The Republicans in congress have just approved a rude little bill.
The House of Representatives approved legislation Wednesday that would require the National Science Foundation to provide written justification for how every grant furthers the “national interest.”
The legislation, H.R. 3293, passed largely along party lines in the Republican-controlled House. Its sponsors characterized the measure as designed to “ensure that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is open and accountable to the taxpayers about how their hard-earned dollars are spent.”
Meanwhile, those impractical enthusiastic physicists have been all jubilant over the discovery of gravitational waves, and it’s in the media everywhere I turn. Guess how much confirmation of this phenomenon cost?
The chirp is also sweet vindication for the National Science Foundation, which spent about $1.1 billion over more than 40 years to build a new hotline to nature, facing down criticism that sources of gravitational waves were not plentiful or loud enough to justify the cost.
All right, smart guys. I’m a reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-educated biologist, and I’ve been struggling to grasp the significance of this discovery. I want you to imagine standing in front of Lamar Smith or Dana Rohrabacher and having to explain to them how a squiggle in a billion-dollar instrument furthers the national interest. These are people quite happy to throw a trillion dollars away on the F-35, but want to know exactly how every penny going to basic science will Make America Great Again.
Have fun with that.
Bah, that’s easy. Take a lesson from the military-industrial complex. It’s all about threat inflation.
“This project seeks to detect gravitational waves, which apart from their theoretical interest could serve as an early-warning system for invasion by extraterrestrial forces, and for significant advances by Muslim nations. Detection of gravity waves may be the first and only warning of impending destruction of American cities by means of tractor beams deployed by advanced attack vehicles operating in gravity pulse mode.”
So in a nutshell – basic research in US is essentially gutted unless it can immediately and obviously be used for profit by corporations.
We (inhabitants of this planet) can only hope that the dropped ball of scientific research will be picked by EU or China or Japan.
Want to hear how zebrafish embryos are critical for preventing sharia law from being imposed on the world’s oceans?
If you need a grant in the tens of millions of dollars, simply explain that zebrafish embryos are the make-or-break testing ground for young earth creationism, and that you hope to confirm once and for all that they were purposely created by a benevolent God.
It’s not your fault if you fail. Failure always means you need more funds so you can try harder.
Robert R. Wilson, testifying to congress on the financial justification for Fermilab. Wilson was challenged as to why money should be spent on the accelerator instead of weapons research. It was suggested that Fermilab was a boondoggle because the discoveries of Fermilab contributed nothing to America’s military:
Thank you, Congress, for reversing the brain drain. American scientists fleeing your know-nothing inanity will be welcomed by many, many countries. But I know that won’t worry you, Congress. You’ll just see it as confirmation that all that money could have been better spent on bigger guns all along.
Really. Sucks to be us.
I guess I’d try to sell them on the weapons potential. If we learn how to control gravity waves, we could shrink Chinese aircraft carriers along a selected axis by 1 part in 10^21.
Yeah, the detection of gravitational waves is just one more confirmation of what physicists already understand, and which has already been confirmed to as near a certainty as you’re gonna get by other means. It’s an amazing technological feat, but worth the money? I think that’s legitimately arguable. Yeah, they’ll improve the sensitivity and they’ll go on to detect other phenomena, but unlikely to find anything unexpected. Not clear it will do anything to advance theoretical understanding of the universe. This will likely turn out to be very expensive bird watching.
Just sayin’.
@ A Masked Avenger # 1
Too complicated. Just tell Ted Cruz (otherwise known as Total War Ted, or Carpet Bomb Cruz) that you can use it to build a Gravity Bomb. You will get all the money you can spend. Just don’t mention to him that ALL bombs work by gravity.
