Posted on 08/22/2004 12:02:47 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Hidden amid the hoopla of finding planets orbiting other stars, decoding the human genome and discovering miracle materials with nanotechnology, there's a seemingly improbable but perhaps even more important story — U.S. science may be in decline.
After 50 years of supremacy, both scientifically and economically, America now faces formidable challenges from foreign governments that have recognized scientific research and new technology as the fuels of a powerful economy.
"The Chinese government has a slogan, 'Develop science to save the country,' " said Paul Chu, a physics professor at the University of Houston who also is president of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. "For a long time they have talked about it. Now they are serious."
According to the National Science Foundation and other organizations that track science indicators, the United States' share of worldwide scientific and engineering research publications, Nobel Prize awards, and some types of patents is falling.
A recent trend in the number of foreign students applying to U.S. schools is even more troubling, scientists say.
As American students have become less interested in science and engineering, top U.S. graduate schools have turned increasingly toward Europe and Asia for the best young scientists to fill laboratories. Yet now, with post-Sept. 11 visa rules tightening American borders, fewer foreign students are willing to endure the hassle of getting into the country.
"Essentially, the United States is pushing the best students from China and other countries away," Chu said.
The new restrictions also hassle students who are already here, like Lijun Zhu, a physics graduate student at Rice University since 1998 who returned two years ago to China to get married. The honeymoon became a nightmare when he and his new wife were stranded for more than two months, awaiting visa renewals.
"I was afraid of going outside my home for even a moment and missing the call from the consulate," Zhu recalled.
Losing future students like Zhu would cost more than just prestige in ivory towers. It could very well mean losing the nation's technological leadership, with implications for the nation's job market and security, to say nothing of culture.
Decline called 'ridiculous' Although President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, dismisses as "ridiculous" the notion that America could lose its scientific prestige, scientists and policy-makers lay the blame in several areas: the drying well of foreign students, limited stem cell research and less federal funding for basic science research.
Since the visa restrictions were tightened in 2002, foreign-student applications to U.S. universities have fallen from 400,000 a year to 325,000, a 19 percent drop. Graduate school applications nationally are down even further, by up to 40 percent, said Jordan Konisky, vice provost for research and graduate studies at Rice University.
The problem, he said, is that when additional screening requirements were added, extra staffing in U.S. consulates to handle the workload was not.
And the atmosphere in these foreign offices, simmering with tension from terrorism's threat, breeds caution.
"No bureaucrat wants to make a mistake and approve a visa for someone that comes to this country and causes a problem," Konisky said. "So they tend to be very conservative about this, and that's good. But I think they're being overly conservative."
Graduate science programs at Rice and elsewhere are heavily dependent on foreign students.
Nearly half of engineering graduate students are foreign, as are more than one-third of all natural sciences graduate students.
These students invigorate research, professors say. They publish papers, bring new ideas and play a major role in patent applications.
Afraid to leave the U.S. In 2003, the Rice graduate physics program admitted 16 foreign students. Two were delayed more than six months, and three were permanently blocked from entering the United States. Southern Methodist University has a smaller program, and in 2002, the two foreign students who were accepted didn't get visas. School officials briefly considered ending the program, but enough students gained visas in 2003 and this fall to keep it open, said Fredrick Olness, the SMU physics department chairman.
Yet even if students make it into the United States, their visa troubles, as evidenced by the plight of Zhu, aren't over.
Scientific conferences are held worldwide, and many students with families or looming deadlines at school opt not to travel for fear that they won't be able to come back. Likewise, meeting planners say the number of foreign scientists attending conferences in the United States has dropped because they don't want to bother with obtaining a temporary visa.
Then there are the physicists who want to work at some of the world's best particle accelerators, which are in Switzerland and Germany.
"All of the foreign faculty we have are afraid to leave the country because of visa problems," Olness said. "If this keeps up, the United States is going to take a hit on its stature in the worldwide physics community."
Seizing the opportunity Marburger, himself a physicist, said changes to streamline visa problems, including adding staff in U.S. consular offices abroad, should be announced soon.
"This has very high visibility in Washington, all the way up to the president," Marburger said.
The winner, for now at least, is clear — scientific enterprise everywhere else.
At Hong Kong University, applications from Chinese students have more than doubled in the past three years. Chu says his faculty is thrilled.
Chu said Great Britain and Australia have seized the opportunity and opened recruiting offices in China. The European Union, too, has set a goal of having the most competitive and knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.
What concerns U.S. scientists is that a decades-long brain drain into America may be coming to an end.
