Physics Funding
What is the most important thing in the Universe? Well, the most important thing in the Universe is…well, the Universe. Therefore trying to understand the Universe, which is what physics is, is the most important thing. For comparison, a person is just one of approximately seven billion humans, which is just one of 5–20 billion species on this planet which is one about ten planets orbiting an ordinary star which is one of about 100 billion stars in an ordinary galaxy which is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. There are about 10 billion habitable Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the Milky Way galaxy. In the following back of the envelope calculation, I estimate about 10¹⁸ planets with intelligent life in the observable universe. These are low ball figures. The real numbers are probably much higher.
https://www.quora.com/Are-we-alone-in-the-universe-3/answer/Jeffery-Winkler-4
In other words, in the grand scheme of things, we are not important. Certainly, the goal of physics, to try to understand the entire Universe, is more important than our mundane daily affairs of our mundane daily lives. This is self-evident to physicists but most members of the public have the opposite view. Most members of the public assume that their own petty concerns are more important than the entire Universe. If there is a recent advance in physics, their first question is “well, what is it good for?”
Let’s say you have children, and somebody asks you, “Why did you want children?”, how do you answer that? You either know what it’s like to want to have children or you don’t. If you know what it’s like, you can’t explain it to anybody else. If you don’t know what it’s like, nobody else can explain it you. Let’s say you are a physicist, and somebody asks you, “Why did you want to understand the Universe?”, how do you answer that? You either know what it’s like to want to understand the Universe or you don’t. If you know what it’s like, you can’t explain it to anybody else. If you don’t know what it’s like, nobody else can explain it you.
The vast majority of politicians are not scientists, and do not know what it’s like to what to understand the Universe. If they ask you why we should spend a huge amount of tax payer’s money on a physics project, and you answer “to understand the Universe”, they will say that “sounds nice” but does not justify spending the huge amount of tax payers money that you are requesting, not when we are running a deficit, and so many other interests are competing for the same money.
So what do physicists do? They lie. They tell politicians that the reason why we do physics is to get the things on the following list.
1. Products on the Shelf at Walmart — The purpose of physics is to get the latest gee whiz gizmo thingamajig. Once APS sponsored some Congressional Visits Day where they pulled this rediculous stunt where someone stood in front of the crowd, and said, “Reach into your pocket….Take out your iphone…Your iphone came from physics!”
2. Medicine — The purpose of physics is so Christopher Reeve will suddenly hop out of his wheelchair and do an Irish jig. Your grandmother with Alzheimer’s will suddenly remember who you are. Who could be against that? I was an outreach event by a woman astronaut who had been on ISS, who said the reason we need to spend money manned spaceflight was to “cure cancer”. One time a senator walked up a famous physicist, grabbed his hand, shook it vigorously, and thanked him profusely for “saving his wife’s life”. The physicist had no idea what the senator was talking about. It turned out that the senator’s wife had cancer, and the senator believed her life had been saved by having an MRI. The physicist had nothing to do with MRI.
3. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! — This is recited like a Buddhist mantra every election cycle. They believe that if we invest in some vague amorphous thing called STEM, which could mean anything, that will lead to a “competitive edge” and create jobs. The reason they created the “National Quantum Initiative” is because they think this has something to with the economy. Never mind that we are decades away from a functioning quantum computer.
4. Killing People — Politicians are always hopeful that scientists will come up with new ways to rain death upon our enemies. They came up with chemical weapons in WWI, and nuclear weapons in WWII. They could do it again. It almost doesn’t matter if it is not even possible to build it. The Strategic Defense Initiative would never have worked but they blindly supported anyway because they were intoxicated by the wonderful thought that we could eliminate communism is a single blinding flash while we were tucked safely behind our magic shield. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
5. National Prestige — Sometimes we have to plant a flag on the Moon lest others forget that we are the “greatest nation to have ever existed”. We strut around…Look at me!…I’m the best! After the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, Ed Schultz on MSNBC asked, “How could Switzerland beat us to the punch?”
