Lol Wut: Are We Reaching Peak Science?

I won’t really comment on this too much, in large part because it does a pretty good job of commenting on itself, but the blog NeuroDojo has a post up right now wondering if we’re approaching peak science. You know, if we’re about to or have already exhausted our possibilities of doing science as humans.

What in the hell?, you say? Aren’t we just now tapping perhaps the richest veins of science in the whole of history? Parsing the genome, unraveling quantum mechanics, gazing almost all the way back to the Big Bang, picking off dark matter particles. And all of these things are just doorways to more things. Suggesting peak science is like suggesting peak radiation or peak, dunno, sand.

The writer’s concerns, however, are less with science itself or scientific principles, but with our capabilities of doing that science. Which is much different. Most of that has to do with funding and priorities. In other words, do we have the will to continue to do science?

The post outlines these points:

1. Declining support for public funding of science. Obviously, science isn't alone in this regard. Budgets are poor for a lot of worthwhile endeavours.
2. Administrative burdens. You need to go through a fairly complex approval process before you can even run some experiments. And once you have any sort of external funding, the accounting and effort certification is widely considered to be much more onerous than it used to be.
3. Disenfranchised junior researchers. People who want to be scientists are facing long training at low pay and little stability. It's not a healthy situation where senior scientists get compared to plantation owners and sweatshop operators. (Jenny Rohn published an opinion piece in Nature last week discussing this problem at the post-doc level.)
4. Bigger questions means bigger equipment. Answering bigger questions often requires bigger infrastructure. For basic physics, can we get much larger than the Large Hadron Collider? Not for the near future, certainly.
5. Energy constriction. And peak research might be more tied to peak oil than people like to think. Research doesn't take just human energy, it takes physical energy. How many pipette tips and other plastics (which is often petroleum-based, remember) does an active biomedical lab go through in a week? Has anyone calculated the carbon footprint of active biological research labs?

I guess a couple of these need quick rebutting. First, we can get much larger than the Large Hadron Collider, and are. The LHC’s successor, the Super Large Hadron Collider (natch), should only cost a relatively paltry £120 million in upgrades from the LHC. Then there’s the International Linear Collider, which is in its planning stages and should cost around the same or less than the LHC (about $6 billion). These things cost money, but not vastly more money than the projects we’ve already built.

And it’s silly to say, in general, that deeper science costs more money. Dark matter detection experiments are a drop in the bucket compared to accelerator and collider experiments. The IceCube experiment, a telescope of sorts 1 km on a side deep underneath the South Pole, cost a mere $271 million, and its quarry isn’t any less of a big question than the Higgs boson. Point is, it’s not fair to say that bigger questions are necessarily pricier questions. (That said, in the grand scheme of things, any piece of equipment in modern science is more expensive than, say, firing current through vacuum tubes.)

In some ways, expensive science has gotten easier to achieve. If you look past all of the “race for the Higgs” nonsense between Fermilab’s Tevatron and the LHC, you’ll find that especially for the LHC, it’s not really grounded with one country at all. It’s in the ground of one country, yes, but there’s a load of different nations that actually buy into the experiment. Indeed, to go larger than the LHC that project would need to be a similar collaboration. Which we can do now! Easily. If globalization has left something behind, it certainly isn’t science.

Finally, in terms of declining support, it’s important to look past the U.S. I mean, didn’t Margaret Thatcher have a direct line to CERN in the ‘70s ’cause she wanted to know the moment the Z boson was discovered or confirmed? (I’m a little hazy on that bit of history.) And I don’t think Nicolas Sarkozy was all that out of line with the French people when he talked about the importance of science and fighting past all the “willful ignorance” in the world. Just ‘cause the U.S. happens to be full of batshit fundamentalists doesn’t mean the rest of the first-world is.

So, yes, peak science is an overreaction and I’ve said way more than I planned about it. But it’s wise to keep it in mind as a possible dystopia of the future. And that we really need to be going to war about science funding, like right now.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.

Image: the abandoned

Supercoducting Supercollider