I read and listened today to David King, Chief Scientific advisor to the British government from 2000-2007 saying that there is no space in scientific funding for so called 'blue skies research'.
Blue skies research is essentially research for curiosity's sake, trying to gain greater understanding of some part of the nature of reality. As such, it generally has no immediate applications at its conception, although it is responsible for the theories that lie as the bedrock supporting applied science, engineering and economics.
One example of blue skies research is into discovering the very nature of physical interaction in the universe, be it on the grand scale of cosmology or the minute scale of particle physics. The Large Hadron Collider which was switched on yesterday at CERN is a good example of the blue sky. David King bemoaned the spending of 500m pounds on the LHC, saying
"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."
Coming from a leading scientist, this comes across as patently ridiculous and rather confusing. Ok, so I might be a little biased being a pure mathematician (how much more blue sky can you get?) and feeling as if we're getting very little funding already. This application driven point of view seems ridiculously closed minded and incredibly short sighted. Particle physics has so far produced such (presumably useless according to DK) devices as the transistor, the computer display, radiotherapy, x-rays... In fact, most of the major advances that characterise the 20th century are due in no small part to spin-offs of particle physics experiments.
Science in the UK seems hopelessly doomed when Chief scientific advisers can be so incredibly anti-science. Given this, it was incredibly gratifying to see David King (above right) berated by Brian Cox (above left), the poster boy of UK particle physics (and a Professor in the High Energy Physics department at Manchester) on Newsnight last night. He put forward the remark that on the one day in which fundamental scientific research is actually covered in the media, it was ridiculous for the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to be pouring cold water on the achievement.
If you're reading this Prof King (haha!), I suggest that you quit your job as chief scientific advisor to UBS and spend all of your time tackling climate change before suggesting that blue sky researchers should change their focus and jeopardise modern science in the process.
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2 comments:
I'm going to play devil's advocate for the hell of it. I think Prof King would probably justify being a researcher for UBS on the basis that they pay him, not the taxpayer, so he may not be 'giving anything back' or whatever, but he's not taking anything away either. I assume this is the reasoning behind his statement - that having taken funding from the state, researchers should give something useful to the state. Otherwise, why should the state give them money to answer questions nobody else understands? This is sort of where I was getting at when rambling about literary criticism - it might NOT be a load of rubbish (though it still might be actually), but why should public money be spent on it, if nobody except the literary critics can understand it? I'd be surprised, though, if nothing the LHC does ever turns out to be 'useful'. The theory of locally presentable categories, on the other hand...
Agreed sort of. Being a mathematician, it is pretty difficult to try and come up with any sort of coherent reason for coming up with new theorems and more importantly, why we should be paid to do this. One could put forward the usual argument of "Well someone might use it in an hundred years..." but I agree, it doesn't seem to hold much water when measured against the human suffering caused by disease, famine...
I still think Prof King is being slightly hypocritical though. It was my general impression that he wasn't particularly concerned about the funding coming from the government. He seemed to be making the slightly more general point that perhaps all people drawn to science should steer themselves towards subjects with abundant applications which would obviously affect mankind in the short term. After all, many universities have grants given by wealthy benefactors for professorships and so on. I suspect he thinks that people holding these positions too should divert their interest toward sustainable energy etc. Given this, it seems then that my jab about his job at UBS is still relevant. I agree though that there is some ambiguity as to whether he restricts his attention to government funded research.
Part of me (the cynical part, which is not insignificant) also thinks that he wanted to get a little bit of publicity for himself and his climate change lobbying by making a controversial claim about a widely publicised experiment to gain a little bit of media interest. We'll never know. Unless he reads this. And feels righteously indignant enough to reply.
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