Among shortcomings to be faced are projects that burden the National Science Foundation, rising costs of graduate science education, lack of coördination in attacks on social problems, and the poor flow of information from scientists to Congress.
THIRTY YEARS AGO research in physics in the United States was a remote concern of government. Graduate students in this then pure science were the original do‐it‐yourself leaders and had to become as adept at begging and borrowing as they were in making equipment. Then came the discovery of fission, the second world war and the nuclear chain reaction. You well know the rest of the story. Congress was so impressed with the enormous new power derived from the science of physics that it enacted one of the most extraordinary laws in our history—the Atomic Energy Act of 1946.
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References
1. Harvey Brooks, “Future Needs for the Support of Basic Research,” Basic Research and National Goals, A report to the Committee on Science and Astronautics, US House of Representatives, by the National Academy of Sciences, 77 (1965).
With strong magnetic fields and intense lasers or pulsed electric currents, physicists can reconstruct the conditions inside astrophysical objects and create nuclear-fusion reactors.
A crude device for quantification shows how diverse aspects of distantly related organisms reflect the interplay of the same underlying physical factors.
