Investing in electron-volt physics

I read with great interest in the article “Singapore applies itself to science” (PHYSICS TODAY, June 2011, page 20 ) that Singapore has deliberately established policies to ensure economic growth through the application of science and technology. The sole purpose of Singapore’s support of R&D is to generate new products and industries and with them new permanent jobs.

The support of physics research described in the article is heavily biased toward electron-volt physics, which I termed “the science of what happens on Earth” in earlier letters (see, for example, PHYSICS TODAY, July 1991, page 84 ). As I noted in those letters, it is electron-volt physics that will generate new products, industries, and permanent jobs. Absent from the Singapore research portfolio is high-energy particle physics, which had not in 1988—and still has not—ever produced permanent jobs for anyone except high-energy physicists and their acolytes and assistants. The scale of energy exchanges in high-energy physics is simply too large to be useful on Earth.

An article in a recent issue of Science points out that the US is ranked only sixth among 40 nations in research-based competitiveness and calls for renewed investment in innovation to restore the US to its former position as number one. ¹

I believe that we have much to learn from Singapore’s investment in such innovation. We must learn, first, to couple research and development much more closely than we have in the past and, second, to focus the research on electron-volt physics, because that’s where innovation and economic growth will come from.