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Comment by pxhb | Hacker News Reader

> Almost any material hard metrics you look at like life expectancy, economic growth or whatever you could consider a sign of technological advancement, even tens of billions in investment seem to produce only marginal improvements. We are not living in the golden age of science.

As a knit pick, these metrics are all derivatives of science output, and not science itself. For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics, but it is still a great achievement for experimental physics.

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Fantastic mondegreen ("knit pick", like picking at stitching with knitting needles, as opposed to "nit pick", which is picking off lice eggs to prevent future annoyance)

The eye of my mind saw a pick made knitted out of wool, which was even funnier.

"Mondegreen" is a word I've needed but didn't know existed. Thanks for sharing.

All intensive purposes. Get down to brass tax. There's a lot of these that I've uttered or heard and they last a long time because they sound kind of sensible.

“Knowledge is power. France is bacon” is a personal favorite.

https://reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea

> For example, detecting gravity waves does move the needle on any of these metrics

It will surely do. Those achievements are not possible without staggering advances in technology that can be later applied in different fields.

The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.

Don't forget the web: https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

> The same technology that we first developed for those expensive colliders is now used in MRI and others diagnosis tools that we have for granted today.

The question is, how much better would "MRI and other diagnosis tools" if that money had been spent actively trying to improve them instead of mostly going to detecting gravity waves? That's the question you need to answer to justify spending billions chasing physicists latest "fetish".

"Big physics" proponents always justify wasting (in my opinion) billions in colliders and observers by the unintended benefits that accidentally derive from them but they never mention how much more progress those other ares could make by directly using that money.Instead of spending $40B in the next big collider, what if we were spent developing CRISPR and related technologies? Or on a "moon-shot" for AGI? On developing new tools and techniques to study and understand large scale social systems?

P.S.: I have a BS/MS/PhD in Theoretical Physics

Exactly.

Arguments for "spinoff benefits" from research always seem really weak to me. If you want lighter, imperishable food, invest in food preservation, not a space program that might happen to produce freeze-dried food.

I'm not 100% convinced. I think it's hard to get really smart people to work on problems that aren't interesting. Asking a team to make food preservation 10% better won't invite the creativity and determination that asking them to preserve food to Mars would.

I think, when you take humans into account, you're better off setting interesting and challenging goals, with many useful byproducts.

That is the best argument for "spinoffs" that I've heard. Well done.

I still think it's pretty weak though; the inspiration benefit seems unlikely to overcome the lost efficiency, in general. And different people find different problems inspiring; some people can be inspired by practical problems (e.g. "how can we lighten the backpacks of trampers").

Do you (always?) realise that need before the product is made?

Are you suggesting these spin-offs are (always?) after-the-fact justifications using issues that were not pressing concerns?

The problem with attempting to justify space exploration with spin-off examples like food preservation is that it risks provoking a 'so what?' response. Piling on unimpressive claims does not strengthen one's argument, it dilutes it, and gives the opposition an easy target to dispute.

When Clarke came up with the idea of communications satellites, he, and others, thought he had come up with a before-the-fact justification for space travel, as he expected these relays would need regular maintenance, but another claimed-spinoff-but-not-really, semiconductor electronics, obviated the need.

Why is the general public wasting millions of dollars on an opioid epidemic? Why does shrekli's 710$ medicine still cost 700$ after he left and was charged?

There is plenty of wasted money in the pharma sector that can be spent and profited from in crispr technologies. I'm not sure why you're taking physics money for that.

The physics funding programs have already moved on from big budget tags in some spaces. ITER will probably be the last big white whale project in fusion. There are a bunch of smaller fusion projects being funded at smaller scales to prove their efforts before going big. The iterative tech model is bleeding over into science funding.

If you put a team to make a better MRI, you'll get the same MRI maybe a bit faster or smaller.

If you want the MRI 2.0, you start with something monstrously different, otherwordly, like gravitational wave detection. There you reach metrological precision, DSP, optics, waveguides, EM shielding, thermal noise compensation, and other incremental advancements that taken together gives you MRI 1.5, and then you can bring in those who make it work into a nice and shiny improved MRI.

The problem with moon-shots (eg. AGI) is that you don't know where to go. With physics at least you sort of do. Higher energy. More sensitivity. Better experiments.

Isn't the 'problem' (for the wider population) that physicists are motivated towards answering the big questions (that's a valid outlay for $billions IMO, just like, say how we spend billions on football/soccer). So effectively what we're doing is allowing that because we know there are positive repercussions that come along with such exploration.

(Also a BSc in TPhys (& maths), fwiw.)