America began attracting scientists in the 1930s when the shadow of Hitler's political and religious persecution fell over Europe. Hordes of leading scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, whose work with nuclear chain reactions led to the atomic bomb, immigrated to the United States.
Focus on science funding After the war, the United States began spending billions of dollars on basic and defense-related research. Other great foreign scientists followed, drawn to new facilities and money. Their work laid the foundation for the technology bonanza of the 1990s, when one-third of Silicon Valley start-up companies were begun by foreigners.
Attracting top graduate students from other countries, then, is the first step toward continuing the trend.
"The United States used to welcome foreign scientists," said Zhu's adviser at Rice, physics professor Qimiao Si. "Nearly a century ago, the center of gravity shifted to the United States. We don't want that to happen in a reverse direction."
There are other policy areas that U.S. scientists say harm their ability to compete. Scientists say the Bush administration's policy to limit the use of embryonic stem cells will blunt advances made in biomedical research. "The stem cell decision has certainly put us behind at the front end of the curve," said Neal Lane, Clinton's science adviser. "It's a huge barrier."
The president's decision also led some U.S. researchers to seek private funds for their work. But this, said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, usually a stalwart ally of Bush, is no solution to the issue.
"It's the federal research that is the big opportunity," the Texas senator said. "That's where the big dollars are. And to have these avenues to federal resources closed is going to hurt us in the long run."
Another problem, said Albert Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is an increasing focus in the federal budget on applied military and homeland security research. Excluding a modest increase for biomedical research, nondefense research and development in the proposed 2005 federal budget would decline 2.1 percent, according to the association.
Marburger said federal science spending is still far greater than in any other country. The United States, he said, spends 1 1/2 times more on research and development than all of the European Union countries combined.
Teich agreed, but only to a point.
"It is probably wrong to say U.S. science is currently in decline," he said. "But it is certainly in danger of declining. We're perched on the edge."
Another troubling trend A fundamental problem, scientists and policy-makers say, is the lack of interest in science from American children.
Between 1994 and 2001, the number of U.S. students enrolling in science and engineering graduate programs fell 10 percent. Foreign enrollment jumped by 31 percent to make up for the shortfall.
National reports on this trend have offered suggestions to address the problem, such as giving money to community colleges to assist high-ability students in transferring to four-year science and engineering programs.
"Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet," said President Clinton's science adviser, Neal Lane.
Although there are some encouraging trends — the number of U.S. Hispanics enrolling in science graduate programs between 1994 and 2001 increased by more than one-third — the number of U.S. minorities in science graduate programs remains well below their representation in the total population.
Yup. What you hire in at is your salary forever. Piss poor way to run a space program.
Ha! My most recent math professor drilled us in mechanics. He said if he called on the phone at 3AM waking us up we should be able to do an integration by parts, give him the result, and roll over and go back to sleep.
135 - "crane operators don't get to slip by. If you're lucky somebody won't get killed the first hour."
That depends on who is doing the hiring, whether they slip by or not, but the poor ones are soon found out, even certified operators, as crane operating is more of an 'art' and requires generally a very sharp, and agile able to mentally calculate, angles, variables, angles, winds, support, all at the same time.
That is why I mentioned sailboat sailor. I found that the best natural crane operators, even without training, were good sailboat sailors.
But extrememly dangerous, extremely fast. One minor error and catastrophe and death. Crane operators don't 'fall asleep' while 'driving (from boredom), like truck drivers.
Here is a true, amusing, strange story. Once, on a job in Saudi, I noticed, after work, one of my British crane operators out in the yard, driving around a small, rough terrain, mobile crane - A 25k Gallion. He was having a ball, just backing up, turning, doing all kinds of strange movements. As it was really boring, and many did strange things for entertainment, and he wasn't bothering anybody, I didn't interrupt. But when he came back in, and I got an opportunity, I asked him what he was doing, and he said 'practicing' - and I said - "You are a good crane operator, why do you need to 'practice', and he responded - "Oh, yeah, the 'crane' part, no problem. It's the driving. I can't drive, have no lisence, so I am practicing driving, so I can get a lisence when I go back to the UK."
True story.
136 - "Students are very capable of learning calculational or algebraic dance steps (such as finding a derivative) without having any clear idea of what it means,"
I agree, but would leave out the 'very'. Rote learning does work, but, since you apparently are a teaccher, and still teaching, and especially since we have computers now which can instantly recalc and redraw, why not try taking a problem and demonstrate graphically, what even very minor changes in different values do to the graphical depiction. I think you would be surprised at how much easier some will catch on to the ideas of what the formulas actually govern, and it may mean far more can understand far more quickly and easily.
In fact, you may find that it will save many of your otherwise 'smart' students who otherwise just don't 'get' calculus, so they give up.
