Can We Afford Science?

Many in the scientific community are still basking in the euphoria of the post election glow, and as much as I hate throwing them into the cold shower of reality, we have some important questions to address. The economy is heading south, joblessness is rising, people are losing their homes, and the government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the financial industry. How do we convince a public staring those cold facts in the face that funding science is important?

Part of the problem is that most people feel disconnected from science. They view science as an abstraction that’s carried out by egg-headed scientists in far away labs. This view has been fostered by politicians and pundits who have a vested interest in promoting anti-intellectualism. They have literally made careers of playing upon the public’s distrust of science and reluctance to spend their hard earned tax dollars on it.

The best way to combat this is to show people that science is concrete, that it has practical uses, that it not only affects their daily lives, but is essential to them. A perfect example of this is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. For those who are unfamiliar with it ( http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/ ), this is biggest experiment in history, requiring the largest machine ever built. It is a super collider that is 27 miles in circumference. It is so big that it straddles the border between France and Switzerland, and employs scientists from all over the world. This monumental project is designed to take protons and accelerate them to 99.999999% of the speed of light and smash them into similar protons moving in the opposite direction. The purpose is to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, in order to better understand the nature of matter that makes up the universe.

“Ho, hum. Why should we spend money on that?” This is the reaction of most people when you talk about something like this. Until you point out to them that, in order to allow all of the scientists working on this to communicate with each other, they had to invent a little thing called the World Wide Web. That ubiquitous part of our daily lives, that allows us to shop, keep in touch with our friends and family, research any topic at any time of the day or night, and even read blogs like this, was simply a spin off of the LHC.

While we’re at it, let’s mention that the personal computer that you are reading this on would have never existed without NASA’s manned space exploration program. It was the need to make computers small enough to fit into a spacecraft that led to computer chips that run everything from our cell phones to our cars, home appliances, iPods, BlackBerries, GPS and countless other things that make the modern world possible.

If we can point out things like this, then perhaps scientific funding will be viewed, less as dumping money down an academic black hole, and more as investing in the future.