Turning our Backs on the Future
Rick Weiss has a nice article on the decline of basic science in the United States in todays Washington Post.
The people now in charge, though, don't see it that way. To them, science can be tolerated if they see a quick contribution to the bottom line, but they are more concerned with the threat it poses to their world view. This situation is hardly unprecedented or even unusual in world history. In 1100 AD or so, Arabic civilization was the most advanced and progressive in the Western world. Religious scholars recognized the threat and suppressed science and progress. A similar suppression was attempted in Europe a few hundred years later, but the fortunate political and religious fragmentation of Europe at the time allowed the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton to triumph. In the middle of the 15th Century, Chinese ships were the best in the world and Chinese explorers had explored the Coast of Africa and were close to being able to sail for the Americas. A purely political decision called the exploration ships back, and China sank into a decline from which it is just now starting to emerge.
Sean Carroll has a nice post on this subject predating Weiss's article at Preposterous Universe
But the U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research -- the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn't know exactly where it's going but so often leads to big payoffs. In discipline after discipline, the demand for specific products, profits or outcomes -- "deliverables," in the parlance of government -- has become the dominant force driving research agendas. Instead of being exploratory and expansive, science -- especially in the wake of 9/11 -- seems increasingly delimited and defensive.The last 50 or 60 yeats has been sort of a golden age for American Science, produced partly by the flood of scientists from Europe due to the Nazis, but mainly by relatively lavish government funding for science after World War II and during the cold war. We have benefitted immensely from that research - our preminent power in the world and our wealth both drive in large part from it.
The people now in charge, though, don't see it that way. To them, science can be tolerated if they see a quick contribution to the bottom line, but they are more concerned with the threat it poses to their world view. This situation is hardly unprecedented or even unusual in world history. In 1100 AD or so, Arabic civilization was the most advanced and progressive in the Western world. Religious scholars recognized the threat and suppressed science and progress. A similar suppression was attempted in Europe a few hundred years later, but the fortunate political and religious fragmentation of Europe at the time allowed the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton to triumph. In the middle of the 15th Century, Chinese ships were the best in the world and Chinese explorers had explored the Coast of Africa and were close to being able to sail for the Americas. A purely political decision called the exploration ships back, and China sank into a decline from which it is just now starting to emerge.
Sean Carroll has a nice post on this subject predating Weiss's article at Preposterous Universe
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