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The writing on the wall became apparent to me with the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, when I was getting my PhD in physics. I didn't k
by spodek 13y ago
The writing on the wall became apparent to me with the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, when I was getting my PhD in physics. I didn't know the numbers for a cost-benefit analysis, but I couldn't then nor can I now see cancellation as helpful to the U.S. The U.S. would have stayed way ahead of the rest of the world in particle physics and all the accompanying jobs, discoveries, and innovation. Instead we look to the rest of the world for leadership.
The Forbes article paints a picture of a United States full of ambition and curiosity driving innovation. That part exists, but it has just as long been a country of puritanism, self-righteousness, and fundamentalism.
The article points to politics as a major problem. That politics reflects this tradition among the people. A large fraction of the population here genuinely dislikes science, no matter how much they like the computers and cd players it brought.
I grew up liking idealism because I thought I was right about so many things. I since dropped my need to be right a priori in favor of what works after testing. Politics in this country does have an idealistic view of the individual -- each person should do for him or herself and anyone helping them will decrease their ability to achieve and lower their motivation. Healthcare, welfare, education, and so on are viewed by a large block of voters as detrimental to the nation. We, as a nation if not readers of this site, stick to this principle in the face of nearly the entire world providing evidence to the contrary.
We put down other countries for doing things against our ideals, saying they don't work, even as they pass us in countless measures of quality of life and community.
Choosing idealism in the face of contrary evidence of what works is a recipe for disaster.
- lispm 13y agoThe funding is in other areas. Work for the NSA, CIA, Homeland Security or Military. They spend a lot of money on innovation. Just one example: The F-35 fighter plane project has an estimated cost over its lifespan of 1.5 trillion (no joke) dollars. Another example: the Virginia Class fast-attack submarine. 2 billion a piece. Around 30 are planned. Who cares about a superconducting super collider? It's even peanuts in terms of money. Fusion reactor? Renewable energy? Infrastructure? You are at the wrong side of innovation.
- anigbrowl 13y agoI care a good deal about it. I think we would be farther ahead with fusion research had we built it. Innovation is not just market-ready technology, it requires fundamental research as well, much more of which seems to be going on elsewhere these days.
- SkyMarshal 13y agoI think lispm was being facetiously hyperbolic with his "who cares" comment.
- T-A 13y ago"jobs, dicoveries, and innovation" from particle physics? Really? I'll go with jobs, but only tax-financed ones. I'll go, tentatively, with discoveries, although everything to come out of the LHC so far is simply confirmation of the same old Standard Model we've known since the 70s. The SSC would have been able to probe higher energies, but as things are standing, there is no indication of new physics; if it exists, it could easily be out of range for both the LHC and the hypothetical SSC. More to the point, the economic value of those discoveries is almost certain to be 0, for simple reasons of scale. As for innovation, what has particle physics brought which would not equally well be brought by any number of other large scale technological projects? We all know the "WWW invented at CERN" story, but surely we also all realize that the physics input to the WWW was exactly 0, that any large organization needing to handle large number of documents over a heterogeneous network would have come up with something similar, that others probably did, and that the real reason CERN's solution took off was it's being free open source? Particle physics is a luxury. At best, it's pursued for reasons of intellectual curiosity. Trying to portray it as an economic engine is not going to convince anyone worth convincing.
- TYPE_FASTER 13y agoYou know...I just don't think that's the case. We can't predict what products or societal changes particle physics will result in until we actually do the research (the Schrodinger's Cat of research?). One thing is for sure: if we don't do the research, we won't know any more, and we won't have gained any further understanding of the universe. I just don't think understanding our universe, and the world we live in, is a luxury.