Burning off the useless eaters
Tim May
timcmay at got.net
Fri May 2 14:55:37 PDT 2003
On Friday, May 2, 2003, at 02:32 PM, Tim May wrote:
(quoting Thomas Shaddack)
>> Contemporary free markets (we'll leave aside the fact they aren't
>> really
>> free) are driven by short-term profits. Higher investments aimed to
>> distant future are rare and far between. Basic research suffers, like
>> virtually everything with no immediate profitable application.
>
> Nonsense. Basic research is being done by many people. Corporations
> have never been the best place for blue-sky, academic research. This
> is one reason the U.S. and Western Europe have thousands of excellent
> universities and colleges offering Ph.D. programs and all the things
> that go with them (professors doing research, grant money, tie-ins
> with corporations, etc.).
>
> "Research" is a very broad topic, covering many fields and many
> issues. Issues of basic physics vs. applied technology, issues of
> biological principles vs. new drugs and new tools, issues of
> fundamental mathematics vs. computer programming.
>
> I think research is doing very well. Some fields are "mined out" in
> terms of major new paradigms, at least in terms of the energies and
> scales we can now probe. Some are undergoing rapid change. Some are
> hotbeds of academic research, some are most closely related to
> corporation projects. All to be expected.
I want to add something to this, as the topic (and Thomas' views) are
both angering me and stimulating me to write about this.
Item: Research in astrophysics and cosmology is booming today. No
corporate interest in figuring out the role of dark matter, dark
energy, superstrings, anthropic reasons for the neutrino mass,
inflation, and a dozen other currently hot topics. Much of the work
came from the fruits of industrial development, just as much of the
astronomy work of the past 150 years, even longer, has come from
industrial methods and tools. In the 1930s, the ability to construct
very large Pyrex mirrors...I lived in the 1950s within a pleasant
Sunday drive to Mount Palomar, for a long time the very largest
telescope in the world.
The same ferment is also happening in several other fields. Physics
went through this ferment in the 1920s-60s, though things have tapered
off in the past couple of decades (with some conspicuous exceptions).
Item: In today's news is a report that two groups have sequenced the
SARS virus. Which brings up "sequencing." A single guy, a surfer and
LSD user at UC San Diego, invented polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as a
way of "amplifying" tiny samples into things which machines could
sequence. Hence was gene sequencing invented. Not a corporate lab, but
a guy thinking about things as he paddled his surfboard. Similar
examples abound.
Item: In crypto, Diffie and Hellman were at Stanford, Merkle was at
Berkeley, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman were at MIT. Again, no
corporate labs. Nobody either "stifling innovation" or "failing to
support basic research." Also in crypto, David Chaum was at UC Santa
Barbara working on his ideas, then at Berkeley (affiliated or living
there, doesn't much matter).
I reject the claim that corporations and capitalism are either stifling
innovation or that innovation is not happening because corporations
aren't doing "enough" basic research.
(There are some practical reasons why corporations are usually not
great places for very basic research. I could write a few pages on
this, but will not do so here.)
I think innovation is doing perfectly well, and I further think the
innovations which have come out of the corporate/capitalist/open
society/Western system have been a whole lot greater in all respects
than what have come out of socialist/closed society/Iron Curtain
systems.
Which makes claims that capitalism is not doing enough research even
more wrong-headed.
Thanks to Thomas for triggering this rant, though.
--Tim May
"The Constitution is a radical document...it is the job of the
government to rein in people's rights." --President William J. Clinton
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