They’re starting to write grants to start getting funding to start actually building the thing in 2038. For scale, paying for all this in one year would equal the yearly budget of the US state of Missouri, or wipe out over half of Harvard’s endowment… or be about 25% of Jeff Bezos’s net worth. Apple could buy this right now out of pocket for less than 10% of what they currently have in the bank.
I generally dispute all claims of the sort ‘we should not fund A because the money would be better spent on B’ on the grounds that it is usually possible to do both. The reason we haven’t solved poverty, climate change or eradicable infections is because we simply don’t give those any priority, not because we don’t have the money, and certainly not because of the space program or the LHC.
Having said that, I am not suggesting that everything should be funded and nothing is a waste of money, and I do think that discussion is an important one to have with regard to the new collider. I am leaning towards going ahead with it personally but I am far from an expert.
A more pertinent waste of money in my opinion is the majority of military expenditure, and also inefficiencies and corruption in the financial markets.
Except that what gets (emergency) funding is very often dirty industries. We don’t need to research climate change as much as we need to put into action what has already been learnt about it (*). Is this thing “expensive”? Quite probably. Is it more expensive than this year’s relief packages for oil-based companies? Nope.
(*) actually we might need to do more research on the topic in the future but that’s because we still haven’t put into action anything we’ve learnt about it.
PS: don’t forget that social change brings more climate change improvements than anything else because the poorest in developing countries don’t need to burn down forests in order to be able to eat.
A few years ago I was talking to a professor at UT Austin. He pointed out that the Superconducting Supercollider, before it had been cancelled, had built two of the enormous superconducting electromagnets that were meant to deflect particles around the ring. Each one of these cost the US government more than the total amount of US government funding for computer science ever. Physics is important but it receives an insanely disproportionate amount of research funding.
That’s not really surprising though, IMHO. Advances in computer science often yield profitable work very quickly, so there’s an incentive for private industry to pick up funding soon after the government has gotten something off the ground. Physics, especially blue-sky physics research, often takes decades to yield “profitable” science that can be profitably funded by the private sector…if ever.
The government should fund things that are important but not profitable. The government’s job isn’t to make money, but to promote the general welfare (and, IMNSHO, knowing the ultimate nature of reality is important to the general welfare…).
This wasn’t always the case, but then physics research became necessary for making nuclear weapons and the rockets to deliver them. Were it not for that then physics would probably get about as much research funding as any other science.
Part of this is just how insanely expensive it is to do experimental work. The laser I use in my lab cost ~$50k to build from scratch. Buying a turnkey version, like a national lab would, costs ~$500k. Some groups that do my kind of research use fast CCD cameras, which cost tens of thousands of dollars. You may also need a fast oscilloscope, which can run $30k (I’ve seen $100k-$200k ones, but have never needed one). I do biophysics research, so I’m not even doing something incredibly high tech apart from the laser I use.
For theoretical physics you really just need to pay salaries and for time on a cluster. I would guess that computer science research is similar.
It’s also expensive to do some bits of computer science research. If you’re doing computer architecture research, taping out a chip is a good $30m, minimum. Research councils don’t fund anything like this, so only a couple of departments in the world ever do it. Even doing systems research, to do it well you need to employ a handful of research software engineers, but grant funding doesn’t let you do this at anything close to an industry-competitive salary.
As a result of this under funding, blue-skies computer science research in a number of core areas is done almost entirely by a handful of industrial research labs.
For the CHERI project, the total cost of the research so far is over $20m and we haven’t even taped out a chip. By the time we get to the end of the Digital Security by Design programme, the total spending between government and industrial funding will be over $300m. That is incredibly rare for a computer science research programme, there are hundreds of ideas that deserve the same level of investment that no one is funding and industrial research is not touching because it wouldn’t lead to a competitive advantage.
