Europe Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Physics

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157514

by nickb • 18 years ago

3 2 18 years ago

giardini• 18 years ago

Should be retitled "Europe Pulls Way Ahead of U.S. in Expenditures on Particle Physics". Or "The Albatross is Passed to Europe".

I wish Europe all possible success in nailing down the thirteenth significant digit of the electron's Lande g-factor. May string theorists ("B Ship") flock to Europe, abandoning the U.S. in droves, so that those few remaining physicists can get some useful work done with their ever-dwindling government grants.

String-theory humour at http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/01/06/string-wars-hit-the-msm...

william-newman• 18 years ago

I am not as sure as giardini that the money is ill-spent --- poking around in a new regime is an interesting gamble, not necessarily an albatross. But the article does seem unusually asinine. "Leadership in the branch of science that delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years?" Physics, broadly defined, has delivered major technologies, yes. (Just about every major technology! Don't be distracted by minor technologies like antibiotics, restriction enzymes, pesticides, fertilizers, plastics, etc.) But once you define physics so broadly that it includes transistors and lasers and satellites, the US is still doing fairly well under that definition. Massive spending in the subfield of high-energy physics doesn't give you leadership in the entire broad field of physics, and there's no particular reason to expect major technologies will come primarily from from the high energy subfield in the future. Granting for the sake of argument the silly apparent assumption that outspending is outdoing, CERN still doesn't deliver leadership in subfields like condensed matter physics that may still have a few technologies left in them.

Europe Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Physics

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