Posted on 05/29/2004 6:51:29 AM PDT by liberallarry
THERE IS BOTH good news and bad news in the flurry of reports describing the decline of American preeminence in science. Falling numbers of scientific papers and prizes, as well as the relative drop in levels of funding and students, provide evidence of this decline. The good news is that it means other governments across the globe have begun investing heavily in basic scientific research. It also means that foreign companies have been investing in research and development, creating opportunities that make more people want scientific careers in their countries. More research anywhere creates more possibilities for innovation everywhere.
Yet the reports from the National Science Foundation and elsewhere indicate that the decline is not only relative. It is also absolute: American science is growing weaker, although not across the board. The boom in research and funding for the biological sciences -- including genetics and molecular biology -- has been matched by a decline in funding for, and interest in, physics and math.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I don't think it is an obligation, but it is compelling for many people. So compelling that when answers are not available, people start putting their money on some pretty wild speculation that only ostensibly provides explanations.
The Raven: ".....I never ran into a FR science hater........"
Wow! Quite a statement. I run into them all the time here at FR on every Thread where they post from that dreadfully kooky and 'masquerading-as-a-scientific-field' website on Intelligent Design. In addition, on the otherside of the coin, whenever a sound scientific study has been posted from a reputable scientific journal on a topic such as evolution the same kooky ID'ers interrupt the Thread with their nonsense and start an arguement that gets the Thread pulled. In fact, it got so bad 6 months or so back that people had to jump in and ask for complicated, lawerly agreements to be adhered to and some particluarly obnoxious posters were banned.
To put it another way.......I have no idea what you're talking about and your statement does not bear up to my experiences. Nonetheless, I have made it a point of staying off these Threads and have refrained from commenting at all . I've got more important things to do. {I'm violating the 'pact-with-myself' by posting here}
CasearianDaoist ".....Some of us have actually had scientific careers, unlike you......."
Wow! THATS kinda dismissive, don't ya think? {Just to assure you.....my qualifications are a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from USC (GO TROJANS!), currently a teacher and researcher at UVa, and I worked my way through school by being a technician in what is now the #1 Biotech in the world.........so I've seen both the academic and the industrial side of science}.
Physicist: "........They come in several flavors. The three main types are zealots who think that any investigation of nature constitutes a threat to their religious beliefs, deep-fried libertarians who think that anything not enthusiastically supported by the free market is worth nothing but contempt, and conspiracy addicts who are convinced that an evil cabal of totalitarian scientists and oil company executives is conspiring to keep free energy, antigravity and psychic powers out of the hands of the masses........."
Agreed.
Best Memorial Day FReegards to all!
Yeah. And labor is much cheaper too.
I'm not opposed to licensing, so long as it isn't a significant barrier to progress.
I don't. I am a (small-l) libertarian myself. A (small-o) objectivist, in fact.
Is it possible to find basic research that is privately funded? Yes, you can find a little bit. Does that mean that the responsibility for basic research should be transferred to the private sector? No, it does not. Basic research, almost by construction, is not directly profitable (although it sometimes works out that way). American business (which is where the real money is) should not be expected to do anything that is not oriented towards turning a profit. The responsibility of a company is to its shareholders, not to the advancement of the Nation. Nevertheless, the advancement of the Nation must be provided for, and basic research is an indispensable means of doing that.
Grid computing is now being applied to a number of commercial problems, such as protein folding to test the effectiveness of new cancer drugs. Could any government program have produced spinoffs like that?
Why, yes. Grid technology itself came out of Argonne National Laboratory. I said I was programming for a private company. Do you know what i3ARCHIVE does? It brings Grid technology to bear on the problem of digital mammography. It is the commercialization of a government-sponsored Grid effort called the National Digital Mammography Archive. (I was on the team that originally designed that Grid.)
Good question. The Constitution charges the government with the regulation (by which is meant the facilitation) of interstate commerce. I consider basic research to be one of the key fountainheads from which such commerce springs. It is as surely and as vitally a part of the Nation's economic infrastructure as the roads or sound money.
Furthermore, the Constitution crucially charges the government with providing for the defense of the Nation. In the modern world, it is not sufficient to provide for men and guns. It is essential to the survival of the nation to have at its disposal a repertoire of technologies and of fundamental knowledge to draw upon when the need arises. We cannot know ahead of time what the threat will be; thus, whatever is the stock of off-the-shelf technologies, it isn't sufficient. Basic research enables us to reach beyond that stock when we have to. Without the basic physics research that had been done in the 1930's, there could not have been a Manhattan Project in the 1940's.
In my son's case, every class had team projects, (One does all the work, one does the art, one gets the camera or story board, and two get credit for doing nothing. This is in math, science, english, foreign language, and social studies.)
Definitely.
