AdmSmith wrote:
“... and I will defend your right to waste your own money, but no not ask for us (=taxpayers) to spend our money on it.”
If your attitude has been the rule in the past, many key innovations would never have come about. The vast majority of laymen and expert scientists opposed important innovations such as telegraphs, airplanes, computers, the laser, radio telescopes, microcomputers, MRI machines and so on. As I mentioned in a previous message, Rabi, Kusch, Thomas, Bohr and von Neumann all thought research on the laser was a waste of money, and they tried to prevent it.
You are suggesting, in effect, that we should decide by vote which subjects will get research funding. Unpopular ideas, especially those that the DoE and American Physical Society denounce, will never be funded, because most people will agree they are “a waste of money.” The DoE and the APS are extremely influential, after all. Perhaps you feel that you would not be influenced by them, but most people will be, so if the majority wins, things like cold fusion will always lose.
I think the traditional academic method of allocating funds is much better. Professors with tenure and industrial research laboratory Fellows should be allowed to study any topic they feel is worth the effort. They make the greatest sacrifice after all, devoting years of their lives to excruciatingly difficult labor.
Perhaps you are suggesting that scientific research itself should not be funded with public money. I would be delighted to see private corporate industrial money spent on cold fusion, but this may be difficult to bring about. For one thing, the DoE deeply opposes cold fusion, and it has a great deal of influence. It spends billions of dollars per year on competing ideas, and awards huge amounts to industry. This is bound to affect the decisions made at industrial research laboratories. For another, cold fusion at this stage is basic physics, which cannot be patented. It is difficult to imagine how a corporation could make money doing such basic research, but without this we will never develop the knowledge we need to make practical devices. Also, corporations must usually keep the research confidential. I cannot imagine cold fusion research will make progress unless it is done in the traditional open, collaborative academic manner.
Perhaps you oppose funding of scientific research in general, because you feel it is frivolous, or unnecessary, or not public business. On this issue, I agree with Thomas Jefferson, who wrote:
“Some good men, and even of respectable information, consider the learned sciences as useless acquirements; some think that they do not better the condition of man; and others that education, like private and individual concerns, should be left to private individual effort; not reflecting that an establishment embracing all the sciences which may be useful and even necessary in the various vocations of life, with the buildings and apparatus belonging to each, are far beyond the reach of individual means, and must either derive existence from public patronage, or not exist at all. This would leave us, then, without those callings which depend on education or send us to other countries to seek the instruction they require. . . .”
http://www.founding.com/library/lbody.cfm?id=132&parent=50 In the case of cold fusion, if the U.S. continues to ban research, and others succeed, we will have to purchase the technology from Japan, Italy, Russia and/or China.
- Jed