6. Won’t Somebody Think of the Children — We always have to do the obligatory hand wringing about how dismally American kids score on tests compared with the rest of the world. “A Nation at Risk!” “Above the Gathering Storm!” “Waiting for Superman!” Maybe if spent more money on STEM? What exactly is STEM?
7. Pretty Pictures — The Hubble Space Telescope was a very expensive way to make art. If you are doing a powerpoint presentation asking for funding, you close with your money shot…The Pillars of Creation!…Ohhh!…Ahhhh!…Either that or a polar bear perched on a diminutive iceberg.
Of course 99% of physics research will never lead to anything in the above list, which is good because it is being done for a far more important reason, which is to understand the Universe, which is far more important than anything in the above list. Better not tell the politicians that or you won’t get the funding you need. Also, there is pork barrel politics. LIGO is located in Livingstone, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington, both of which are bad locations. In Louisiana, it was literally in a swamp, and they had to build a giant earthwork in order to put the detector on dry land. In Washington, it is near the Cascade Fault, a giant subduction zone, constantly rattled by micro earthquakes. Why are the detectors in those locations? Because they would never have gotten the funding without the support of the senators from those states.
If you are a member of the U.S. Congress, and someone is requesting funding for a government program that would supposedly lead to X, it would be quite reasonable for you to request some evidence that the the funding would, in fact, lead to X. If you requested funding for a program to teach children to read, you would need to provide some evidence that it would teach children to read. Since the physicists are constantly telling the politicians that the reason why we do physics is to get the things on the list, the politicians then require that you provide evidence that your research will lead to the things on the list in order to get funding. Gary Peters, who sponsored the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act said, “Before a proposal gets one penny of funding, reviewers have to consider it based on criteria that include whether the proposal increases economic competitiveness, advances public health and welfare, or supports the national defense.” Of course, it is minuscule percentage of physics research that could lead to any of those things, so if your work doesn’t, you have to lie and say that is does, in order to get funding. Even those strict criteria are not enough to satisfy Rand Paul who threatened to pull the plug on funding just because he did not like or did not understand it. Rand Paul responded to his fellow Republican Gary Peters by saying, “We do have silly research going on. It’s not just the title, and cleverly changing the title to obscure the silliness of the project won’t make it any less silly … Let’s quit doing it”.
https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/sen-rand-paul-introduces-bill-overhaul-federal-research-grant-system
Gary Peters is trying to reassure Rand Paul that no science project gets funded unless it would lead directly to economic competitiveness, advancing public heath, or national defense. Rand Paul is saying he does not believe Gary Peters that all funded research leads to those things. The irony is that Rand Paul is absolutely right about that. The problem is that both Gary Peters and Rand Paul assume that it should not be funded otherwise. Experiments trying to solve the greatest unanswered questions in physics, such as the LHC looking for beyond the standard model physics, dark matter direct detection experiments, neutrinoless double beta decay, muon magnetic moment anomaly, possible sterile neutrinos, learning what we can from gravitational waves from LIGO and Virgo, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Ice Cube studying neutrinos, comparing the spectra of antihydrogen and hydrogen, Gravity Probe B testing general relativity, Kepler discovering thousands of exoplanets, work in theoretical physics such as the AdS/CFT correspondence, monstrous moonshine, and trying to realize de Sitter space in string theory, and work in mathematics such as the Riemann Hypothesis, the Poincaré conjecture, or the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, are all hugely important, in my opinion, even though they will never lead to economic competitiveness, advancing public heath, or national defense, and thus would be ineligible to receive funding under current law. Physicists have to lie in order to receive the funding they need. The physicists complain that the funding requirements are to restrictive but they are the ones who consistently tell the politicians that the reason why we do physics is to get the things on the list, so don’t be surprised when politicians believe you after you keep telling them that.
