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Comment by DenseComet | Hacker News Reader

This is why science should be led by the government, not for profit companies. Science is for the greater good of humanity, it should not be solely about making money.

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I love science (at least in the ideal form). That being said, if knowledge provides a real, tangible benefit to mankind, people should be willing to pay for it. If it doesn't, people shouldn't be forced to pay for it.

I agree that some valuable research would go undone if performed by companies because the time window to see a return on investment would be too long. Unfortunately, academia is a huge mess, and we really need a new approach to basic science.

What's your definition of basic science?

The requirement for Science to produce real, tangible benefits to mankind for it to get funded makes a lot of it unfeasible, because a good bit of it is useless on it's own, but is good to figure out because of potential uses in the future.

The real problem is we won't know if something is useful until after we get results.

Gravity is a perfect example - physics has a lot of open questions on gravity. What if someone closed one of them? It could mean nothing, just a slightly better understanding of why things fall - or it could be a major change that allows us to create "anti-gravity paint" making a self-supporting colony on Jupiter simple (image all the "land" you could own there - whatever "owning land" on gas planet means)

Come on, such a thing would allow for reasonable space travel even better than for just making colonies. It is essentially Mass Effect Element Zero - you could create gravity wells for things to "fall into", creating enormous accelerations of space ships while at the same time protecting the crew from the effects.

Potentially even a kind of faster than light travel.

As a side boon new kinds of materials can be created in extreme artificial gravity conditions some this maps to extreme and impossible to achieve otherwise pressures. Including just creating stars in a controlled environment making for immense energy availability. Instead of magnetic fusion containment you'd have gravitational fusion containment.

This is how powerful practically breaking gravity can be.

I just hand wave assumed a slightly different set of rules. With your set of rules (which is at least as likely as mine) you are correct. Since both of us are speculating we are both equally right. Of course it might be that better understanding of gravity proves that artificial gravity is impossible.

Gravity is not a hard thing to understand. If energy is released when two objects are gravitating towards each other, then something must release it. It narrows number of possible options. My current best guess is that we are inside gigantic object (about hundred of order of magnitudes larger than our Visible Universe, made of particles about few dozens order of magnitude smaller than Planck scale) with conditions similar to conditions in neutron star. So gravitation is just Casimir effect at scale.

The type of basic science I'm talking about here is stuff that is foundational for other science that can be applied. A good example would be esoteric math. Looking back, not all of it had immediate application when it was being worked on, but we wouldn't have things like transistors if people hadn't worked on it.

There definitely needs to be a cost sharing scheme in place in science to encourage basic research that benefits everyone. I'm doubtful that the current model is optimal though, and I think we should explore other options.

On one hand, I love that people can research things without worrying about generating a profit. However, when I read about someone who has been funded to spend years studying the sports history of central-asian mongols and I look how much I'm struggling, working in an underfunded public-sector school, I feel... well, jealous and hard-done-by.

Yeap, a lot of para-scientific departments and fields get founding under the umbrella of research and science but what they really do is either politics or almost completely useless studies. In countries where funding is a problem, it is a bit raging to see how much money got wasted this way. These studies have their place too, but their makers should at least have the decency not call what they do science.

The core problem persists in either model. If people don't think they should pay for science, they'll vote either with their wallet or for the politicians who promise to return (or spend elsewhere) their tax dollars. Add in the increasing level of politics in science and the idea of just giving some people a decent life regardless if they produce result or not becomes a very hard sell.

The root of the problem with either funding method goes back to people not valuing science that may bring no benefit for to them. What's the solution for fixing that? Especially when talking to someone who care barely make ends meet.

I think you need both, but an alternative albeit for-profit way of going big without government requirements attached is the patronage model, which funded Leonardo Di Vinci for example.

Several individuals are pumping a lot of money into moonshot projects, and of course Google X type incubators exists. But I'm excited for projects like Elon Musk sending those artists to the moon, because those are the type of unpredictable upsides that could never achieve government funding.

I’d doubt you’re suggesting that for profit companies should not be allowed to perform science?

If science is worth doing, and companies have money, then they’ll probably do a lot of science.

If you’re arguing that science should not only be left to private companies then I fully agree and think most would.

Politicians come and go and can't be trusted to understand or even appreciate science. Something that will not probably pay benefits before four years is a negative sum game for they.

We've seen a big shift over the last 75 years or so from most science being funded by corporate research to most science being funded by government agencies.

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