Those atheist scientists have not released the accompanying photo of Jesus surfing the gravity waves. He is still riding the event horizon, chasing the God particle, i guess.
cervantes #8,
I won’t argue whether it is worth the money or not. But on what basis do you make this claim:
You can’t possibly know that. This is, in effect, the first result from a brand new field: gravitational wave astronomy. Are you some kind of super-expert who knows that when this field grows that nothing unexpected will be discovered? Do you know, for example, that this field will never have anything to say about what is the better model for quantum gravity? Do you happen to know that when waves from more massive black hole collisions are detected with more sensitive instruments and more detectors that it will be unlikely they’ll find anything unexpected? That’s a pretty bold claim.
1B over 40 years? cheap.
also, if gravity is waves, we can create an anti-wave device and levitate.
LEVITATE!
Nah this is all the wrong approach, what you tell congress is: gravity waves are what Jessica Chastain and Topher Grace discovered at the end of Interstellar. They’ll grasp that immediately.
“Yeah, the detection of gravitational waves is just one more confirmation of what physicists already understand”
Confirming theories is soooo 20th century! In the future, let’s let science be guided by the principle of “Sounds good to me!”
If the Chinese get this first they can shrink your balls and penis, do you want small balls and weenie wee wees?
Worth the money to spend 0.2% of the _annual_ Pentagon budget, spent over a 40-year time span, to investigate gravitational waves? Certainly!
Seriously, the notion of “national interest” is something that is never properly accounted for when it comes to other areas of the budget. Scientists should rebel at the differential attitude being taken, especially when it’s being used by a Congress that is evidently anti-science.
Taking an apologetic stance toward basic scientific research would be a mistake, as would be adopting the framework raised by legislators with nefarious aims.
cervantes @8:
If you’ve ever won any internets, you must now return them in plain brown wrap.
And that’s now -1 internets.
@8 Cervantes: When gravitational waves came up at a recent conference, we discussed some of the implications of this. This is more than what happened with the Higgs Boson, where finding it didn’t really lead us anywhere. With this, we can now go on to learn about:
1) How frequent are black holes in the universe? Particularly, what about primordial black holes?
2) Is the wave signature consistent with the predictions of General Relativity? What about the predictions of some modified gravity theories that haven’t yet been ruled out?
As it turns out from a discussion when this came up, even a single wave detection could possibly rule out quite a number of modified gravity theories. It will be interesting to see some analysis of this one now that it’s public.
National interest? Easy enough: Had the commies beaten you to it, it would now be a red hole instead of a black one. The mere idea should be intolerable to any … red blooded American?
Anyhow, while we’re on the topic may I also recommend realloacting the entire defence budget to NASA? Just to ensure the first flag dropping into that black hole will be the red … white and blue stripey one. Useful spin-offs may include moonbases (ideal for nuclear missles!), starships (also ideal for nuclear missiles!), extrasolar colonies (not aifnm on account of their range*) and probably a thousand technologies that can be weaponised into something much, much worse than nuclear missiles. That should be all the motivation congress needs.
*Further funding should be made available to develop the first InterStellar Relativistic** Missile.
**By the time the missile arrives everyone will have forgotten they were at war. Thus you achieve total surprise.
A pair of black holes merge in an orgiastic bliss moment, how can this not be of interest to the rethugs? They could legislate against it.
They should have David Tennant come to Congress and give the “wobbly-wobbly timey-wimey” speech.
If we don’t discover gravitational waves, the Russkies and the Chineeeze will discover them first. Then they will make fun of us and say how backwards we ‘Mericunz are.
Funnily at lunch with physicists, we talked about how this discovery was an inadvertent middle finger to Congress. After spending money to get the detectors right*, we turn them on and *bam* we see a pair of colliding black holes within a month. And non-scientists are all ‘oooh, tell me more about black holes’.
* Incidentally, I would have trouble believing that some of the hardware and software couldn’t be useful for something else
Artificial gravity. Future Republican candidates will be able to walk on the ceiling, and convince their constituents that they’re the Messiah.
I have always assumed the only reason the govt funded Fermilab was because they saw some super-secret weapons potential.
