Readers’ perspectives highlight vagaries of progress in science

Charles Day’s article “A reporter’s look at the progress of science” (Physics Today, December 2013, page 35 ) provided a fascinating look at how scientific research does or doesn’t stand up over time. Some cutting-edge research thought to be a shoo-in for the next big thing ended up going nowhere, while other investigations that appeared interesting but impractical turned out to be extremely useful. Two of the points Day makes at the end of the article are worth repeating:

‣ The time scale for research to bear fruit is unpredictable and often long.

‣ Because of that uncertainty, basic research is best undertaken by university (and I might add, government) labs, because the returns are just too risky for industry.

My experience on shale gas is a case in point. Back in the 1980s, I was working as a geology contractor for the US Department of Energy on the Eastern Gas Shales Project, which was attempting to develop new, domestic sources of natural gas in response to an oil embargo against the US. ¹ Many different gas shales were investigated, and a great deal of effort and money were expended to develop resource assessments and new hydraulic fracturing technology to recover economical amounts of gas. Despite a few successes, most attempts were failures, ² and the program was officially shut down in the early 1990s. In a paper I published describing some laboratory studies on shale core samples, ³ I mentioned that at least one of those formations, the Marcellus, might have significantly higher gas potential than official estimates indicated. The results went largely unnoticed at the time because the economical extraction of shale gas was not yet possible.

Twenty-five years later, technological advances in horizontal drilling and staged hydraulic fracturing have made shale gas a significant contributor to domestic energy supplies in the US. ⁴ The project even got mentioned by President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union address, when he said, “It was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

The president’s statement reinforces another important point that Day makes in his article: The funding of short-term, targeted research at the expense of basic research could negatively affect the development of unforeseen and promising applications. How many basic research projects today, from astronomy and space to energy and the environment, are being shortchanged by politicians concerned only about budget cutting and reelection? When basic research is not funded, we don’t even know what it is that we don’t know.