Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books: “The crisis of big science”

APR 24, 2012

Nobel laureate sees “anti-tax mania” closing a century of high-energy physics in gloom.

On the free side of the paywall in the 10 May issue of the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg offers a long, historically framed essay titled “The crisis of big science .”

He surveys high-energy physics mainly, but also astronomy, and sees funding-based existential problems for both fields. At the end he prescribes higher taxes, suggests that “dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts,” asserts that it “is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending,” cites an “anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public,” admits that “views like these are political poison,” and declares, “This is the real crisis, and not just for science.”

Weinberg starts with Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the atom’s nucleus a century ago. He proceeds through cyclotrons to the post–World War II era, when the idea was not “setting records for the highest-energy accelerators, or even ... collecting more and more exotic species of particles, like orchids,” but was instead “creating new kinds of matter, to learn the laws of nature that govern all forms of matter.” The “logic of discovery,” Weinberg observes, “forced physics to become big"—eventually so big that, like the collider at Fermilab, physics research tools were “features of the landscape.”

He reports the success of the standard model, but calls it “clearly not the end of the story,” and expresses the hope that the Large Hadron Collider “will let us make the next step beyond” it. This leads to the assertion that “discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more comprehensive future theory,” which means that “in the next decade, physicists are probably going to ask their governments for support for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed.”

And that “is going to be a very hard sell,” he predicts, explaining that his “pessimism comes partly from [his] experience in the 1980s and 1990s in trying to get funding for another large accelerator,” the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC. Weinberg offers this view of SSC’s 1993 demise:

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

Even though arcane particle physics itself yields no direct technological payoffs, Weinberg says, the conduct of it has yielded synchotron radiation and the World Wide Web. “For promoting invention,” he writes, “big science in this sense is the technological equivalent of war, and it doesn’t kill anyone. But spin-offs can’t be promised in advance.” He notes that what “really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal principles that we are capable of discovering.” And he laments, “But not everyone feels the importance of this.” That lament leads to this anecdote:

During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed it. He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was “No.”

Weinberg predicts that in the future, big science’s problems “will be worse, because the next accelerator will probably have to be an international collaboration.” He cites “how a project to build a laboratory for the development of controlled thermonuclear power, ITER, was nearly killed by the competition between France and Japan to be the laboratory’s site.” This leads him to another prediction: In “the next decade we may see the search for the laws of nature slow to a halt, not to be resumed again in our lifetimes.”

After some thoughts about astronomy and the James Webb Space Telescope, Weinberg frames his conclusion by listing worthy competitors for the funding that science seeks—education, transportation, the patent system, prisons, a Securities and Exchange Commission that “doesn’t have enough staff to win cases against the corporations it is charged to regulate,” drug rehabilitation, health care, and others.

“We had better not try to defend science by attacking spending on these other needs,” he warns. “We would lose, and would deserve to lose.”

The long essay ends with a paragraph that will surely provoke strong response from all sides not just in technopolitics, but in politics generally:

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.