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Comment by zeynel1 | Hacker News Reader

just a glance is enough at this table of contents of academic journal - classical and quantum gravity- http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/27/17 to wonder how much of this -research- is advancing knowledge and how much is --about advancing the career of the authors--

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It's a very good question, and hardly a trivial one. Quite a lot of science is nearly worthless, and only published to pad the author's cv. A couple of blog posts on the topic:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/24/all_those_wo...

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/25/what_to_do_w...

Lasers were thought to be a laboratory curiosity when they were invented. On the other hand, you have a ton of academics who are convinced that the "semantic web" is the next big thing.

Part of the problem with science is that it's an activity where it's very hard to have any useful metric. Even experts in the field have a tough time deciding whether a given research direction is going to be fruitful. They're often wrong.

So far the best thing we've figured out for science resembles the Underpants Gnomes' business plan:

1) Fund lots of science.

2) ????

3) Profit!

The ???? part is "pray that some of it is useful and that some of that gets into the hands of people who will use it."

1) Fund lots of science.

Why do we need this? By every metric I know of, governments spend orders of magnitude more on science than they did in the 1800s. Are we getting orders more "Profit!"?

You can't split atoms with a chisel, nor email the international space station with telegraph lines. The discoveries possible with 1800-vintage equipment are mostly already made, so now we have to spend orders of magnitude more to learn anything new. And I'd much rather we roll the dice again and keep looking, not just wait and see how civilization survives the decline of oil and fertilizer.

Could you clarify your metrics and sources?

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/53/41558958.pdf tells me that non-commercial (government or government-subsidized) R&D represents ~1% of GDP in 2006 for the US. I believe equivalent figures for the 1800s would be closer to 0% R&D inasmuch as there were no Departments of Energy, Health & Human Services, etc., but I'm willing to be proven wrong. Maybe the Gilded Age governments in the US actually spent 2% of GDP on R&D.

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