On AD 2008 June 26 Thursday 10:47:43 PM -0600, Andy Bradford wrote: > So, you truly believe that communication mechanisms like the > ``Internet'' would have never come about without the omniscient, > omnipotent government? Imagine how much innovation and discovery could > be made by people, people with incentive to meet the needs of others, > had we not wasted billions, if not trillions of dollars on countless > governmental programs, military spending, empire building, etc... Its > not surprising that government comes up with things, they drain people > of the very thing that allows entrepreneurs and businessmen to innovate: > savings and money. I'm sure if I had billions extorted from the people I > could do many good things with it too.
I've been reading this thread more with amusement than interest, but this is an incredibly closed minded, narrow characterization, almost to the point of ignorance. I am a scientist. I have been in the past, will be beginning this fall, and will likely live off from the rest of my life (at least in part) money from the National Science Foundation and other similar government foundations from this and other countries. The intarwebs might have gotten themselves invented without the DoD pouring in dollars and academics pouring in ideas and research, neither motivated by the potential for monetization. Somehow I doubt private corporations would have been altruistic enough to let the thing become what it has without their trying to justify it quarter by quarter by crafting up ways to draw money out of it for their shareholders. The intarwebs might have had a chance at that. Do you really think there are corporations out there that are visionary enough to pour the billions and billions of dollars each year into basic scientific research that doesn't have potential to turn a technological profit for decades, perhaps even centuries, to say nothing of financial? Why do you think we have organizations like the NSF? Is there purpose to fund research that will turn into dollars within a sufficiently short period to satisfy the taxpayers? Is it immoral for someone pursue a course of work for which there is no financial motivation whatsoever? I submit that not only is it moral but it is crucial to the progress of society. Now let me tell you something. In the 1800s the mathematicians Abel, Jacobi, Galois, Gauss, Kronecker and others worked out foundations of what is now often known as abstract algebra. There was not even any scientific motivation for the establishment of this kind of mathematics. In the early 1900s Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and others using many of the abstract, theoretical mathematical objects from abstract algebra worked out what became known as quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the solid scientific foundation for electronic and optical technology, materials science, chemical engineering, and several other fields. How much of the GDP do you think all of this technology accounts for? And it was all made possible because people researched the stuff they had passion for. If they got any money out of it (some of them didn't, Galois for example) it came from their university. I seriously doubt privatized research would have the patience of decades to wait for technologies like fusion to yield (it hasn't), to say nothing of the pursuit of more esoteric research, like the Higgs boson, or quantum gravity. There is a 27 kilometer long circle underground Geneva Switzerland fitted with the worlds most powerful multi-Tesla liquid helium cooled superconducting electromagnets. The Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina--the size of Rhode Island, dozens of other observatories worldwide, in orbit and speeding out of the solar system, all of them the province of astronomers and astrophysicists, yet you don't see any corporations rush in even so much as to get their brand names on them. Justin /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
