One Physicist's take on the History of Scientific Funding

Hi Roger. Have been following your post series, and do share many of your concirns abour science related funding cuts etc. Also notice that you (among many of us) are missing the bigger unpleasant picture. The myopic sight of our goverments, and I'm refering mostly to mine because have no right to talk about others, have increased debts that have our signatures on them, even if we didn't physically signed them. Equally myopically they see now that short term 'investment' payback from many science fields is not possible, so just take out their knives. But that's only a small portion of the picture. And above all the enemy is elsewere. Do you think the deindustrialisation that is happening in your country (and mine) the past years and it's transition to countries of zero labour cost is just a small byproduct of globalisation? It's the fuc*in essence of it. And attempts to hide countries' GDP deterioration behind terror wars and debt like yours, and statistics cooking and debt like mine have short legs. And who you think is going to pay the bill? Anyway that's my views on my optimistic days. S.M.

I am at the opposite end of the spectrum. I do totally low tech stuff that I believe will one day help poor people have better lives. I found the "pulser pump" effect back in the 1980's by accident and made a pump and ................ Nothing. There is no mechanism in place to investigate pretty simple things like it. Over 2 decades later, there is no official research to tell people how high they will pump, how much they will pump and how big they can be built. The only data out there is from my mickey mouse prototype that I made from scrap pipes in 1988 or 1989. It is on youtube with over 300 000 views and they have sprouted up all over the world. But absolutely no official response. It is absurd. A few months ago I showed that an airlift pump "nano" could pump pretty darn high with extremely low air pressure and challenged people to show how much higher it could pump. Nobody has taken up the challenge yet. (Potentially, you could have a solar panel attached to a 5 or 10 dollar aquarium air bubbler pumping water from a well 40 or 50 ft deep and nobody is interested?)

How can that be? Are we so pathetic as a society and as individual humans that nobody can take up these tiny challenges? I have videos on youtube about these things. They seem to be slowly spreading to the amateur hydroponics people but without the top down research that the majority of people still need before they jump in. We can all do amateur research. Yesterday I saw a guy talking about solitary bees and there are lots of unknowns about them that ordinary people could help figure out. Anyway, that is it for the moment. Brian

I agree with some of interesting sentences in the article which I quote:

Scientists and politicians live in completely different worlds..........politicians are unable to understand even the simplified sience......Scientists and engineers continue to publish their work in academic journals which are accessible to very few people out side universities..... very few of them have understanding of both academics and politics..