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Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates
David Goodstein
Sigma Xi forum on "Ethics, Values, and the Promise of Science"
February 25-26, 1993.
Scientific papers often begin by posing a paradox, even if it is
one that had not previously seemed particularly disturbing. Having
posed the paradox, the author then proceeds to resolve it. At
first glance, we don't seem to make much progress that way. A
paradox that was previously unnoticed is now no longer
unexplained. However, such exercises can sometimes be useful. For
example, Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper introducing the
theory of relativity was very much of this form. He began by
pointing out that when a magnet induces an electric current in a
loop of wire, we attribute that effect to entirely different
causes depending on whether the magnet or the loop of wire is in
motion. Finding this paradox intolerable, he proceeded to resolve
it, giving new meanings to time and space along the way.
Today, with my customary modesty, I would like to follow in
Albert's bicycle tracks and begin this talk by posing a paradox.
The paradox is that we, here in the United States today, have the
finest scientists in the world, and we also have the worst science
education in the world, or at least in the industrialized world.
There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly
contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained
in American graduate schools produced more Nobel Prizes, more
scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to
measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the
rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools
consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations
in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore roughly 95% of
the American public is consistently found to be scientifically
illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have
arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of
education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists?
I would like to refer to this situation as The Paradox of the
Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
In my view, these two seemingly contradictory observations are
both true, and they are closely related to one another. We have
created a kind of feudal aristocracy in American science, where a
privileged few hold court, while the toiling masses huddle in
darkness, metaphorically speaking, of course. However, I also
think inexorable historic forces are at work that have already
begun to bring those conditions to an end. Not that light will be
brought to the masses necessarily, but that our days at court are
clearly numbered. To understand all this, and before we get any
more deeply mired in dubious metaphors, it may help to go back to
the beginning. I mean, really The Beginning.
In modern Cosmology, the accepted theory of the beginning of the
universe goes something like this: At a certain instant around 18
billion years ago, the universe was created in a cataclysmic event
called The Big Bang. It has been expanding uniformly ever since.
What we do not know, however, is whether the density of matter in
the universe is great enough to reverse that expansion eventually,
causing the universe to slow down, come to a stop, and then
finally fall back upon itself. If that does happen, the
cosmologists are prepared with a name for the final cataclysmic
moment when the universe ends. It will be known as The Big Crunch.
Today I would like to offer you a somewhat analogous theory of the
history of science. According to this theory, science began in a
cataclysmic event sometime around the year 1700 (the publication
of Newton's Principia in 1687 is a good candidate for the actual
event). It then proceeded to expand at a smooth, continuous
exponential rate for nearly 300 years. Unlike the universe,
however, science did not expand into nothing at all. Instead, the
expansion must come to an end when science reaches the natural
limits imposed on it by the system it was born into, which is
called The Human Race.
I don't mean that scientific knowledge is limited by the human
race; in fact, I don't think scientific knowledge is limited at
all, and I hope that will go on expanding forever. What I'm
talking about here is what you might call the profession of
science, or the business of science. It is my opinion that the
size of the scientific enterprise, which began its expansion
around 1700, has now begun to reached the limits imposed on it by
the size of the human race. Thus, the expansion of science is now
in the process of ending, not in a Big Crunch, but in something
much more like a whimper, that may or may not leave some residue
of science still existing when it is all over. I think that the
beginning of the end of the exponential expansion era of science
occurred, in the United States at least, around the year 1970.
Most people, scientists and otherwise, are unaware that it is
coming to an end (in fact, they probably never knew it existed)
and are still trying to maintain a social structure of science (by
which I mean research, education, funding, institutions and so on)
that is based on the unexamined assumption that the future will be
just like the past. Since I believe that to be impossible, we have
some very interesting times ahead of us. I would like to tell you
today why I believe all this, and what we might try to do about
it.
