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By Root 2008 0

science. No one asked to pay for this had the foggiest idea of what a Higgs boson is. I’ve read some of the material intended to justify the SSC. At the very end, some of it wasn’t too bad, but there was nothing that really addressed what the project was about on a level accessible to bright but sceptical non-physicists. If physicists are asking for $10 or $15 billion to build a machine that has no practical value, at the very least they should make an extremely serious effort, with dazzling graphics, metaphors and capable use of the English language, to justify their proposal. More than financial mismanagement, budgetary constraints and political incompetence, I think this is the key to the failure of the SSC.

There is a growing free-market view of human knowledge, according to which basic research should compete without government support with all the other institutions and claimants in society. If they couldn’t have relied on government support, and had to compete in the free-market economy of their day, it’s unlikely that any of the scientists on my list would have been able to do their groundbreaking research. And the cost of basic research is substantially greater than it was in Maxwell’s day -both theoretical and, especially, experimental.

But that aside, would free-market forces be adequate to support basic research? Only about ten per cent of meritorious research proposals in medicine are funded today. More money is spent on quack medicine than on all of medical research. What would it be like if government opted out of medical research?

A necessary aspect of basic research is that its applications lie in the future, sometimes decades or even centuries ahead. What’s more, no one knows which aspects of basic research will have practical value and which will not. If scientists cannot make such predictions, is it likely that politicians or industrialists can? If free-market forces are focused only towards short-term profit - as they certainly mainly are in an America with steep declines in corporate research - is not this solution tantamount to abandoning basic research?

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

Of course there are many pressing problems facing our nation and our species. But reducing basic scientific research is not the way to solve them. Scientists do not constitute a voting bloc. They have no effective lobby. However, much of their work is in everybody’s interest. Backing off from fundamental research constitutes a failure of nerve, of imagination and of that vision thing that we still don’t seem to have a handle on. It might strike one of those hypothetical extraterrestrials that we were planning not to have a future.

Of course we need literacy, education, jobs, adequate medical care and defence, protection of the environment, security in our old age, a balanced budget, and a host of other matters. But we are a rich society. Can’t we also nurture the Maxwells of our time? To take one symbolic example, is it really true that we can’t afford one attack helicopter’s worth of seed corn to listen to the stars?

24

Science and Witchcraft*

Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.

Latin proverb

[* Written with Ann Druyan. The following two chapters include more political content than elsewhere in this book. I do not wish to suggest that advocacy of science and scepticism necessarily leads to all the political or social conclusions I draw. Although sceptical thinking is invaluable in politics, politics is not a science.]

The 1939 New York World’s Fair - that so transfixed me as a small visitor from darkest Brooklyn - was about The World of Tomorrow’. Merely by adopting such a motif, it promised that there would be a world of tomorrow, and the most casual glance affirmed that it would be better than the world of 1939. Although the nuance wholly passed me by, many people longed