When I was seven, I decided I wanted to be both a scientist AND a truck driver when I grew up. More than twenty years later, I'm getting my Ph.d in the humanities, and I still don't have a driver's license. Que sera, sera...
We actually still teach a fairly 'traditional' calculus at our shop: mostly algebraic. Too much graphics/intuition at the expense of algebra skills leaves students underprepared for differential equations and the like.
We use TI-86 graphing calculators, and the software Derive, to help students visualize formulas. There's a nifty little piece of software called Cyclone that draws three-dimensional implicit surfaces; the student can change coefficients of the equation by changing a slider, and the surface changes real-time as the student moves his or her mouse. We use this in calc III.
Right. Of course I was speaking of senior and graduate level, real variables, complex variables. Freshmen can be memorizing some trig while they are there, sin pi/2, double angle formulas, it makes things a lot easier and quicker later.
THANK YOU MY GOOD AND TRUSTED FRIEND. AS SOON AS THESE ADMINISTRATIVE DIFFICULTIES ARE CLEARED UP, WITH THE HELP OF YOUR EXPENSE MONEY, I WILL BE ABLE TO SEND TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT THE $60 MILLION MY UNCLE, THE GENERAL, HAS BEEN TRYING TO EXPATRIATE.
/s/ ABU BANTU
LOL! Haven't seen one of those in a while.
You have to build the infrastructure first. Spending money on "anti gravity" and the like is not the path to take IMHO. If we used lunar mass drivers as an example, getting material into orbit becomes far easier than from the gravity well we inhabit.
Smiles
When I was about seven, I wanted to be an astronaut. Guess I didn't do too badly. Never flew, but got to work with the space program. :-)
What do you think contributes more to our standard of living? A foundation excavation, or some HTML floating around in cyberspace?
TI-86 - Pretty nifty. My experience is old, I used to love my various TI calculators until I got Excel, and figured out how to use it. Not familiar with the current TI's, though it sounds pretty good, I seriously doubt a hand calculator can give quite the visualization and flexibility of a PC, spreadsheet, graphics and monitor. But, our schools must be practical too.
try a PC and the spreadsheet MS Excel for entering data and formulas, and use the graphics package in Excel for displaying the results.
You can do all kinds of neat things, easily and quickly, once you get the hang of it. And laying out and printing out the data in spreadsheet format and charts using Excel (while it takes a while to learn) can do/show most amazing things, in big screen and in multi-colors and 3-d.
Excel is highly programmable and full of hundreds and hundreds of built in functions - though they are not readily apparent. Get a good book on Excel and Customizing Excel will yield amazing results.
In fact, there used to be various TI emulators available, as add-ins.
To give you a simple idea in Excel - just enter in row(s)/column(s) of numbers and highlight them, and click on the little bar graph icon and create charts and graphs automatically. Enter formulas if you wish to automatically calculate the rows and columns of data.
As a mathematician, you should have a ball with Excel, after using the TI.
Just a question: traditionally, how much of the space budget has been allocated from defense funding? The main incentive for our space program was competition with the Soviets; in fact, the post war move towards greater science funding was largely to maintain both industrial superiority and to improve our defensive capability (even CERN, as part of the Marshall Plan, was an outgrowth of American defense funding). In this regard, we were too successful; the Soviet Union is gone, our enemies do not belong to a nation-state and our relationship with China although not warm, has been cordial enough for the last thirty years that their rapidly-acclerating space program is not perceived as a threat to us (from beyond the grave, Nixon continues to screw the space program). How else can we justify further space exploration, and science in general, except by repeating R.R. Wilson's famous (and very true) statement that it gives us something worth defending?
151 - " If we used lunar mass drivers as an example, getting material into orbit becomes far easier than from the gravity well we inhabit."
Shooting ingots into space using mass drivers from the moon is rather interesting.
However, ingots won't do it. Try mass driving JPL, or Boeing, or Northrop into space - it doesn't work.
152 - "When I was about seven, I wanted to be an astronaut. Guess I didn't do too badly. Never flew, but got to work with the space program. :-)"
Just like my brother, the 'color blind' NASA engineer. (Knocked out of the astronaut program before he could start, because he was slightly color blind), so he ended up with a career as a NASA engineer.
So, you think we should send our people to china to build foundations, so we can make more money?
I have some ruby rods (see the post on transparent aluminum) left over from laser experiments. I have contacts in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam who will cut the rods into jewelry quality stones and set them. I do need some seed money however to pay the cutters and setters and to buy the gold for the settings. If you could send me $5,000,000 (certified check or Western Union), I could let you have 5% of the action.
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