I think the right way to think about science investment is the multi-armed bandit. There's a lot of uncertainty, but you also know that if you fund a portfolio with a good distribution, you'll have a chance of maximizing the total good science results that come out of it.

I've always been very skeptical of claims that heavy investment in the space sciences advacnced other technologies, more than if we had just invested that money directly in the other technology. I also see a lot of money wasted in space sciences running experiments on the ISS that aren't really that useful (like crystallography- sure, you can grow nice crystals in space and then bring them back down to earth, but for the money you spent on that, you could have funded 10 PIs, and also crystal structures aren't that useful for advancing science).

Interestingly, if you look at modern science funding, it does basically treat it as a multi-armed bandit and there is a portfolio of project funding that includes both large particle physics experiments and individual investigators.

I think his point is the science would be better served if it focused on solving problems for people, rather than exploring knowledge for the sake of it. But really I think that is the realm of engineering, and science is really just pursuing knowledge for the sake of it. It's impossible to know what will be useful - Richard Feynman thought it would be fun to analyze the flight characteristics of a flying plate. He later used the math he developed doing that to help him earn a Nobel prize.

https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html

Reading your 1st sentence made me think "But that's engineering, it's application. Basic science is getting knowledge just for the sake of it."

And you basically followed with it. Basic science is the foundation engineering builds on. I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment. Em waves were. Gigantomagnetoresistance was. The internet was an academic curiosity.

It think it's important to blow some of human work on the free thinkers. It moves the popluation forward. Any other comparable scientific and engineering progress I can think was fueled by war.

Imho allocating resources only for acute goals lead to local technological optima. Seemingly puporseless research helps to break out.

My favourite example is number theory, which was either hailed or ridiculed for millennia as being pure mathematics that can and will never be applied to real life problems.

Today number theory is the basis for several important fields of application, including computation theory, modern cryptography, and numerical calculation.

Yes, but the question is, did developing number theory hundreds of years in advance of its applications accelerate the development of, say, cryptography? Or would cryptographers have just worked out the number theory when they needed it? If it did accelerate the development of cryptography, how much acceleration did we get for that investment?

Also in modern times, especially, there is a big problem of discoverability. If the mathematical result you need for some application is buried in a thirty-year-old journal using unfamiliar terminology, what are the chances you'll find it and understand it when you need it? I venture to suggest that much of the time it's easier to re-derive the result than to find it.

That's a good point, but I think a strong counter-example would be anything we get from satellites. We went to space for political reasons, but let's just say it was for the sake of science because it sure didn't solve any immediate problems for mankind. But it did create the technology for satellites, which allow us to better predict the weather and gives us GPS tracking, and other things as well. But imagine you wanted to develop a global tracking system, would your first thought be to invent satellites if they did not already exist? So it definitely does matter sometimes, although which times is obviously open to interpretation.

I think that is a weak counter-example. The applications of rocketry and satellites were obvious by the end of WW2. In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke had already published an article explaining how useful it would be to have communication satellites in geostationary orbit, and it didn't take much imagination to suppose that a big enough rocket could put them there.

It's easy to think of it as a possibility, but the amount of effort to put a satellite into space is still extraordinary (space travel is still far from a commodity all these decades later). My point was they would not go through the trouble of first creating satellites as it would be considered too exotic of an idea. It would be like thinking of Uber 15 years ago before smartphones were ubiquitous, and deciding you first need to invent the smartphone rather than shelve the idea.

> Or would cryptographers have just worked out the number theory when they needed it?

Not a chance.

> I believe 1st semiconductors were a science experiment.

I'm pretty sure the transistor [1] was invented specifically to solve a real engineering problem.

[1] I'm taking your use of "semiconductor" to mean transistor because my understanding is semiconductors are a kind of material that was discovered, not invented.

Speaking of nitpicking, it's nitpicking - literally speaking, removing the eggs of the lice you've probably already removed from someone's hair. It's a fussy activity (of necessity), takes forever, and would probably seem quite an annoying thing to someone (likely a child) who thinks you've already solved their pressing problem and should maybe leave them alone now.

Speaking of nitpicking or the more practical nit combing, none is needed if a 0.9% suspension of Spinosad (1) is applied to a child’s dry hair and washed off after 10 minutes. You may happily and confidently send your kids back to school after this one treatment despite the horrified looks of parents and teachers ;-)

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3273925/

From link:

The average cost of an application of permethrin 1% cream is about $20; an application of spinosad costs $270 without insurance.

Ouch!

Or you can just let your kid have that fuschia mohawk she wants. The eggs will fall off the shaved part and the peroxide and glue will kill off the rest in the unshaved part.

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