How firm a foundation?

OCT 01, 1950

Do physicists care for grants in chunks less than a million dollars at a time? This article grew out of correspondence with the author who wrote to the Institute some time ago expressing his puzzlement that the bulk of grants in aid to scientific research made by Research Corporation has shifted within the last four years from nearly equal numbers in physics and chemistry to a marked preponderance for chemistry. The author speculates on the reason for this and on some of the trends of our changing times in regard to foundation support of research.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3066682

Charles H. Schauer

The somewhat supercilious voice from the telephone receiver presumed that the position of the decimal point was a typographical error. In the course of the next day or so, two more voices of varied inflections, representing successively higher echelons in the editorial hierarchy of a popular periodical, raised the same question and accepted assurance with equal reluctance. The difficulty was the record of a Research Corporation grant of $5,000 made to the University of California in 1931 to assist E. O. Lawrence in constructing a cyclotron. From the perspective of 1948 there just weren’t enough zeros in this figure for it to be of significance in the same sentence as the word cyclotron.

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Charles H. Schauer, Research Corporation.