This graph is borrowed from a book called Little Science, Big
Science by Derek da Solla Price. Price may be identified as the
Edwin Hubble of the expansion of science (Hubble discovered the
expansion of the Universe). The figure, a plot of the number of
scientific journals founded, world wide, as a function of year, is
a suitable stand-in for any other quantitative measure of the size
of science. It shows that the cumulative number of journals
founded increased by a factor of 10 about every 50 years, from
1750 to 1950. This is a different, faster kind of growth than a
free expansion like that of the universe. Here the rate of growth
of the system keeps increasing as the size of the system
increases. In other words, the bigger it is, the faster it grows.
Anyone observing this so-called exponential curve would conclude
that science was born (roughly) in the year 1700, and that a
million journals would have been founded by the year 2000. Price,
who pointed out this phenomenon in the early 1960's, was clever
enough to know that neither of these conclusions would be correct.
On the one hand, both scientific knowledge and the scientific
enterprise have roots that stretch all the way back to antiquity,
and on the other hand the number of scientific journals in the
world today, as we approach the year 2000, is a mere 40,000. This
sorry failure of the publishing industry to keep up with our
expectations often leaves us scientists with nothing to read by
the time we reach the end of the week.
The point is that the era of exponential growth in science is
already over. The number of journals is one measure, but all
others tend to agree. In particular, it applies to the number of
scientists around. It is probably still true that 90% of all the
scientists who have ever lived are alive today, and that statement
has been true at any given time for nearly 300 years. But it
cannot go on being true for very much longer. Even with the huge
increase in world population in this century, only about
one-twentieth of all the people who have ever lived are alive
today. It is a simple mathematical fact that if scientists keep
multiplying faster than people, there will soon be more scientists
than there are people. That seems very unlikely to happen.
I think the last 40 years, in the United States, have seen the end
of the long era of exponential growth and the beginning of a new
era we have not yet begun to imagine. These years will be seen in
the future as the period in which science began a dramatic and
irreversible change into an entirely new regime. Let's look back
at what has happened in those 40 years in light of this historic
transformation.
The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science.
Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a
decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue
it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the
Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to
assume responsibility for the support of basic research. Moreover,
much of the rest of the world was still crippled by the
after-effects of the war. At the same time, the G.I. Bill of
Rights sent a whole generation back to college. The American
academic enterprise grew explosively, especially in science and
technology. Even so, that explosive growth was merely a seamless
continuation of the exponential growth of science that had dated
back to 1700. It seemed to one and all (with the notable exception
of Derek da Solla Price) that these happy conditions would go on
forever.
By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically.
With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its
appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research.
To make matters worse, the country is 4 trillion dollars in debt
and scientific research is among the few items of discretionary
spending in the national budget. There is much wringing of hands
about impending shortages of trained scientific talent to ensure
the Nation's future competitiveness, especially since by now other
countries have been restored to economic and scientific vigor, but
in fact, jobs are scarce for recent graduates. The best American
students have proved their superior abilities by reading the
handwriting on the wall and going into other lines of work. Half
the students in American graduate schools in science and
technology are from abroad. The golden age definitely seems over.
Both periods, the euphoric golden age, 1950-1970, and the
beginning of the crunch, 1970-1990, seemed at the time to be the
product of specific temporary conditions rather than grand
historic trends. In the earlier period, the prestige of science
after helping win the war created a money pipeline from Washington
into the great research universities. At the same time, the G.I.
Bill of Rights transformed the United States from a nation of
elite higher education to a nation of mass higher education.
