one has made ribbons from it yet, but I'm working on that.
Both these groups have succeeded where many others have tried and failed (even with very similar ideas). It's great work. As the summary suggested though, they've taken one hard to work with material and using a complicated process, made an even harder to work with material. This is great for doing science, as graphene ribbons are a huge pain to make, and this should open up more labs to investigating their properties.
If we're going to have graphene consumer electronics though, it's going to be based on the wafer-scale CVD manufacturing process developed in Korea and MIT.
Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide needs to be reduced back to something which can be stored (a solid or liquid) or burned again (such as methane). This process requires energy, but some of the catalysts which do this get their energy from sunlight. Unfortunately, these catalysts don't work well in normal atmosphere, but they do work in something like syngas (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen). Research on these catalysts to make them cheaper and capable of operating in more oxidative (normal) atmospheres and work better with CO2 could lead to technology which directly converts CO2 in the air into fuel using sunlight. This is "high risk" research normally (and is not really funded right now), but put under the heading of "clean coal" it is low risk (much easier working with just the coal plant exhaust) and perhaps, maybe, possibly could get private funding.
I would bet that's what the angle is... get power companies to pay for the research that will replace fossil fuels.
You can use an atomic force microscope with a magnetic tip to do that, but it's a very slow and tedious process. It's often called magnetic force microscopy.
It is pretty expensive ~$100k to $1M for an instrument, then you have to pay someone to run it, and the software...
If you had some good engineers and really had money to spend on development, you could probably get about 10 microns of tape per second, or about 1 meter of tape per day. That's not too bad, actually, compared to what they did.
Lawyers and judges do run experiments like you suggest (at least, the good ones do). Judges are generally encouraged to take classes which look at case studies (that is what you are talking about) of types of cases they're commonly trying. There are many social scientists who have made their careers studying how people interact in a court room and whether or not a particular procedure is fair.
Go sit in the audience for a court case. You'll find that lawyers absolutely can not just argue about things. The "case" which a lawyer makes is from evidence and experts, not opinion. They often bring up expert witnesses, and can have whole panels of experts look at evidence and interpret it. The defense lawyers in the case you bring up absolutely will have access to the pictures and will have a panel of experts evaluate them, should this ever go to trial. Anyone who's been on a jury for a DUI has seen how this works, as a good prosecutor will have a medical expert describe how alcohol enters the blood stream, how long it stays there and what the effects are. A good judge would not allow a lawyer to simply assert any of those things.
As a "hard" scientist, I would point out that what you're suggesting is not objective. It's fine to have a science of law, but it is a subjective science. Please don't assume that because someone is "an expert", they are an unfeeling automaton. Any measurement which requires the judgment of a person is subjective.
It's essentially a description of how we could grow plants to take CO2 out of the air. He advocates a carbon tax to pay for this. He estimated that around 2000 the problem with CO2 may or may not be acute, and the problem may not be solved so easily. This was in 1977. His estimates and descriptions are very simple, but he admits that. On the other hand, he provides a very workable solution: tax CO2 production and then use the money to sequester the carbon. He's not some romantic scientific "heretic," he was an early believer in global warming, an early believer that it was a problem and an early believer that economics could be used to help solve it.
It's really too bad more people didn't listen to him back then.
As you point out, his problem is with the panic over global warming (he may have a point), but he's allowing himself to be used a poster-boy for the "global warming doesn't exist" crowd. When Dyson says to simply tax CO2 and use the money to capture it and you're solved the problem, he means it. He means it exactly when he says global warming is a political problem, he thinks the science is done. However, that is all he expects is necessary to say to solve it.
That there should be any more debate or that some politician would not take his advice is unreasonable (this mindset is common in physics, we often don't understand why people don't take our advice, and his advice is obviously scientifically good). The political debate is so distasteful to him that he's separating himself from any scientists who are engaging in politics. That Al Gore is trying to get people to agree to his solution doesn't matter. That a politician is acting like a scientist and gaining popularity from that act is a more important problem to him. This is a mistake of an older (more naive/less cynical) generation of scientist.
