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 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 for such a reassurance on the eve of the most brutal and calamitous war in human history. I knew at least that I would be growing up in the future. The sleek and clean ‘tomorrow’ portrayed by the Fair was appealing and hopeful. And something called science was plainly the means by which that future would be realized.
But if things had gone a little differently, the Fair could have given me enormously more. A fierce struggle had gone on behind the scenes. The vision that prevailed was that of the Fair’s President and chief spokesman, Grover Whalen – a former corporate executive, New York City police chief in a time of unprecedented police brutality, and public relations innovator. It was he who had envisioned the exhibit buildings as chiefly commercial, industrial, oriented to consumer products, and he who had convinced Stalin and Mussolini to build lavish national pavilions. (He later complained about how often he had been obliged to give the fascist salute.) The level of the exhibits, as one designer described it, was pitched to the mentality of a twelve-year-old.
However, as recounted by the historian Peter Kuznick of American University, a group of prominent scientists, including Harold Urey and Albert Einstein, advocated presenting science for its own sake, not just as the route to gadgets for sale; concentrating on the way of thinking and not just the products of science. They were convinced that broad popular understanding of science was the antidote to superstition and bigotry; that, as science popularizer Watson Davis put it, ‘the scientific way is the democratic way’. One scientist even suggested that widespread public appreciation of the methods of science might work ‘a final conquest of stupidity’ – a worthy, but probably unrealizable, goal.
As events transpired, almost no real science was tacked on to the Fair’s exhibits, despite the scientists’ protests and their appeals to high principles. And yet, some of the little that was added trickled down to me and helped to transform my childhood. The corporate and consumer focus remained central, though, and essentially nothing appeared about science as a way of thinking, much less as a bulwark of a free society.
Exactly half a century later, in the closing years of the Soviet Union, Ann Druyan and I found ourselves at a dinner in Peredelkino, a village outside Moscow where Communist Party officials, retired generals and a few favoured intellectuals had their summer homes. The air was electric with the prospect of new freedoms – especially the right to speak your mind even if the government doesn’t like what you’re saying. The fabled revolution of rising expectations was in full flower. But, despite glasnost, there were widespread doubts. Would those in power really allow their own critics to be heard? Would freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, of religion, really be permitted? Would people inexperienced with freedom be able to bear its burdens?