Physics worth more to EU economy than retail and financial services, says study

https://sciencebusiness.net/physics-worth-more-eu-economy-retail-and-financial-services-says-study

by sbdmmg • 7 years ago

162 52 7 years ago

sbdmmg• 7 years ago

The conclusion of this study is not clear at all to me. From reading their executive summary, the CEBR researchers seem to take the global value added (GVA) of any physics-based industry, and consider it as a something like a contribution of physics to the society. That sounds like a gross overestimation to me.

As an example, they consider "Extraction of crude petroleum" as a physics-based industry. Naively I would consider that industry at least 33% physics, 33% chemistry, and 33% engineering. Aren't they largely overestimating their conclusion by neglecting chemistry and egineering?

Disclaimer: I am a former physicist. I really think that science funding is vital to Europe, that this kind of studies should help supporting the field... I would just like to better understand how the EPS and CEBR got to such a clickbait title. I have the impression that this kind of article could actually undermine the credibility of all the contributions that Physics research is actually bringing to society at large.

marcusverus3• 7 years ago

They're correct in that the production of crude is not possible without the physics. It is a necessary input, ergo physics unlocks that economic activity.

It sounds like your concern is that all three fields of Physics, Engineering, and Chemistry could claim this output, which would be odd, because if every field did this, their combined 'value added' would be many times the total GDP, since their contributions overlap, like you mentioned. That doesn't matter, because we're not concerned about measuring the GDP with this method (if we were, we would have to divide credit like you mentioned) just the objective contribution of a single field.

LudwigNagasena• 7 years ago

By that logic retail and financial services could claim the same output. All of these physicists and companies have to use them to survive in the modern world.

antoineMoPa• 7 years ago

Gravity keeps bank on the ground, thus physics funding is essential to the finance world. Imagine all banks floating away.

wenc• 7 years ago

I would argue that physicists themselves do not unlock this specific economic activity as they are rarely directly involved in crude extraction. As a field, it is too far removed. It would be like saying mathematicians are instrumental to crude extraction. Sure, they provide the scientific/theoretical basis for that work, but the actual execution is performed by engineers and various other applied experts.

Unlike what most people think, engineering is only partly based on physical/mathematical models. In fact, much of engineering is based on heuristics and empirical knowledge/know-how, and some of this knowledge isn't quantitative and it's not in the province of most physicists.

The difference between physics and engineering is actually quite vast.

I think the economic activity referred to in the article is around large-scale physics activities by organizations like CERN.

walterstucco6662• 7 years ago

Ancient populations were digging holes in the ground before physics was invented.

Matticus_Rex• 7 years ago

Yeah, you've nailed it. If a spark plug manufacturer claimed that spark plugs added [insert amount] of value to the economy and claimed the entire amount of value cars add to the economy, everyone could and should call BS on that, despite the fact that without a spark plug, the car doesn't run. It's simply bad accounting.

toast0• 7 years ago

Splitting hairs, but diesel cars are common in Europe and don't have spark plugs.

airstrike6• 7 years ago

33% physics, 33% chemistry, and 33% engineering

How about financing investments, accounting, sales, supply-chain logistics and managing the business?

wott• 7 years ago

They obviously make up the remaining 1%.

perl4ever• 7 years ago

What about human resources and project coordination?!

madaxe_again2• 7 years ago

You can have all those things - but without a steam engine your mine is staying full of water, and your industrial revolution isn’t happening.

Don’t know why you need supply chain logistics for a subsistence farm, because that’s the best you’ll get without physics.

Iv• 7 years ago

I work in tech and any company with a website calls itself a tech company.

Saying you are a physics company as soon as you use advanced materials does not seem that far-fetched from where I stand.

And the criterion of "these companies competitive advantage depend partly on recent physics research" is a pretty good one that may indeed include drilling companies and geological exploration.

airstrike6• 7 years ago

Any company with a website calls themselves tech because there is a value in doing so, not because they objectively believe that to be true.

There's no value in calling a company a "physics company" because that means nothing outside of this very specific conversation we're having

sriku• 7 years ago

Maybe measuring the contribution of the economy to physicists would give a better indication? .. since physics education and it's application to employment is easily measured and accounted compared to the, say, the hundreds of trillions in value added by Sir Isaac Newton.

bryanrasmussen• 7 years ago

Some of that stuff the retail industry is selling must have involved physics at one point.

pergadad• 7 years ago

Not an unusual lobby study. Then they turn around and tell everyone to teach more physics in school and invest in the field/studies. I've seen similar ones for very different professions with similar outcomes. A but unusual to see it for a field of study on its own though, I guess they have a strong lobby somewhere.

fungicide• 7 years ago

No kidding. CERN takes in public money which it turns into research. It then gifts that research to businesses (frequently owned privately by CERN employees) who then sell products which generate billions in profits. Following the money at CERN is a very complex task, but to the best of my knowledge none of those profits go back to CERN. The gifting of patents seemed like a good thing at the time, but now I think if CERN had a different model, where they kept a small percentage stake in the patents, they would have more than enough cash now to fund themselves and build the next collider, without all this daft lobbying and begging for public money.

abdullahkhalids• 7 years ago

This has indeed been spun in a way that it should not have been. But the way I see it is that out of the 700 possible sectors of industries in the EU, there are 72 "where the use of physics – in terms of technologies and expertise – is critical to their existence." [1]

These 72 sectors have a revenue of 4.40 million euros. This means that for example, if you ban all physics education tomorrow, all this revenue will drastically fall because they critically depend on physicists. Note that this is about ensuring that physicists of today are trained to continue working in this industry. And not what some physicists might have done in the past.