"If you haven't done anything in physics by the time you're 21, you never will."
I've been told this quote comes from Heisenberg, and at the time I heard it, I thought it was a load of crap. However, the idea is correct. If you want to be a physicist, you have to be able and willing to jump into research right at the beginning (as an undergraduate), or you'll probably never do real research. Of course, most undergraduates don't end up finding bugs in code which has been checked by dozens of postdocs and grad students.
You make a good point. I did leave out one case. The way I've heard it explained, if there was one big bang, then it's impossible to have any totally non-interacting particles in a finite universe. If we experience continued "creation" of space time then it is likely that there are many non-interacting particles. This is so far out of my normal realm of physics that I really have no idea whether it makes sense or not.
It does make really good bar conversation (depending on who you're talking with).
So you've (kind-of) figured out that there is no such thing as two non-interacting particles (we can make them not interact in particular ways, but there is always some interaction). But, the wave function for any system does deterministically predict the future. It is only an approximation to say any two particles have different wave functions. This is a problem with the way QM is taught, and many physicists think that approximation is exact. Part of the problem is that it's very hard to write down the wave function for two particles, and I don't think it has ever been finished for three. But, for any collection of particles (say, the Universe), there really is only one wave function. If the universe is finite, it is exactly deterministic. If the universe is infinite, it may not be.
You want to get them doing real science? Talk to your local university and get them summer research positions. Experience with real science is the best way to expose someone to real science.
I'm a physicist. I've mentored a few high school students (sorry, all full for this summer already). Although the background theory is a bit beyond them, the hands on experimental techniques are well within the average high school student's video game honed dexterity. Their eyes are still good, their backs are still good, they're not bitter like most graduate students, and in some cases are more mature.
There is one high school student who has had a paying job all year in my lab because he is very good at making graphene, something many graduate students, postdocs and professors have trouble with.
Yeah, I've always found taking a backpack off before sitting in a chair to be effective, but I suppose if you want to sit and carry a bag at the same time, a backpack is inferior. I'll give you that.
I'm not sure a shoulder bag would fare better in a mugging, but maybe it makes a more mobile shield? I wouldn't try it, myself. I've never had any problems with pickpockets, even in eastern Europe, but maybe there's something about a pale lost skinny guy that keeps them away.
Nice comments on this thread! I totally agree with you about the need in physics to separate basic and weapons research.
I used to work in fusion (DIII-D), but I don't believe the "40 years away" mark. My feeling is that the materials to build a commercial grade reactor are still too expensive and that there is some non-trivial materials work still to be done with the reactor walls and gathering energy. I realize this is what the ITER people tell the grant reviewers they're going to look at, but it has been my experience that plasma physicists are not really interested in materials research when it comes down to who gets to pay postdocs and grad students. In the end, the monolithic grant structuring in fusion will need to integrate or approximate the smaller scale, more distributed materials research community (lots of small, cheap experiments) for fusion to have a chance to work commercially in 40 years. I doubt the handful of experiments around now will be able solve the materials problems quickly. Oddly, this is not an opinion I got from studying materials physics, but from the plasma physicists I used to work with who thought ITER was trying to sell something it couldn't deliver prior to being changed into "ITER lite" and cutting back on the expectations.
NIF could do some materials research, and I'm sure they'll run a few test, but it's still the wrong kind of experiment. The money would have been better spent developing a tool which could be sold to ~50 research universities for materials testing for fusion.
So... the sense of light intensity different from frequency? Do we have a sense of wind? Insects detect chemicals with antenna which work much differently than animal noses, does that mean they don't really "smell"? You can go crazy with the number of ways we interact with the world, or you can try to generalize them. I find it more convenient to generalize, but I understand the biological reasons for enumerating slight differences in senses.
Also, I'm not just being clever. I didn't come up with those four areas, that's a common classification system. There are more than those four, but those are the four found in humans (so far).
I would say we have only 4 senses: chemical, light, pressure and temperature... but part of my job is to work on electrical analogues of sense and often this boils down to the most basic properties. For example, telling which way is down is just an application of a pressure sensor, even though it's nothing like a sense of "touch".
