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How did you know, as a graduate student no less, that research money spent on high energy research was low yield compared to the biological sciences? I think th
by ThePhysicist 6y ago
How did you know, as a graduate student no less, that research money spent on high energy research was low yield compared to the biological sciences? I think that's a pretty bold and naive statement to make.
For example, research on quantum-mechanical light-matter interaction was considered not very practically relevant in the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s the results were picked up by the superconducting qubit research community and used to great effect to build a viable approach to quantum computing.
The outcome of research is inherently hard to predict, and telling people that their field of study is "low yield" because it's not the hot topic of the day seems quite naive and arrogant to me.
- jchallis 6y agoI’ll grant you the boldness, naïveté and arrogance of my 2006 self - he could be an insufferable a$$. But looking from the vantage point of 14 years on I think the statement is accurate and that researcher understood why. There was simply nothing on the horizon that remotely held as much promise as Alain Aspect’s and Serge Haroche’s quantum optics work. Just because I was a graduate student does not automatically mean I was wrong.
- dekhn 6y agoThe difference is that some of the biological research money ends up going to discoveries that dramatically improve the human condition, while quantum computers don't have any path to doing so yet (while conventional computers solve most of the important problems we have today). Even biology has a pretty low dollar-to-discovery rate, though.