Before the war, about 8% of Americans went to college, a figure
comparable to that in France or England. By now more than half of
all Americans receive some sort of post-secondary education, and
nearly a third will eventually graduate from college. To be sure,
this great and noble experiment in mass higher education has
failed utterly and completely in technology and science, where
4-5% of the population can be identified as science and technology
professionals, and the rest may as well live in the pre-Newtonian
era. Nevertheless, the expanding academic world in 1950-1970
created posts for the exploding number of new science Ph.D's,
whose research led to the founding of journals, to the acquisition
of prizes and awards, and to increases in every other measure of
the size and quality of science. At the same time, great American
corporations such at AT&T, IBM and others decided they needed to
create or expand their central research laboratories to solve
technological problems, and also to pursue basic research that
would provide ideas for future developments. And the federal
government itself established a network of excellent national
laboratories that also became the source of jobs and opportunities
for aspiring scientists. As we have already seen, all this
extraordinary activity merely resulted in a 20 year extension in
the U.S. of the exponential growth that had been quietly going on
since 1700. However, it was to be the last 20 years. The expansion
era in the history of science was about to come to an end, at
least in America.
Actually, during the second period, 1970-1990, the expansion of
American science did not stop altogether, but it did slow down
significantly compared to what might have been expected from
Price's exponential curves. Federal funding of scientific
research, in inflation-corrected dollars, doubled during that
period, and by no coincidence at all, the number of academic
researchers also doubled. Such a controlled rate of growth
(controlled only by the available funding, to be sure) was not,
however consistent with the lifestyle that academic researchers
had evolved. The average American professor in a research
university turns out about 15 Ph.D. students in the course of a
career. In a stable, steady-state world of science, only one of
those 15 can go on to become another professor in a research
university. In a steady-state world, it is mathematically obvious
that the professor's only reproductive role is to produce one
professor for the next generation. But the American Ph.D. is
basically training to become a research professor. American
students, realizing that graduate school had become a training
ground for a profession that no longer offered much opportunity,
started choosing other options. The impact of this situation was
obscured somewhat by the growth of postdoctoral research
positions, a kind of holding tank for scientific talent that
allowed young researchers to delay confronting reality for 3 or 6
or more years. Nevertheless, it is true that the number of the
best American students who decided to go to graduate school
started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever
since.
In the meantime, yet one more surprising phenomenon has taken
place. The golden age of American academic science produced
genuine excellence in American universities. Without any doubt at
all, we lead the world in scientific training and research. It
became necessary for serious young scientists from everywhere else
either to obtain an American Ph.D., or at least to spend a year or
more of postgraduate study here. America has come to play the role
for the rest of the world, especially the emerging nations of the
Pacific rim, that Europe once played for young American
scientists, and it is said, that Greece once played for Rome. We
have become the primary source of scientific culture and learning
for everyone. Almost unnoticed, over the past 20 years the missing
American graduate students have been replaced by foreign students.
This change has permitted the American research universities to go
on producing Ph.D's almost as before.
Nevertheless, it should be clear by now that with half the kids in
America already going to college, academic expansion is finished.
With the Cold War over, competition in science can no longer be
sold as a matter of national survival. There are those who argue
that research is essential for our economic future, but the
managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have
decided that central research laboratories were not such a good
idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their
missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually
transformed from manufacturing to service, and service industries
like banking and insurance don't support much scientific research.
Each of these conditions appears to be transient and temporary,
but they are really the immediate symptoms of a large-scale
historic transformation. For us in the United States, the
expansionary era of the history of science has come to an end. The
future of American science will be very different from the past.
Let's get back now to the Paradox of Scientific Elites and
Scientific Illiterates. The question of how we educate our young
in science lies at the heart of the issues we have been
discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number
of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply,
that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been
proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We
have already seen how that process works at the final stage of
education, where each professor in a research university turns out
15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and
turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
Recently, however, a vastly different picture of science education
has been put forth and has come to be widely accepted. It is the
metaphor of the pipeline, illustrated in this slide, which shows
the cover of a recent issue of Science magazine. The idea is that
our young people start out as a torrent of eager, curious minds
anxious to learn about the world, but as they pass through the
various grades of schooling, that eagerness and curiosity is
somehow squandered, fewer and fewer of them showing any interest
in science, until at the end of the line, nothing is left but a
mere trickle of Ph.D's. Thus, our entire system of education is
seen to be a leaky pipeline, badly in need of repairs. As the
cover of Science indicates the leakage problem is seen as
particularly severe with regard to women and minorities, but the
pipeline metaphor applies to all. I'm not quite sure, but I think
the pipeline metaphor came first out of the National Science
Foundation, which keeps careful track of science workforce
statistics (at least that's where I first heard it). As the NSF
points out with particular urgency (and the Science cover echoes)
women and minorities will make up the majority of our working
people in future years. If we don't figure out a way to keep them
in the pipeline, where will our future scientists come from?