Of course, I understand completely that a neurologist is going to have a different opinion, which is correct in its own way, and probably more similar to how a computer scientist would think of things.
If the NIH or Department of Health were managed like the NSF, this would work. The NSF is lead by scientists, staffed by scientists and uses scientists outside of the agency to do performance reviews.
I have no idea how we've kept lawyers and political appointees out of the NSF, but it's worked pretty well so far. I wish the budget was bigger, but that's a problem for congress...
There are also good and bad physicists, chemists, mathematicians... and so on.
I'm a physicist, and if I do something a chemist finds stupid (and I have), they let me know it in no uncertain terms (and they have) and what they think has real consequences for my career (and it has). I'm not sure it works that way for medicine. Who reviews them? Who determines what doctors get promotions?
The way it works for me, the "faceless bureaucrats" who are looking over my shoulder are real scientists sent by NSF, DOE, NASA, NIH... all the good acronyms. Their reports are judged by other real scientists (who I know and meet with) who then follow strict rules on what happens with my funding or review or whatever is going on. These people still make mistakes, and are not always honest, but it's hardly soviet style brainless leadership. I think the current system with insurance companies and hospital administrators doing the reviewing is closer to the "faceless bureaucracy." If I was a medical doctor, I would prefer the scientific oversight.
but... you didn't end up working for NASA (right?) Imagination is great. I think this project is justified for the reasons you gave. I disagree that it will push kids into careers in science... maybe programming and video game design.
I would like to see more projects focused on getting kids to experience what scientists do everyday, the small moments of discovery and goal-oriented approach in an environment where everything is not known and predetermined. The idea that you're doing something no one has ever done before, but which will be used by everyone in 50 years is a key idea missing from video games. I'm not sure that video games are the right way to get people interested or primed for actually doing science (the same goes for follow-the-recipe labs). If the best we can hope for from the American people is that we can generate a few more hobbyists, we may as well give up trying to stay at the forefront of scientific research. There need to be incentives and training for people (like you!) to move into research professionally. There are small programs out there trying to get hobbyists to do more professional science, and it would have been nice if NASA spent this money there instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a faculty position somewhere. Then, it doesn't matter whether anyone buys your books. Your income will be (partially) based on how many citations and how useful your book is. It's not perfect (because there are many other factors, and many stupid people). But... if you really do want to write a useful trade book (as opposed to fiction, or junk), have it used, and make a living, it's a good field. And, if you're just a jerk and not just worried about putting food on the table, you can force your students to buy your books!
Absolutely right. Even though Elsevier is huge and a fixture in scientific research, this is the kind of ethical breach that could lead to ruin for the company. As big as they are, the NIH is bigger and there are people there who do not appreciate these kinds of shenanigans. It is absolutely an argument for community based open-access journals. All that would have to happen is the NIH putting publication in such journals as a condition in their grants and librarians the world over would rejoice.
There is research being done. To claim that there is not during a discussion of how your work was record breaking is a flat out stupid statement. The knowledge transfer process you describe is research. Whatever the official purpose of the project is, academia (which is who I am talking about, and of which I am part) sees this as just another research project.
For the purposes of this activity, you are not students. What you are doing is bringing prestige (and money, either from Lockheed or someone else) to Cornell. Think about why Cornell is not picking up your salary while you're working for them. They should be. (I was in a similar "class" for solid state physic my first year of grad school, and was paid to be there.)
You're a graduate researcher, there are no "off work hours."
You've claimed to be an amateur, but you've obviously shown great skill in ballooning and you have a job as an engineer at an aerospace company. I know it's "cool" to be an amateur in some technical communities, but don't insist on cheapening your work. I'm just saying you deserve better.
It's really cool and all, but these guys are being paid to do this by an aerospace company (Lockheed) and are graduate researchers. Calling them amateurs and students is slightly insulting (I realize the amateur part is just the way these ballooning things are described, to separate them from NASA, but it's still an unfortunate word in this case).
