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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:25AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:25AM (#256803)

    The impetus for the most powerful computers in the world today came from unwashed nerds playing computer games in their mothers' basements.

    Don't believe me? - look up GPU.

    Even the CPUs today owe more to hobbyists than to governments or big business - if you look at the events in the 1970s.

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday October 31 2015, @07:33AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday October 31 2015, @07:33AM (#256820) Homepage Journal

    The impetus for the most powerful computers in the world today came from unwashed nerds playing computer games in their mothers' basements.

    Don't believe me? - look up GPU.

    Even the CPUs today owe more to hobbyists than to governments or big business - if you look at the events in the 1970s.

    Maybe not as much as you think. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research (1999) [nap.edu] from the National Academies Press examines this in great detail. From the Preface:

    At a time when the U.S. style of competitive market capitalism attracts
    the world’s attention—even its envy—and U.S. computer firms
    dominate the global marketplace, it is difficult to recall and acknowledge
    that the federal government has played a major role in launching and
    giving momentum to the computer revolution, which now takes pride of
    place among the nation’s recent technological achievements. Federal
    funding not only financed development of most of the nation’s early digital
    computers, but also has continued to enable breakthroughs in areas as
    wide ranging as computer time-sharing, the Internet, artificial intelligence,
    and virtual reality as the industry has matured. Federal investment also
    has supported the building of physical infrastructure needed for leading-edge
    research and the education of undergraduate and graduate students
    who now work in industry and at academic research centers.

    if you want to speak and write with actual knowledge, I suggest you educate yourself. This book might be a good start. It's free and everything!

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr