> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tool

> I find it much more likely that we would learn new physics by giving 10-year grants to 1000 young physicist of revolutionary spirit, and let them use the tools they could build themselves, than by handing that money to the old guard which has produced nothing of significance for the last two generations. What is interesting, is that a lot of the fundamental physics theories were discovered by amateurs. Einstein was a patent clerk, for example. Maybe we should work on democratizing data collection, and making more raw data available for people to work with. With the advent of cloud computing and on demand computing, maybe your hobby group could code up a an analysis and run it on AWS for a few hundred dollars and discover some new theory.