The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [192]
Giving money to someone like Maxwell might have seemed the most absurd encouragement of mere ‘curiosity-driven’ science, and an imprudent judgement for practical legislators. Why grant money now, so nerdish scientists talking incomprehensible gibberish can indulge their hobbies, when there are urgent unmet national needs? From this point of view it’s easy to understand the contention that science is just another lobby, another pressure group anxious to keep the grant money rolling in so the scientists don’t ever have to do a hard day’s work or meet a payroll.
Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnet-ism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it ‘X-rays’; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mould; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.
Members of Congress and other political leaders have from time to time found it irresistible to poke fun at seemingly obscure scientific research proposals that the government is asked to fund. Even as bright a senator as William Proxmire, a Harvard graduate, was given to making episodic ‘Golden Fleece’ awards, many commemorating ostensibly useless scientific projects including SETI. I imagine the same spirit in previous governments - a Mr Fleming wishes to study bugs in smelly cheese; a Polish woman wishes to sift through tons of Central African ore to find minute quantities of a substance she says will glow in the dark; a Mr Kepler wants to hear the songs the planets sing.
These discoveries and a multitude of others that grace and characterize our time, to some of which our very lives are beholden, were made ultimately by scientists given the opportunity to explore what in their opinion, under the scrutiny of their peers, were basic questions in Nature. Industrial applications, in which Japan in the last two decades has done so well, are excellent. But applications of what? Fundamental research, research into the heart of Nature, is the means by which we acquire the new knowledge that gets applied.
Scientists have an obligation, especially when asking for big money, to explain with great clarity and honesty what they’re after. The Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) would have been the preeminent instrument on the planet for probing the fine structure of matter and the nature of the early Universe. Its price tag was $10 to $15 billion. It was cancelled by Congress in 1993 after about $2 billion had been spent - a worst of both worlds outcome. But this debate was not, I think, mainly about declining interest in the support of science. Few in Congress understood what modem high energy accelerators are for. They are not for weapons. They have no practical applications. They are for something that is, worrisomely from the point of view of many, called ‘the theory of everything’. Explanations that involve entities called quarks, charm, flavour, colour, etc. sound as if physicists are being cute. The whole thing has an aura, in the view of at least some Congresspeople I’ve talked to, of ‘nerds gone wild’ - which I suppose is an uncharitable way of describing curiosity-based