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Comment by urthor | Hacker News Reader

I reference Alan Kay, who's spent 50+ years complaining Xerox Parc only happened when they wrote a GIGANTIC cheque. Then forgot about them.

Good science basically requires atrocious amounts of money, to quite a small number of people.

None of the scrabbling for $200,000 grants for a researcher, 4 grad students, and some beakers.

Try 5 million 1970s dollars for a couple of dozen of the best and brightest.

There's no doubt at all. The physical sciences have always been, and always will be, an enabler of income inequality.

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So you're saying, for example, that after plowing how many billions into fusion research, when they finally crack it and can produce continents-worth of power from pennies worth of sea water, they won't actually start giving electricity away for free? Even though we've all collectively 'invested' in it through our taxes for decades?

Isaac Newton spent more time turning lead into gold than mathematics. Time & money doesn't make dumb ideas good ones.

Bread needs water, flour, AND yeast to rise. Ain't gonna do much without all three.

And of course Sir Isaac found time to fit alchemy and mathematics in between the daily activities of subsistence farming. Oh wait ..

Was he funded by an external agency for the purpose of turning lead into gold, or was it only his own interest/initiative?

Interestingly, Newton was "Master of the Mint" at the Royal Mint, which supplies all the nation's coinage.

> Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Royal_Mint

If he had been successful in turning lead into gold, he might have made his employer obsolete.

Flatbread is pretty tasty I hear.

It’s also the worst investment ever - if the same money was invested in solar farms and research, we could have actual world changing energy sources right now.

More money doesn't make the wind blow more often. And there's only.so much capital that can be spent on material science before you hit a limit on the rate of improvement per unit time

An ironic comment, since fusion is the field depending on radical materials advances.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/research.seas.ucla.edu/dist/d/... slide 13

It doesn't work like a game of Civilization. Allocating resources to a research problem means you increase the social and material rewards for a certain type of person to work on a certain type of project. There is no guarantee of success or one to one allocation of resources. It's also not a zero-sum game when the money to one source of energy took away from another.

Also unlike a video game, the tech-tree dependencies are not obvious. We don't know in advance whether a tech will be a productive avenue of R&D, or if it depends on other unrelated advances in theory, material science, or computer modeling, or was actually completely unfeasible in the first place. I find wind power [1] as a case study representative, and we see similar stories for e.g. fusion, cancer research, AI

[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-did-we-wait-s...

Unfortunately, nuclear fusion is physics research.

The unsaid part underlying physics research is "if you fund us, we promise to whip you up an atom bomb in 5 minutes if the Russians invade."

Physics research involves precisely zero cost effectiveness justifications.

99.9% is the government of the day thinking "if we do this,

> There's no doubt at all. The physical sciences have always been, and always will be, an enabler of income inequality.

That claim is the opposite direction of the rest of your comment, which shows income inequality being an enabler of science research.

It's not a directed graph edge.

It's a bidirectional graph edge.

Goes both ways.

I think most of the low hanging fruit like that has been picked unfortunately. Most impactful science these days requires coordinated effort of large teams. I’m sure there are a few exceptions, but I doubt we will get anything like xerox parc again any time soon. But I agree that high performers should be given more resources!

I somewhat disagree. It's true that many or maybe even most science requires large sums of money, but might there be some forms that we've yet to discover that could produce useful output with much more economic efficiency?

For example: what about a new form of think tank, one where people other than the usual suspects (ie: "the" "best" "and" "brightest") like people from "the general public" (perhaps even a few of the "uneducated", and maybe even a few picks from the "freaks and weirdos" category to shake things up for a change) are hired to simply think of new ideas?

Alan Kay on how to fund research groups to solve big challenges[1]

"When “What Will It Take?” Seems Beyond Possible, We Need To Study How Immense Challenges Have Been Successfully Dealt With In The Past"

[1]http://www.vpri.org/pdf/Kay_How.pdf

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