Another reason is international prestige. If a nation to invests in a major particle collider or other mega science project, it will attract many of the brightest and most capable scientists and researchers. More bright people in general may lead to more incentive for general commercial and private investment. This argument may especially work well for emerging nations. There is also some national prestige in being the place where a major scientific discovery is made.
For example, there was always a proposal to set up a gravitational wave detector in India, but it was only officially approved by the government a week after the first official GW detection by LIGO in the US.
That is unfortunate. I wonder what the cost of the gravitational wave observatory in the US was? Seems that certainly demonstrated its worth in terms of purely basic research.
Well yes, and notice that there already major investments in building several successors to LIGO, and itâs justification is almost entirely based on basic science concerns.
Think of what doubling the budget for NSF alone would accomplish. That is a drop in the bucket compared to defense spending and tax breaks for the wealthy.
NSFs budget is about $8 billion. Increasing its budget might make sense. That isnât going to happen if science is perceived as anti-religious or a collection of humanities projects by artists posing as scientists.
LIGO cost $1.1 billion, or half of a B-2 stealth bomber. (I donât want to constantly harp on the defense budget, but itâs worth noting).
Another aspect worth considering is technological advancements made when building these machines. The stuff we learned about the Moon from the Apollo missions may not have application, but we invented a lot of important tech just getting there.
That doesnât mean we need the pendulum to swing to science being pro-religion either Josh. Science really has nothing to do with anyoneâs personal religious beliefs.
Also NSF is the USâ main basic research institution. Itâs not primarily meant to fund research whoâs primary focus is applied. Your NSF grant will get rejected if it is strictly a biomedical proposal and not addressing some basic question. Turning NSF into the equivalent of a junior NIH is a mistake. Not to mention the wildly undersupported work that goes on in Americaâs museums.
I would take issue with your characterization of the work that I do as âhumanities projectsâ but that said humanities projects are ALSO wildly underfunded. Itâs like what was said already itâs not about resources rather it is about priorities.
Who exactly is perceiving what Iâm doing as a âhumanities projectâ then? And why is the perception of a âhumanities projectâ slapped on to every scientific project without any direct immediate application? If so then that is an enormous problem and I would say it is an outgrowth of decades of eroding recognition of the importance of basic research.
Iâve never argued it should be pro religion. It should be neutral where ever possible, even though it certainly interacts with personal religious beliefs.
So this thread started with my opinion that creationists and perhaps more broadly religious people in general donât tend to recognize the importance of science unless that science can serve some immediate agenda whether it is some practical application or to justify some religious conviction. That opinion was quickly derided as an âattackâ. However, what Iâm reading in this thread is telling me that those instincts are likely not far off the mark.
I think the real problem is that for the Higgs search, they had a pretty good idea of what they were looking for and where to find it. This proposal seems to based more on, there is dark matter so lets amp it up and see what we can find - at least that is how it comes across. Correct me if Iâm wrong there. Given the choice, I think I would direct the big money to space based optics and interferometry, but maybe I just like the pictures per my icon.
Well thatâs the definition of basic research Josh. My broader point was this. Are religious people more likely to view science through a utilitarian lens either for immediate practical purposes or as a framework to prop up their beliefs? I believe you said that it is undisputed that there are more religious scientists (per captia?) working in predominantly applied areas like biomedicine, clinical medicine, engineering, and industry. That is the sort of thing I am talking about. If that were true why would that be? What is it about being religious that makes that side of science more attractive?
Well, we are discussing something different, how to justify basic scientific work. Even the AAAS makes appeals to utility. What we are exploring here does not deviate from their advocacy work for scientific funding.
You are absolutely correct. A hypothesis driven project is much easier to justify than a project focused on pure discovery. Eisteinâs equations predicted gravitational waves, and the machines we built were theoretically capable of measuring them. The Higgâs field had a predicted range of energies, and the LHC was designed to test collisions at those energies. Smashing particles together at even higher energies just to see what happens is a very different proposition.
Finding signals of life on distant planets is probably one of the most exciting possibilities in astronomy right now, at least in my opinion.