They’re starting to write grants to start getting funding to start actually building the thing in 2038. For scale, paying for all this in one year would equal the yearly budget of the US state of Missouri, or wipe out over half of Harvard’s endowment… or be about 25% of Jeff Bezos’s net worth. Apple could buy this right now out of pocket for less than 10% of what they currently have in the bank.
[Comment from banned user removed]
I generally dispute all claims of the sort ‘we should not fund A because the money would be better spent on B’ on the grounds that it is usually possible to do both. The reason we haven’t solved poverty, climate change or eradicable infections is because we simply don’t give those any priority, not because we don’t have the money, and certainly not because of the space program or the LHC.
Having said that, I am not suggesting that everything should be funded and nothing is a waste of money, and I do think that discussion is an important one to have with regard to the new collider. I am leaning towards going ahead with it personally but I am far from an expert.
A more pertinent waste of money in my opinion is the majority of military expenditure, and also inefficiencies and corruption in the financial markets.
Except that what gets (emergency) funding is very often dirty industries. We don’t need to research climate change as much as we need to put into action what has already been learnt about it (*). Is this thing “expensive”? Quite probably. Is it more expensive than this year’s relief packages for oil-based companies? Nope.
(*) actually we might need to do more research on the topic in the future but that’s because we still haven’t put into action anything we’ve learnt about it.
PS: don’t forget that social change brings more climate change improvements than anything else because the poorest in developing countries don’t need to burn down forests in order to be able to eat.
A few years ago I was talking to a professor at UT Austin. He pointed out that the Superconducting Supercollider, before it had been cancelled, had built two of the enormous superconducting electromagnets that were meant to deflect particles around the ring. Each one of these cost the US government more than the total amount of US government funding for computer science ever. Physics is important but it receives an insanely disproportionate amount of research funding.
That’s not really surprising though, IMHO. Advances in computer science often yield profitable work very quickly, so there’s an incentive for private industry to pick up funding soon after the government has gotten something off the ground. Physics, especially blue-sky physics research, often takes decades to yield “profitable” science that can be profitably funded by the private sector…if ever.
The government should fund things that are important but not profitable. The government’s job isn’t to make money, but to promote the general welfare (and, IMNSHO, knowing the ultimate nature of reality is important to the general welfare…).
This wasn’t always the case, but then physics research became necessary for making nuclear weapons and the rockets to deliver them. Were it not for that then physics would probably get about as much research funding as any other science.
I agree - I believe pure and applied physics was in the right place at the right time to get all the funding it needed during the Cold War.
“Well sir, I hear the Russians are working on this project too… it would be a shame if they finished it first.”
Part of this is just how insanely expensive it is to do experimental work. The laser I use in my lab cost ~$50k to build from scratch. Buying a turnkey version, like a national lab would, costs ~$500k. Some groups that do my kind of research use fast CCD cameras, which cost tens of thousands of dollars. You may also need a fast oscilloscope, which can run $30k (I’ve seen $100k-$200k ones, but have never needed one). I do biophysics research, so I’m not even doing something incredibly high tech apart from the laser I use.
For theoretical physics you really just need to pay salaries and for time on a cluster. I would guess that computer science research is similar.
It’s also expensive to do some bits of computer science research. If you’re doing computer architecture research, taping out a chip is a good $30m, minimum. Research councils don’t fund anything like this, so only a couple of departments in the world ever do it. Even doing systems research, to do it well you need to employ a handful of research software engineers, but grant funding doesn’t let you do this at anything close to an industry-competitive salary.
As a result of this under funding, blue-skies computer science research in a number of core areas is done almost entirely by a handful of industrial research labs.
For the CHERI project, the total cost of the research so far is over $20m and we haven’t even taped out a chip. By the time we get to the end of the Digital Security by Design programme, the total spending between government and industrial funding will be over $300m. That is incredibly rare for a computer science research programme, there are hundreds of ideas that deserve the same level of investment that no one is funding and industrial research is not touching because it wouldn’t lead to a competitive advantage.
That’s a good point, I wasn’t thinking about those kinds of expenses at all.