[FRIAM] for the optimists

[Steve Smith]

I heard Freeman Dyson speak at LANL in the mid-late 80s, I think it was
a rehash of his "Giffords Lecture" at Aberdeen, on the topic of the
risks/hazards/weaknesses of Big Science.   I found it profound at
several levels, not least of which was the audience he was delivering it
to (Scientists almost exclusively in pursuit of and funded by Big
Science (tm) ).    Part of his technique in winning us over was to
describe an out-of-scale Soviet project that either failed or had
harsh/weird unintended (expected?) consequences, then handing us one of
our own in contrast... often equally absurd/painful.   Plowshare and the
Soviet version comes to mind.  

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosion>

Nuclear fracking in the 4 corners comes to mind... right here in our region.


Here is an interesting popular article on the topic of the downside of
Big Science, with a relevant Dyson quote:

    https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/27/us/big-science-it-worth-price-periodic-look-largest-new-research-projects-heavy.html
    <https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/27/us/big-science-it-worth-price-periodic-look-largest-new-research-projects-heavy.html>

   

    Dr. Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study
    in Princeton, said in his book, ''Infinite in All Directions,'' that
    some of the big projects take so long to build that they are
    virtually obsolete when completed.

    ''The cutting edge of science moves rapidly,'' he said. ''The bigger
    and more ambitious the missions become, the more difficult it is to
    reconcile the time scale of the missions with the time scale of
    science.''

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_in_All_Directions
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_in_All_Directions>

I have not read Dyson's "Infiinite in all Directions" but I appreciate
the gist of it as reviewed:

    The lectures were given in two series, and this book is accordingly
    divided into two parts.
    Part 1 is about life as a scientific phenomenon, about our efforts
    to understand the nature of life and its place in the universe.
    Part 2 is about ethics and politics, about the local problems
    introduced by our species into the existence of life on this
    planet.^[1]
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_in_All_Directions#cite_note-Dyson2004-1>


On 7/1/21 10:43 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:
> Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
>
> Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history.
>
>> Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never recovered.
>
>
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