I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of
education as a pipeline leading to Ph. D's in science or in
anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it
could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have
a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For
another thing, producing Ph.D's is simply not the purpose of our
system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens
capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if
possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective
economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those
purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is worse than
arrogant; it is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the
sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right
predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external
constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline,
leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only
produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor
for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting
operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human
debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in
the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished
into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It
takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model
accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential
growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective
scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and
minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because
it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once
they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It
accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part
a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all
levels of American education, until the magic moment when a
teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes
exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of
Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we
have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in
the world. It is because our entire system of education is
designed to produce precisely that result.
It is easy to see the sorting operation at work in the college
physics classroom, where most of my own experience is centered,
but I believe it works at all levels of education and in many
other subjects. From elementary school to graduate school, from
art and literature to chemistry and physics, students and teachers
with similar inclinations resonate with one another. The tendency
is natural and universal. But, if it is so universal, you might
ask, why is America so much worse off than the rest of the world?
The answer, I think, is that in education and in science, as in
fast food and popular culture, America is not really worse than
the rest of the world, we are merely a few years ahead of the rest
of the world. What we are seeing here will happen everywhere soon
enough. Our colleagues abroad can take what scant comfort they can
find in the promise that our dilemmas in science and education are
on the way, along with Big Macs and designer jeans.
Getting back to America, the mining and sorting operation that we
call science education begins in elementary school. Most
elementary school teachers are poorly prepared to present even the
simplest lessons in scientific or mathematical subjects. In many
places, Elementary Education is the only college major that does
not require even a single science course, and it is said that many
students who choose that major do so precisely to avoid having to
take a course in science. To the extent that is true, elementary
school teachers are not merely ignorant of science, they are
preselected for their hostility to science, and no doubt they
transmit that hostility to their pupils, especially young girls
for whom elementary school teachers must be powerful role models.
Even those teachers who did have at least some science in college
are not likely to be well prepared to teach the subject. Recently,
I served on a kind of visiting committee for one of the elite
campuses of The University of California, where every student is
required to have at least one science course. The job of the
committee was to determine how well this requirement was working.
We discovered that 90% of the students in majors outside science
and technology were satisfying the requirement by taking a very
popular biology course known informally as "human sexuality'. I
don't doubt for an instant that the course was valuable and
interesting, and may even have tempted the students to do
voluntary "hands on" experimentation on their own time (a result
we seldom achieve in physics). But I do not think that such a
course by itself offers sufficient training in science for a
university graduate at the end of the 20th century. These
students, some of whom will go on to become educators, are
themselves among the discards of the science mining and sorting
operation.
In any case, the first step of the operation is what might be
called passive sorting, since few elementary school pupils come
into personal contact with anyone who has scientific training.
Certainly, we all know that many young people decide that science
is beyond their understanding long before they have any way of
knowing what science is about. Nevertheless, a relatively small
number of students, usually those who sense instinctively that
they have unusual technical or mathematical aptitudes, arrive at
the next levels of education with their interest in science still
intact.