These guys need to present themselves as professionals for their own sake. Part of the reason school administrators do stupid things like raise grad student tuition and cut grad student benefits is because they do not realize how much on-campus research is done by graduate students. I spent several years when I was in grad school trying to explain to deans, chancellors, and regents that graduate "students" were not just older undergraduates (some of these people were shocked to find out I only took classes for 2 out of 6 years of grad school... they had no idea what science and engineering graduate students do all day).
This kind of stuff drives me crazy. These guys did a great thing, and to play it off as "look what this group of students did" implies this was a small side project done in their spare time, or something a more senior person taught them to do, when this was well funded research which will likely go toward their degrees (and obviously has not been done before). Incidentally, Lockheed Martin's press release uses the phrases: young engineers, early career engineers, and employees. The word "student" is not present, only referenced by "employees' graduate studies." They get it.
The big benefit of the CVD method is that it's actually easy to remove from the growth wafer. Nickel is easy to dissolve. The first papers on CVD graphene did this and demonstrated pretty good transistors. No one has made ribbons from it yet, but I'm working on that.
Both these groups have succeeded where many others have tried and failed (even with very similar ideas). It's great work. As the summary suggested though, they've taken one hard to work with material and using a complicated process, made an even harder to work with material. This is great for doing science, as graphene ribbons are a huge pain to make, and this should open up more labs to investigating their properties.
If we're going to have graphene consumer electronics though, it's going to be based on the wafer-scale CVD manufacturing process developed in Korea and MIT.
What is needed to make "clean coal?"
Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide needs to be reduced back to something which can be stored (a solid or liquid) or burned again (such as methane). This process requires energy, but some of the catalysts which do this get their energy from sunlight. Unfortunately, these catalysts don't work well in normal atmosphere, but they do work in something like syngas (a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen). Research on these catalysts to make them cheaper and capable of operating in more oxidative (normal) atmospheres and work better with CO2 could lead to technology which directly converts CO2 in the air into fuel using sunlight. This is "high risk" research normally (and is not really funded right now), but put under the heading of "clean coal" it is low risk (much easier working with just the coal plant exhaust) and perhaps, maybe, possibly could get private funding.
I would bet that's what the angle is... get power companies to pay for the research that will replace fossil fuels.
(yeah, I know plants already do this)
You can use an atomic force microscope with a magnetic tip to do that, but it's a very slow and tedious process. It's often called magnetic force microscopy.
It is pretty expensive ~$100k to $1M for an instrument, then you have to pay someone to run it, and the software...
If you had some good engineers and really had money to spend on development, you could probably get about 10 microns of tape per second, or about 1 meter of tape per day. That's not too bad, actually, compared to what they did.
Lawyers and judges do run experiments like you suggest (at least, the good ones do). Judges are generally encouraged to take classes which look at case studies (that is what you are talking about) of types of cases they're commonly trying. There are many social scientists who have made their careers studying how people interact in a court room and whether or not a particular procedure is fair.
Go sit in the audience for a court case. You'll find that lawyers absolutely can not just argue about things. The "case" which a lawyer makes is from evidence and experts, not opinion. They often bring up expert witnesses, and can have whole panels of experts look at evidence and interpret it. The defense lawyers in the case you bring up absolutely will have access to the pictures and will have a panel of experts evaluate them, should this ever go to trial. Anyone who's been on a jury for a DUI has seen how this works, as a good prosecutor will have a medical expert describe how alcohol enters the blood stream, how long it stays there and what the effects are. A good judge would not allow a lawyer to simply assert any of those things.
As a "hard" scientist, I would point out that what you're suggesting is not objective. It's fine to have a science of law, but it is a subjective science. Please don't assume that because someone is "an expert", they are an unfeeling automaton. Any measurement which requires the judgment of a person is subjective.
Good... Dyson thinks global warming is real and human caused. He's just pissed at Gore for pretending to be a scientist.
Have you read Dyson's paper on global warming?
