Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Maxwell and The Nerds
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
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