In addition to Physicist's excellent response in post 45, especially regarding the example of the Manhattan Project (but not the interstate commerce clause, which I think is too much of a stretch), it should be remembered that Jefferson -- hardly a wild-eyed big-government Federalist -- used federal funds to finance the Lewis & Clark expedition. There is no specific clause in the Constitution which authorizes such an expenditure. Also, the feds routinely do coastal surveys, studies of ocean currents, satellite weather surveys, global positioning satellites, etc., mostly under the naval power clause, I assume, but often this stuff has basic science implications. I'd justify funding of basic science on the military power, the "post offices and post roads" power, and the "necessary & proper" catchall clause (which isn't a separate power, but it allows some wiggle room for the enumerated powers). Most important, to me, is the Lewis & Clark precedent, which happened during the generation of the Framers, and has stood for 200 years. And trust me, I ain't no "liberal interpretation" leftie.
he Ansari Z Prize is all privately funded. The idea behind it is to encourage entrepreneurs to take risks that government astronauts could never contemplate.
Clinton still could have done more to prevent the shutdown of Brookhaven's LHC. But the testimony of such brilliant scientific and environmental experts as Alec Baldwin and Christy Brinkley swayed Bill Richardson's DOE enough to do so. And although Bush is not, IMHO, doing enough as he could to address the problems in science funding, the problems are path-dependant ones, which go all the way back to Clinton, and prehaps even to Bush sr., who may or may not have done enough to take into account the effects end of the Cold War would have on science policy. I will add that if Gingrich didn't succumb to both his personal problems and the unending war against him by the Dems and the media, things may have been very different today.
Dang! Now there's a subset that needs vetting. Why would these Luddites matter? Your knowledge and expertise are always welcome.
Science, physics in particular, is essential to capitalism and the progress this nation has experienced. Despite any philosophical differences, the contributions of your life's advocation are manifestly appreciated.
You lost me there; the LHC is under construction at CERN. Do you mean the beam reactor?
I will add that if Gingrich didn't succumb to both his personal problems and the unending war against him by the Dems and the media, things may have been very different today.
Science had few better friends in Congress than Newt. I had the pleasure of telling him so when he signed my copy of "To Renew America".
Nice strawman you've built there.
I had the pleasure of meeting both Brookhaven administrator Mona Rowe and lab historian Robert Crease at conference about a year and a half ago. Mona gave me as a gift an autographed picture of Ray Davis, who had just won the Nobel Prize a few weeks earlier, as a reward for instantly recognizing who he was when she held it up (I had actually misidentified him as Ray Davies. Like most people, I suppose, I keep getting his name confused with the lead singer for The Kinks).
I give his book The Second Creation (with Charles Mann) my highest recommendation. It's the best history of particle physics I've read.
an autographed picture of Ray Davis, who had just won the Nobel Prize a few weeks earlier
For almost eleven years, he has been my colleague in the physics department at Penn.
I've never met him.
I'm not arguing that all research can be moved to the private sector. I'm arguing that private research extends into many areas beyond the short-term commercial profits that its detractors claim is all it's good for. Scientific research, public or private, is done by science geeks. Much corporate research is done by science geeks who piggyback their most speculative ideas on the back of commercial R & D that is pitched to management for short-term profit.
Liberals might also want to note that the most effective way to get the government to plunge into your research area, no-holds-barred, and keep the flat-earth lobby from ruining your efforts is to militarize it. That is how nuclear technology got its start at Los Alamos, and how JFK got us to the Moon. The most generally-useful-to-all-mankind government program of the last generation, the Global Positioning System, was also implemented as a military project. The public may see it purely as satellite technology, but it actually incorporates relativistic physics.
Grid technology itself came out of Argonne National Laboratory
In the same sense that the idea of the Internet originated at DARPA, as a means of networking highly dissimilar supercomputers. The DARPA people themselves not only had no idea that their half-formed idea was commercially applicable, but had no idea what commercial research was needed to create the Internet we know today. The government researchers' attitude, as I remember from U of California in the earliest days of large-scale networking, was that letting hoi polloi on would cause a traffic nightmare, and had to be avoided at all costs. Private researchers, on the other hand, spend their careers knowing that commercial requirements and basic research are locked in an intricate dance. Bringing DARPA's inchoate idea to market required Ethernet, high-speed routers, fiber, lasers, the DNS, and a host of other results of commercial research. To return to our question at hand, how long would it have taken the Argonne grid project to evolve by itself into the SETI@home application we know today?
Thanks, but I had a lot of help.
That's good to hear. I still wonder where the profitability will come from to maintain a market for advances in space travel. Satellite deployment, intercontinental travel, entertainment, 20-mile-high club, Jabba the Hut?
Ahh, I see. Like your friend here who suggests that thoughts other than his don't belong here.
To: Heartlander
Does truth exist?
Come on, OPUS and be done with it!
34 posted on 05/26/2004 9:12:10 PM EDT by balrog666 (A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.)
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