[1] https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.eps.org/resource/resmgr/policy/eps...

esotericn• 7 years ago

As a physics graduate I would have considered this self evident. Of course we pretty much single handedly run the economy. Along with our sidekicks [0] in the other hard sciences we invented it.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/435

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H8crilA• 7 years ago

This is probably a PR campaign by CERN, though. They're going through a rough patch after discovering little and needing new money for new experiments.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

perspective1• 7 years ago

The idea that the (whole economy) = (physics + retail + financials + other stuff) seems like somebody made a type error. You can't just add a research field to industries. I guess you could draw out 2 separate pies: 1 of GDP by industry and 1 by "field" but you're still comparing apples to oranges.

droithomme• 7 years ago

So they spent an absolute fortune on things which might be cool but really contributed nothing to the economy except construction and employment. And the argument is that because they wasted such a huge amount on these vapid endeavors, an incredible proportion of the entire economy, that therefore they should continue because it is "contributing" to the economy by virtue of its spending.

Give Universal Basic Income to everyone. That will spend more and then we can say with the same reasoning that UBI is worth more to the economy than retail and financial services.

lazyjones• 7 years ago

The kind of sophistry nonsense that passes as a scientific study these days is amazing.

Agriculture is worth much more than physics, since it feeds physicists all by itself. You could come up with many such dependencies to create chains of "worth more" relations, all utterly pointless. If the idea was to get more funding for physicists, it's unconvincing.

imtringued2• 7 years ago

Modern agriculture would be impossible without artificial fertilizer.

dTal• 7 years ago

Your example with agriculture doesn't really support your argument that dependency chain analysis is 'utterly pointless'. Agriculture is more important than physics; we would never prioritize physics research over food. So this example seems like a success for this analytical method.

hanniabu• 7 years ago

They should pay like it is

mjfl• 7 years ago

“All businesses require movement and the existence of stuff to make a profit and thus depend on physics. Please please please fund our new particle accelerator”

floki999• 7 years ago

I don’t dispute the significance of physics to industry and economics, but basic physics innovation would not be commercialized without the participation of a host of non-physicists.

hogFeast• 7 years ago

Scientist discovers that he is very important and valuable. Much more valuable than all those idiots who didn't go to university...or those people who did go to university but earn more than scientist despite being way way more stupid then scientist.

ClumsyPilot2• 7 years ago

Our society does not value scientists, you can't become a billionaire by doing research.

Einstein, Steven Hawkins, and Isaac Newton went down in history, but their net worth is nothing compared to fast-food chains. Does that means KFC created more value for society?

skribbj• 7 years ago

I'm hopefully a future physicist and the first to defend its importance but this kind of argument seems quite bad faith to me.

"Physics-based industries are those that rely heavily on expertise in physics. These include oil and gas extraction, nuclear fuel processing, and various forms of manufacturing like fibre optics, lighting equipment, office machinery, cars, ships and armaments."

Oil extraction, gas, and ships. Really? Sure, I get it, these areas wouldn't be possible without prior physics research, and present physicists will create new economic opportunities in the future; but blindly inhereting these fields' economic signifiance to physics seems incorrect. In other news, mathematics worth more than 80% of EU economy - these industries include finance, business, engineering, computing, and entertainment.

madaxe_again2• 7 years ago

You say that, but an awful lot of people doing maths in industry are physicists - mathematicians are far more likely to stay in academia. One of my first jobs was writing trading algorithms in the early 2000s - I was a physics student, most of the dev team were physicists or chemists. We got a mathematician in to consult on some gnarly cluster analysis - but after a month he presented us a white paper that was very, very pretty, and described our problem mathematically very succinctly - but totally unusable as it wasn’t so much a solution as a beautifully defined problem.

walterstucco6662• 7 years ago

But the point is you are not doing physics, you are at best tweaking some pre existing model.

I did it in the past while consulting for a major bank, I studied CS, not physics, and I haven't seen any applied physics in banks.

They hire young people studying physics because they are not scared of working "with numbers", but when you past 40 you're not scared of anything anymore and you'll find there a majority of people with a degree in economy, once you grasped the basics, you can do the job.

While the physics student hopes to be a real physicist someday in the future and stop working on trading models as soon as somethings better comes up.

PeterStuer• 7 years ago

"Physics-based industries, it says, include electrical, civil and mechanical engineering, as well as computing and other industries reliant on physics research."

This model feels overly broad. For instance I'd agree developing a new process for microprocessor production is physics centric, but writing sofware is not and both are part of 'computing'.

orbifold• 7 years ago

Which is why of course physics departments pay you ~50% to do a PhD, whereas in Computer Science they pay 100% because otherwise no one will apply.

Physics worth more to EU economy than retail and financial services, says study

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