The selection process becomes more active in high school. There
are about 22,000 high schools in the United States, most of which
offer at least one course in physics. Physics is my own subject,
and I have had some influence on the teaching of physics in
American high schools because a remarkably large fraction of them
use "The Mechanical Universe", a television teaching project I
directed some years ago. Because I have some first-hand knowledge
about physics in high schools, I'll stick to that, although I
suspect what I have to say applies to other science subjects as
well. Anyway, there are just a few thousand trained high school
physics teachers in the U.S., far fewer than there are high
schools. The majority of courses are taught by people, who, in
college, majored in chemistry, biology, mathematics, or
surprisingly often, home economics, a subject that has lost favor
in recent years. I know from personal contact that these are
marvelous people, often willing to work extraordinarily hard to
make themselves better teachers of a subject they never chose for
themselves. My greatest satisfaction from making "The Mechanical
Universe" comes from the very substantial number of them who have
told me that I helped make their careers successful. Their
greatest satisfaction comes from - guess what - discovering those
diamonds in the rough that can be sent on to college for cutting
and polishing into real physicists.
I don't think I need to explain to you what happens in college and
graduate school, but I'd like to tell you a story of my own
because I think it helps to illustrate one of my main points. By
far the best course I had in college was not in physics, but
rather it was a required writing and literature course known as
Freshman English. The Professor was my hero, and I was utterly
devoted to him. He responded just as you might expect: he tried
hard to talk me into quitting science and majoring in English.
Nevertheless, the thought of actually doing that never crossed my
mind. I knew perfectly well that if I was ever going to make
anything of myself, I was going to have to suffer a lot more than
I was doing in Freshman English! The story illustrates that we
scientists are not the only ones who engage in mining and sorting.
The real point, however, is that for most of us in the academic
profession, our real job is not education at all; it is vocational
training. We are not really satisfied with our handiwork unless it
produces professional colleagues. That is one of the
characteristics that may have to change in the coming brave new
world of post-expansion science.
American education is much-maligned, and of course it suffers from
severe problems that I need not go into here. Nevertheless, it was
remarkably well suited to the exponential expansion era of
science. Mass higher education, essentially an American invention,
means that we educate nearly everyone, rather poorly. The
alternative system, gradually going out of style in Europe these
days, is to educate a select few rather well. But we too have
rescued elitism from the jaws of democracy, in our superior
graduate schools. Our students finally catch up with their
European counterparts in about the second year of graduate school
(this is true, at least, in physics) after which they are second
to none. When, after about 1970, the gleaming gems produced by
this assembly line at the end of the mining and sorting operation
were no longer in such great demand at home, the humming machinery
kept right on going, fed by ore imported from across the oceans.
To those of us who are Professors in research universities, those
foreign graduate students have, temporarily at least, rescued our
way of life. In fact we are justly proud that in spite of the
abysmal state of American education in general, our graduate
schools are a beacon unto the nations of the world. The students
who come to join us in our research are every bit as bright and
eager as the home-grown types they have partially replaced, and
they add energy and new ideas to our work. However, there is
another way of looking at all this. Graduate students in the
sciences are often awarded teaching assistantships, for which they
may not be well qualified, because their English is imperfect. In
general, through teaching or research assistantships or
fellowships, they are paid stipends and their tuitions are either
waived, or subsidized by the universities. Thus our national and
state governments find themselves supporting expensive research
universities that often serve undergraduates poorly (partly
because of those foreign teaching assistants) and whose principal
educational function at the graduate level has become to train
Ph.D's from abroad. Some of these, when they graduate, stay on in
America, taking some of those few jobs still available here, and
others return to their homelands taking our knowledge and
technology with them to our present and future economic
competitors. It doesn't take a genius to realize that our state
and federal governments are not going to go on forever supporting
this playground we professors have created for ourselves.
