If Queen Victoria had ever called an urgent meeting of her counsellors, and ordered them to invent the equivalent of radio and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere, Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus, and the judgement to preserve the displacement current in a vacuum. They would, I think, have gotten nowhere. Meanwhile, on his own, driven only by curiosity, costing the government almost nothing, himself unaware that he was laying the ground for the Westminster Project, ‘Dafty’ was scribbling away. It’s doubtful whether the self-effacing, unsociable Mr Maxwell would even have been thought of to perform such a study. If he had, probably the government would have been telling him what to think about and what not, impeding rather than inducing his great discovery.
Late in life, Maxwell did have one interview with Queen Victoria. He worried about it beforehand – essentially about his ability to communicate science to a non-expert – but the Queen was distracted and the interview was short. Like the four other greatest British scientists of recent history, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, P.A.M. Dirac and Francis Crick, Maxwell was never knighted (although Lyell, Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, Rutherford, Eddington and Hoyle in the next tier were). In Maxwell’s case, there was not even the excuse that he might hold opinions at variance with the Church of England: he was an absolutely conventional Christian for his time, more devout than most. Maybe it was his nerdishness.
The communications media – the instruments of education and entertainment that James Clerk Maxwell made possible – have never, so far as I know, offered even a mini-series on the life and thought of their benefactor and founder. By contrast, think of how difficult it is to grow up in America without television teaching you about, say, the life and times of Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid or Al Capone.
Maxwell married young, but the bond seems to have been passionless as well as childless. His excitement was reserved for science. This founder of the modern age died in 1879 at the age of 47. While he is almost forgotten in popular culture, radar astronomers who map other worlds have remembered: the greatest mountain range on Venus, discovered by sending radio waves from Earth, bouncing them off Venus, and detecting the faint echoes, is named after him.
Less than a century after Maxwell’s prediction of radio waves, the first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of searches, some of which I referred to earlier, for the time-varying electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances from possible other intelligences – biologically very different from us – who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell.
In October 1992, in the Mojave Desert, and in a Puerto Rican karst valley, we initiated by far the most promising, powerful and comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). For the first time NASA would organize and operate the programme. The entire sky would be examined over a ten-year period with unprecedented sensitivity and frequency range. If, on a planet of any of the 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, anyone had been sending us a radio message, we might have had a pretty fair chance of hearing them.
Just one year later, Congress pulled the plug. SETI was not of pressing importance; its interest was limited; it was too expensive. But every civilization in human history has devoted some of its resources to investigating deep questions about the Universe, and it’s hard to think of a deeper one than whether we are alone. Even if we never decrypted the message contents, the receipt of such a signal would transform our view of the Universe and ourselves. And if we could understand the message from an advanced technical civilization, the practical benefits might be unprecedented. Far from being narrowly based, the SETI programme, strongly supported by the scientific community, is also embedded in popular culture. The fascination with this enterprise is broad and enduring, and for very good reason. And far from being too expensive, the programme would have cost about one attack helicopter per year.
I wonder why those members of Congress concerned about price tags don’t devote greater attention to the Department of Defense, which, with the Soviet Union gone and the Cold War over, still spends, when all costs are tallied, well over $300 billion a year. (And elsewhere in government there are many programmes that amount to welfare for the well-to-do.) Perhaps our descendants will look back on our time and marvel at us, possessed of the technology to detect other beings, but closing our ears because we insisted on spending the national wealth to protect us from an enemy that no longer exists.*
[* The SETI programme was briefly resurrected, using $7 million in private contributions, in 1995 under the appropriate name Project Phoenix.]
David Goodstein, a physicist at Cal Tech, notes that science has been growing nearly exponentially for centuries and that it cannot continue such growth, because then everybody on the planet, would have to be a scientist, and then the growth would have to stop. He speculates that for this reason, and not because of any fundamental disaffection from science, the growth in funding of science has slowed measurably in the last few decades.
Nevertheless, I’m worried about how research funds are distributed. I’m worried that cancelling government funds for SETI is part of a trend. The government has been pressuring the National Science Foundation to move away from basic scientific research and to support technology, engineering, applications. Congress is suggesting doing away with the US Geological Survey, and slashing support for study of the Earth’s fragile environment. NASA support for research and analysis of data already obtained is increasingly constrained. Many young scientists are not only unable to find grants to support their research; they are unable to find jobs.
Industrial research and development funded by American companies has slowed across the board in recent years. Government funding for research and development has declined in the same period. (Only military research and development increased in the decade of the 1980s.) In annual expenditures, Japan is now the world’s leading investor in civilian research and development. In such fields as computers, telecommunications equipment, aerospace, machine tools, robotics, and scientific precision equipment, the US share of global exports has been declining, while the Japanese share has been increasing. In that same period the United States lost its lead to Japan in most semiconductor technologies. It experiences severe declines in market share in colour TVs, VCRs, phonographs, telephone sets and machine tools.
Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of course have a vested interest in basic research. It’s what they like to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society’s interest to support such research. This is how the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made. Whether a few grand and ambitious scientific projects are a better investment than a larger number of small programmes is a worthwhile question.
We are rarely smart enough to set about on purpose making the discoveries that will drive our economy and safeguard our lives. Often, we lack the fundamental research. Instead, we pursue a broad range of investigations of Nature, and applications we never dreamed of emerge. Not always, of course. But often enough.
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.