It's essentially a description of how we could grow plants to take CO2 out of the air. He advocates a carbon tax to pay for this. He estimated that around 2000 the problem with CO2 may or may not be acute, and the problem may not be solved so easily. This was in 1977. His estimates and descriptions are very simple, but he admits that. On the other hand, he provides a very workable solution: tax CO2 production and then use the money to sequester the carbon. He's not some romantic scientific "heretic," he was an early believer in global warming, an early believer that it was a problem and an early believer that economics could be used to help solve it.
It's really too bad more people didn't listen to him back then.
As you point out, his problem is with the panic over global warming (he may have a point), but he's allowing himself to be used a poster-boy for the "global warming doesn't exist" crowd. When Dyson says to simply tax CO2 and use the money to capture it and you're solved the problem, he means it. He means it exactly when he says global warming is a political problem, he thinks the science is done. However, that is all he expects is necessary to say to solve it.
That there should be any more debate or that some politician would not take his advice is unreasonable (this mindset is common in physics, we often don't understand why people don't take our advice, and his advice is obviously scientifically good). The political debate is so distasteful to him that he's separating himself from any scientists who are engaging in politics. That Al Gore is trying to get people to agree to his solution doesn't matter. That a politician is acting like a scientist and gaining popularity from that act is a more important problem to him. This is a mistake of an older (more naive/less cynical) generation of scientist.
"If you haven't done anything in physics by the time you're 21, you never will."
I've been told this quote comes from Heisenberg, and at the time I heard it, I thought it was a load of crap. However, the idea is correct. If you want to be a physicist, you have to be able and willing to jump into research right at the beginning (as an undergraduate), or you'll probably never do real research. Of course, most undergraduates don't end up finding bugs in code which has been checked by dozens of postdocs and grad students.
You make a good point. I did leave out one case. The way I've heard it explained, if there was one big bang, then it's impossible to have any totally non-interacting particles in a finite universe. If we experience continued "creation" of space time then it is likely that there are many non-interacting particles. This is so far out of my normal realm of physics that I really have no idea whether it makes sense or not.
It does make really good bar conversation (depending on who you're talking with).
You've got the answer right there, it's so close.
So you've (kind-of) figured out that there is no such thing as two non-interacting particles (we can make them not interact in particular ways, but there is always some interaction). But, the wave function for any system does deterministically predict the future. It is only an approximation to say any two particles have different wave functions. This is a problem with the way QM is taught, and many physicists think that approximation is exact. Part of the problem is that it's very hard to write down the wave function for two particles, and I don't think it has ever been finished for three. But, for any collection of particles (say, the Universe), there really is only one wave function. If the universe is finite, it is exactly deterministic. If the universe is infinite, it may not be.
You want to get them doing real science? Talk to your local university and get them summer research positions. Experience with real science is the best way to expose someone to real science.
I'm a physicist. I've mentored a few high school students (sorry, all full for this summer already). Although the background theory is a bit beyond them, the hands on experimental techniques are well within the average high school student's video game honed dexterity. Their eyes are still good, their backs are still good, they're not bitter like most graduate students, and in some cases are more mature.
There is one high school student who has had a paying job all year in my lab because he is very good at making graphene, something many graduate students, postdocs and professors have trouble with.
Yeah, I've always found taking a backpack off before sitting in a chair to be effective, but I suppose if you want to sit and carry a bag at the same time, a backpack is inferior. I'll give you that.
I'm not sure a shoulder bag would fare better in a mugging, but maybe it makes a more mobile shield? I wouldn't try it, myself. I've never had any problems with pickpockets, even in eastern Europe, but maybe there's something about a pale lost skinny guy that keeps them away.
You joke, but among non-suit wearing people, I don't see the advantage of a shoulder bag over a backpack.
Nice comments on this thread! I totally agree with you about the need in physics to separate basic and weapons research.
