A Science News Story About Funding! (And It’s Pretty Good, Too)
Short version: there is a lot more good science waiting to be done than there is money to fund it each year.
swans on tea
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A Science News Story About Funding! (And It’s Pretty Good, Too)
Short version: there is a lot more good science waiting to be done than there is money to fund it each year.
A grant funding application is a business plan: PERT chart, budget, guaranteed outputs; zero risk, maximum DCF/ROI. Content is irrelevant unless it is innovative (non-zero risk). Never fund junior faculty.
How many non-coincident lines are parallel to a given line? Euclid postulated one, and that stuck for 2000 years. By the early 1800s it was obvious that “zero” and “infinite” were every bit as good as “one” – elliptic, hyperbolic, and plane geometries. It’s a damned shame Thurston was funded to demonstrate EIGHT primary geometries of three-space in 1979.
Do opposite shoes vacuum free fall identically? Einstein postulated “yes” for General Relativity (1917) and “no” for Fernparallelismus, teleparallel gravitation (1931). Physics denies chirality has any fundamental meaning at all, inserting “symmetry breakings” when the universe disagrees (e.g., Yang and Lee). Physics is not stupid about classical gravitation. Physics has observed every test mass divergence it can imagine, bench top and astronomic (orbit and orbital decay of PSR J1903 0327, binary magnetized neutronium millisecond pulsar and a solar star),
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#b1
There is only one test mass divergence physics refuses to observe, the one that is actively excluded from physics because it is an emergent property, left versus right shoes,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
The worst it can do is suceed.
Parity Eotvos experiments will never be run for a simple stated reason: Nobody knows the outcome, and that risk is intolerable for grant funding. Prior tests perfectly failed. Reruns proceed at the apparatus’ full capacity, assuredly incrementally validating observations of nothing.
Los Angeles hit 113 F on Monday, 50,000 homes without electricity while the homeless were in special cooling shelters being pampered. Savor the downfall of First World civilization.