APS President Robert Byer and ACS President Bassam Z. Shakhashiri collaborated on an op-ed that appears today on The Hill newspaper’s Congress blog. The piece makes a compelling argument against federal regulations requiring the reduction of travel and meeting expenses by 30 percent in fiscal year 2013. Pending congressional legislation would go even further with new requirements.
Where do President Obama and Mitt Romney stand on critical science policy issues?
Science Debate 2012, a grassroots initiative spearheaded by scientists, engineers and concerned citizens, recently asked the presidential candidates 14 questions covering topics that include innovation and the economy, research and the future and education and energy.
Neil Armstrong, a man who captured the collective imagination of the world with a few short words in a video clip from hundreds of thousands of miles away, passed away last Saturday at the age of 82.
Armstrong was an American hero. As a public figure, he inspired a new generation of scientists. As an explorer, he was the first to set foot on a landscape where no one had ever been before. As a symbolic figure, he, along with fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, represented the crowning achievement of federally funded science in the first half of the 20th century.
Armstrong was humble in his role. He understood that that such an accomplishment was not his alone, but rather built out of the efforts of thousands of people working together. His passing, and how he regarded his life’s accomplishments, reminds us that a collective involvement and investment in science can lead to imagination-bending moments.
I believe we can best honor his legacy by continuing to embrace the tradition that made him the symbol of American exceptionalism. In short, we need to metaphorically shoot for the moon. And while we still do shoot for the moon in many ways, the Higgs Boson being one example, that spirit has waned in recent decades. The federal scientific investment has continued to decline as a percent of gross domestic product since the early 1970s. U.S. projects such as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment are in need of major financial support. NASA is staring down budget cuts and increased criticisms of big science projects.
Without a robust federal investment in science where will we find the 21st century’s “Neil Armstrong”? Just as Armstrong needed the support of thousands to eventually stand on the lunar surface, so too will the great figures of the 21st century. And it begins with the willingness to invest now in scientific fantasies.
The American Physical Society and scientists everywhere will forever remember the impact Neil Armstrong has had not just on the scientific enterprise, but also on the hearts and minds of the entire world. Let’s honor Armstrong’s legacy by making science a priority.
Want to know Rep. Paul Ryan’s views on science and government?
According to ScienceInsider, an online news site of breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy, Ryan has “expressed strong support of government funding of basic science, but critics argue that a 10-year roadmap he authored — if enacted — would substantially slow future spending on fundamental studies. Additionally, “he does not favor federal spending on applied research programs, such as ARPA-E, which he calls picking winners and losers, placing him at odds with Mitt Romney, who has endorsed ARPA-E in the past.””
APS student members are seeking signatures on a letter to Congress about the possible negative effects of sequestration, the across the board budget cuts scheduled to occur on Jan. 2nd 2013. The letter accompanies a webinar recently hosted by APS on student science advocacy.
During the webinar, student panelists John Mergo and Megan Comins discussed how they became involved in advocacy and shared their success stories.
Visiting their representatives, building relationships with Congressional staffers, writing op-eds, and serving in leadership roles have all resulted in positive feedback for Mergo and Comins.
Although they are examples of students who above and beyond the call of duty, sometimes all it takes is getting in touch with your representative through a letter to let your voice be heard. And that is exactly what students did at the end of the webinar.
Mergo and Comins joined together in signing on to a letter from students asking Congress to find a bipartisan path forward avoiding the damaging impact of sequestrations.
The letter discusses concerns students have regarding the effect sequestrations will have on future job prospects and research opportunities, amongst other negative effects. It is not just physics students involved in this letter. Students across scientific and engineering disciplines are being contacted by their professional societies and signing on.
With all the upcoming fiscal challenges, the science community needs to make sure its voice is heard, and the student voice is a highly effective one. Share this letter with students you know and encourage them to sign on with their peers, letting Congress know that allowing sequestrations to occur would be a disservice to the leaders, innovators, and scientists of tomorrow.
Supporting scientific research and development will keep the nation globally competitive, according to U.S. Rep. Ron Kind who recently authored an op-ed in Capitol Hill Quarterly, a newsletter produced by the American Physical Society. In the piece, Kind writes, “To maintain our competitive edge, America must provide the right environment to promote innovation, strengthen entrepreneurship and foster basic scientific research to ensure America remains the most innovative, creative country in the world.”
By Jodi Lieberman
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on July 22nd, L. Gordon Crovitz attempted to redress what he believed to be a common “urban legend”: the government invented the Internet. Unfortunately, he muddied the facts to fit his argument and, in the process, propagated the notion that the federal government should get out of the basic science business. Luckily, Scientific American, Ars Technica, and other technologists assailed Crovitz’ s erroneous history and set the record straight.
On the Scientific American blog, Michael Moyer noted that “… Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology. Most egregiously, Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another—with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network.”
Yes, Virginia, there is an Internet. But, its critical bits and pieces, particularly the TCP/IP communications protocol and the World Wide Web, were invented by scientists (Vincent Cerf, Robert Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee) using government funding.
The TCP/IP protocol allowed Cerf and Kahn to connect four computer network nodes at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif.; and the University of Utah for the first time. This momentous occasion, which happened 43 years ago—on December 5, 1969—doubled the size of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) ARPANET. On that day, the fundamental communications protocol gave rise to the Internet as we know it today.
Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web while working as a software consultant at the CERN particle physics lab in Geneva. His goal was to enable scientists working around the world to exchange data with one another regardless of the type of computer or documents they were using.
Those are the facts according to anyone who knows technology history.
But Crovitz attempts to prove otherwise.
In an effort to remove government from the equation, he proposed that Xerox PARC invented the Internet. He then used a history of Xerox written by Michael Hiltzik to prove his point.
The problem? He gets it completely wrong. And Hiltzik calls out Crovitz for distorting the facts.
“[And] while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning, to support his case, it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. ”
In fact, Hiltzik points out that the private sector wanted absolutely nothing to do with what would become the Internet revolution.
“Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America’s communications network, AT&T, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet.”
So, why would Crovitz go to such lengths to disprove the fact that government funding provided the seed corn for one of the modern era’s most important innovations?
It isn’t totally clear.
But the upshot of Crovitz’s seriously flawed WSJ piece is that it gives credence to the belief that government has not and should not be involved in scientific research and innovation. However, Crovitz’s critics reinforce the fact that, without the visionary, far-reaching and risky research that the federal government funded, the Internet and the World Wide Web would not have been created.
And what about that other urban legend — the one which alleges that Al Gore invented the Internet? He didn’t do it, and he never made such a claim. But, he can claim that he gave the Internet a significant legislative boost.
The “High Performance Computing Act,” which became known as the “Gore Bill,” was enacted into law in 1991. The bill helped accelerate the infrastructure known as the “Information Superhighway” that enabled the Internet as well as the invention of the Mosaic web browser and the creation of a high-speed fiber optic computer network.
The guy who pinned the moniker of Internet inventor on Gore? Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Check out this thought-provoking op-ed titled Science Needs Champions by APS Member Kevin Pitts, a physics professor at the University of Illinois.
Citing the recent announcement of the Higgs Boson, the piece points out how the discovery is a “symptom of the weakening scientific research effort in the United States.”
To overcome the problem, Pitts writes that Congress needs more science champions — people who are willing to tell their colleagues about the great innovations stemming from scientific research, including the iPad and the Internet, and how science plays a crucial role in strengthening the nation’s economy.
The scientific community is abuzz with the latest news out of CERN: nearly 50 years after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs theorized its existence, evidence of the Higgs boson has been found. For the global physics community, this is tantamount to coming face to face with a mermaid. But what about the rest of us? The layperson, the non-physicist? Folks in middle America, who continue to struggle to put food on the table every day? Why should THEY care?
Media reports during the last 24 hours have barely tackled that question. That means the average non-physicist likely shrugged and went on his or her way pounding the pavement for a job, probably bemoaning the massive amount of money spent to find the elusive little bugger.
On the day of the announcement, the Washington Post ran an Associated Press piece on the particle. It went through the standard information – who, what, when, where and why.
But buried in the piece was a nugget of information shedding light on why the non-physicist should care:
“Were there any practical results from scientists’ hunt for the Higgs boson? Not directly. But the massive scientific effort that led up to the discovery paid off in other ways, one of which was the creation of the World Wide Web…. The vast computing power needed to crunch all of the data produced by the atom smasher has also boosted the development of distributed — or cloud — computing, which is now making its way into mainstream services. Advances in solar energy capture, medical imaging and proton therapy — used in the fight against cancer — have also resulted from the work of particle physicists at CERN and elsewhere.”
It is unfortunate that more media outlets didn’t highlight the “real world” impact of the work leading up to Higgs announcement . The public’s lack of understanding affects whether science projects get funded in the U.S.
On Ezra Klein’s blog at the Washington Post, Brad Plummer explains:
“The Higgs could have been discovered about a decade earlier — and in Texas rather than Switzerland. Back in the 1980s, American physicists were developing a particle accelerator three times as powerful as Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. But Congress eventually cut off funds and the project collapsed.”
Plummer quotes Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate and physicist involved in the 1980s era Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) project:
“In the early 1980s, the U.S. began plans for the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, which would accelerate protons to 20 TeV, three times the maximum energy that will be available at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. After a decade of work, the design was completed, a site was selected in Texas, land bought, and construction begun on a tunnel and on magnets to steer the protons.
Then in 1992, the House of Representatives canceled funding for the SSC. Funding was restored by a House–Senate conference committee, but the next year the same happened again, and this time the House would not go along with the recommendation of the conference committee. After the expenditure of almost 2 billion dollars and thousands of man-years, the SSC was dead.”
Why is Congress hesitant to fund big science projects?
The problem, revealed by recent polling funded by APS and several other organizations, is the lack of public understanding for why big science projects are important to our lives. If more attention was given to spreading information about the practical impacts of these large projects, the tide could turn. The voting public could make more informed decisions about how their tax dollars should be spent.
The AP story highlighted a key benefit of the search for the Higgs boson; that that the World Wide Web was invented not by Steve Jobs or Al Gore, but by physicists doing research in pursuit of the Higgs to make it easier to exchange information with one another. So, the next time you surf the web, thank a physicist.
An op-ed in today’s San Jose Mercury News states how APS attempts to balance the necessity of scientific peer review with the public’s right to access the results of federally funded research.