I used to work in fusion (DIII-D), but I don't believe the "40 years away" mark. My feeling is that the materials to build a commercial grade reactor are still too expensive and that there is some non-trivial materials work still to be done with the reactor walls and gathering energy. I realize this is what the ITER people tell the grant reviewers they're going to look at, but it has been my experience that plasma physicists are not really interested in materials research when it comes down to who gets to pay postdocs and grad students. In the end, the monolithic grant structuring in fusion will need to integrate or approximate the smaller scale, more distributed materials research community (lots of small, cheap experiments) for fusion to have a chance to work commercially in 40 years. I doubt the handful of experiments around now will be able solve the materials problems quickly. Oddly, this is not an opinion I got from studying materials physics, but from the plasma physicists I used to work with who thought ITER was trying to sell something it couldn't deliver prior to being changed into "ITER lite" and cutting back on the expectations.
NIF could do some materials research, and I'm sure they'll run a few test, but it's still the wrong kind of experiment. The money would have been better spent developing a tool which could be sold to ~50 research universities for materials testing for fusion.
So... the sense of light intensity different from frequency? Do we have a sense of wind? Insects detect chemicals with antenna which work much differently than animal noses, does that mean they don't really "smell"? You can go crazy with the number of ways we interact with the world, or you can try to generalize them. I find it more convenient to generalize, but I understand the biological reasons for enumerating slight differences in senses.
Also, I'm not just being clever. I didn't come up with those four areas, that's a common classification system. There are more than those four, but those are the four found in humans (so far).
Depends on who you ask...
I would say we have only 4 senses: chemical, light, pressure and temperature... but part of my job is to work on electrical analogues of sense and often this boils down to the most basic properties. For example, telling which way is down is just an application of a pressure sensor, even though it's nothing like a sense of "touch".
Of course, I understand completely that a neurologist is going to have a different opinion, which is correct in its own way, and probably more similar to how a computer scientist would think of things.
But, yeah, the 5 senses thing is pretty dumb.
National Science Foundation
If the NIH or Department of Health were managed like the NSF, this would work. The NSF is lead by scientists, staffed by scientists and uses scientists outside of the agency to do performance reviews.
I have no idea how we've kept lawyers and political appointees out of the NSF, but it's worked pretty well so far. I wish the budget was bigger, but that's a problem for congress...
There are also good and bad physicists, chemists, mathematicians... and so on.
I'm a physicist, and if I do something a chemist finds stupid (and I have), they let me know it in no uncertain terms (and they have) and what they think has real consequences for my career (and it has). I'm not sure it works that way for medicine. Who reviews them? Who determines what doctors get promotions?
The way it works for me, the "faceless bureaucrats" who are looking over my shoulder are real scientists sent by NSF, DOE, NASA, NIH... all the good acronyms. Their reports are judged by other real scientists (who I know and meet with) who then follow strict rules on what happens with my funding or review or whatever is going on. These people still make mistakes, and are not always honest, but it's hardly soviet style brainless leadership. I think the current system with insurance companies and hospital administrators doing the reviewing is closer to the "faceless bureaucracy." If I was a medical doctor, I would prefer the scientific oversight.
but... you didn't end up working for NASA (right?) Imagination is great. I think this project is justified for the reasons you gave. I disagree that it will push kids into careers in science... maybe programming and video game design.
I would like to see more projects focused on getting kids to experience what scientists do everyday, the small moments of discovery and goal-oriented approach in an environment where everything is not known and predetermined. The idea that you're doing something no one has ever done before, but which will be used by everyone in 50 years is a key idea missing from video games. I'm not sure that video games are the right way to get people interested or primed for actually doing science (the same goes for follow-the-recipe labs). If the best we can hope for from the American people is that we can generate a few more hobbyists, we may as well give up trying to stay at the forefront of scientific research. There need to be incentives and training for people (like you!) to move into research professionally. There are small programs out there trying to get hobbyists to do more professional science, and it would have been nice if NASA spent this money there instead.
We live in the physical world and experience entanglement all the time. Physics doesn't stop outside the lab.
That's a cute gimmick, but that's all it is.
A few decades of particle physics experiments adds up to no data? That's pretty harsh.
We're not butterfly collectors looking for a new color. We're physicists. Quantitative prediction of things we've never seen is what we do.