To most of us professors, of course, science no longer seems like
a playground. Recently, Leon Lederman, one of the leaders of
American science published a pamphlet called Science -- The End of
the Frontier. The title is a play on Science -- The Endless
Frontier, the title of the 1940's report by Vannevar Bush that led
to the creation of the National Science Foundation and helped
launch the Golden Age described above. Lederman's point is that
American science is being stifled by the failure of the government
to put enough money into it. I confess to being the anonymous
Caltech professor quoted in one of Lederman's sidebars to the
effect that my main responsibility is no longer to do science, but
rather it is to feed my graduate students' children. Lederman's
appeal was not well received in Congress, where it was pointed out
that financial support for science is not an entitlement program,
nor in the press, where the Washington Post had fun speculating
about hungry children haunting the halls of Caltech. Nevertheless,
the problem Lederman wrote about is very real and very painful to
those of us who find that our time, attention and energy are now
consumed by raising funds rather than doing research. However,
although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly
believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government
money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled
(as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a
few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves
in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a
valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has
worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in
1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger
fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end.
The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research
funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning.
Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific
enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most
essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among
scientists.
The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in
recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed
by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in
these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for
scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure
increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more
common.
Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For
example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole
edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific
journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting
agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what
research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some
cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to
referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in
question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors
of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what
research should be supported and what results should be published
are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
Peer review is usually quite a good way of identifying valid
science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate
a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer
review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the
only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate
an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space
in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the
least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of
interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same
resources. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for
referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity
to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more
referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of
having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were
authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices
that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but
will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we
face.
We must find a radically different social structure to organize
research and education in science. That is not meant to be an
exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known
to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive
at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than
design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the
faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another,
even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists
have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this
much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by
an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition
is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact,
as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment,
however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some
conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well
as a past.
It seems to me that there are two essential and clearly linked
conditions to consider. One is that there must be a broad
political consensus that pure research in basic science is a
common good that must be supported from the public purse. The
second is that the mining and sorting operation I've described
must be discarded and replaced by genuine education in science,
not just for the scientific elite, but for all the citizens who
must form that broad political consensus.
Basic research is a common good for two reasons: it helps to
satisfy the human need to understand the universe we inhabit, and
it makes new technologies possible. It must be supported from the
public purse because it does not yield profits if it is supported
privately. Because basic research in science flourishes only when
it is fully open to the normal processes of scientific debate and
challenge, the results are available to all. That is why it is
always more profitable to use someone else's basic research than
to support your own. For most people it will also always be easier
to let someone else do the research. In other words, not everyone
wants to be a scientist. But to fulfill the role of satisfying
human curiosity, which means something more than just our own, we
scientists must find a way to teach science to non-scientists.
That job may turn out to be impossible. Perhaps professional
training is the only possible way to teach science. There was a
time long ago when self-taught amateurs could not only make a real
contribution to science, but could even become great scientists.
Benjamin Franklin and Michael Faraday come to mind immediately.
That day is long gone. I get manuscripts in the mail every week
(attracted, no doubt, by my fame as a T.V. star) from amateurs who
have made some great discovery that they want me to bring to the
attention of the scientific world, but they are always nonsense.
The frontiers of science have moved far from the experience of
ordinary persons. Unfortunately, we have never developed a way to
bring people along as informed tourists of the vast terrain we
have conquered, without training them to become professional
explorers. If it turns out to be impossible to do that, the people
may decide that the technological trinkets we send back from the
frontier are not enough to justify supporting the cost of the
expedition. If that happens, science will not merely stop
expanding, it will die.
Tackling in a serious way the as-yet uncontemplated task of
bringing real education in science to all American students would
have at least one enormous advantage: it would give a lot of
scientists something worthwhile to do. On the other hand, I'm not
so sure that opening our territories to tourism will bring unmixed
blessings down upon us. For example, would the scientifically
knowledgeable citizens of our Jeffersonian republic think it worth
$10 billion of public funds to find out what quarks are made of? I
don't know the answer to that question, but I am reasonably sure
that a scientifically literate public would not have supported
President Reagan's Star Wars program, which in its turn, did help
for a while to support at least a small part of my own research.
In other words, keeping the tourists away has some advantages that
we may have to give up.
Nevertheless, I'm willing to take the gamble if you are. I don't
think education is the solution to all our problems, but it does
seem like a good place to start.
Besides, I really don't know what else we can do.
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