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posted by janrinok on Friday October 30 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the chicken-and-egg dept.

For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. Now Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal that when you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. "It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration," says Ridley. "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." According to Ridley technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do.

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements. "Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention," concludes Ridley. "They can only make sure that they don't hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change."


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @11:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @11:14PM (#256709)

    "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine [tumblr.com].

    Which is an interesting twisting of the words of the author of that link.

    While the earliest steam engines didn’t require much understanding of thermodynamics, they benefited immensely from our growing understanding of vacuums. Denis Papin, the designer of the earliest piston-driving engine, had worked on vacuums with Huygens, Leibniz and Boyle. Many of the other early improvers of steam engines like Thomas Savery, Henry Beighton and John Theophilus Desaguliers were all involved with the Royal Society, the pre-eminent society of scientists in the country.

    and

    So, Ridley is right to stress that innovation need not necessarily stem from science, but the impact of science on innovation should not be underestimated. Indeed, I strongly suspect that science plays an ever more important role in innovation. See nuclear power reactors, bio-engineering, many pharmaceuticals, and the development of new materials. However, this requires further research before saying for sure, and I’ll deal with some of his other points in later posts.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @12:35AM (#256742)

    But it's a Tumblr blog! They are renown for their high accuracy.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:06AM (#256811)

    Interestingly, the science of thermodynamics was kicked off by government subsidies in the 17th century. In particular, Robert Boyle was a Fellow of the Royal Society, funded by Charles II.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:37PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:37PM (#256933) Journal
    It may be an "interesting twist", but it is accurate. You should instead wonder why the author of that link felt the need to spin almost completely out of whole cloth a dependency on government-funded vacuum research. The real obstacle was machining parts well enough to seal against high pressure gases, not a better understanding of vacuum - which would have come anyway due to the development of steam engines. And notice how the taint of government funding is invoked:

    Many of the other early improvers of steam engines like Thomas Savery, Henry Beighton and John Theophilus Desaguliers were all involved with the Royal Society, the pre-eminent society of scientists in the country.

    Savery and Beighton both developed their engines before having anything to do with the Royal Society. None of them were significantly funded by the Royal Society. It just served as a means of propagating their knowledge. Involved (in the weak sense of giving the inventor or lecturer a podium to speak from and an education audience to listen) somehow means that government is responsible for steam engine development.

    And who really thinks thermodynamics would have progressed without the existence of several completely enclosed engine designs which do work solely by the transfer of heat from a hot sink to a cold sink?