I wouldn’t think it would be too hard to convince conservatives that deciphering the fabric of the universe would have all sorts of weapons potential. Just like Star Trek.
It wasn’t a squiggle in a European, Russian, Chinese or Japanese billion-dollar instrument. What happened to good old American chest-beating?
One of the annoying things about the media coverage is the “it took 100 years to prove Einstein right” garbage. The right perihelion precession for Mercury followed almost immediately, deflection of light by the sun within a few years, etc.
Just tell them it’ll make a weapon to kill brown people.
The BBC has this covered. They say this discovery will help us understand how gravity really works, and will enable us to come out with a unified field theory.
Reading this, it always makes me laugh when people pretend that the US put astronauts on the moon because of some great, poetic drive for exploration and adventure characteristic of American culture.
I mean, sure, some (or even most) of the scientists involved in the project may have felt that way, to varying degrees. But the only reason they got the resources to do it was because the people in power decided it was really important in winning their nationalistic dick-waving contest with the Soviet Union. Basically they went to the moon for the same reason they built a replica Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.
So I suggest that the best way to get funding for gravitational wave research — which will be massively more useful and interesting scientifically than having some guys in pressure suits walk around in the dust for a bit, play golf, then go back home — is to convince modern American politicians that it’ll *really* annoy the Chinese if you do it.
@Todd Morgan #12
I assume this is meant to be read in a Dalek voice? I know I did.
IMPERSONATE!
With gravitational waves, we will have cheap oil that will vibrate out of the ground when the gravitational waves hit at the quantum level.
Stops Muslims too – in their tracks
@25
It was a close call but they did authorize it, probably because they thought it would, despite all the evidence to the contrary. When Fermilab turned out not to produce the next generation of wunderwaffen, that’s probably the single biggest reason Congress decided to cancel the superconducting supercollider, and instead funded
Space Station Freedomthe ISS.@29
The actual people involved were absolutely motivated by the high ideals of discovery and exploration. The people that wrote the checks just wanted a public exhibition of how far our rockets could travel and how much payload they could carry, while maintaining the outward appearance of peaceful coexistence. Sputnik, the manned program, even the Hubble was really just a backhanded demonstration of the abilities of our KH-11 spy satellites.
It’s important to know gravitational waves are real, because they might help non-human intelligent life figure out what happened to the humans with the $1t nuclear weapons “upgrade” the US is about to embark on.*
(*To “upgrade” a nuke you make better ones then get rid of the older ones. And of course you have to test them. Look for the US to figure out how to bypass the test ban treaty. Remember: the US starved Iran over its alleged weapons program for a whole lot less than this.)
… and accountable to the taxpayers about how their hard-earned dollars are spent.
Those easily-earned hedge-fund & financial derivative dollars, however, need no explanations since they go untaxed.
Actually it served a serious practical purpose.
Much of the early research focused on reaching orbit, and safely de-orbiting. This is vital to developing missiles that can deliver a nuclear payload to any target on earth. (Once you can achieve orbit, you can select any suborbital trajectory desired, and hit any target on the planet.) De-orbiting is also the first step to MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicle) technology, which is used to build missiles that can deliver multiple warheads to multiple targets. You probably think of Reagan and MX missiles when you think of MIRV, but in fact the first multi-warhead missiles were developed in 1970. This is not a coincidence.
Actually getting to the moon served the practical purpose of making sure that if anyone were to militarize space, and put missile silos on the moon for example, the US would be in a position to do it first and claim the ascendancy. It was also about dick-waving, of course. And it was partly political cover: the moon race was originally launched as an excuse to build nuclear missile technology, but they sorta needed to finish the job for the alibi to hold up.
@cervantes: We discovered some more evidence of how the universe works.
This kills a lot of ideas about gravity and strengthens others.
Any new theory we propose will need to explain gravitational waves with the specific features measured.
Further, now that we know that they exist and can be detected, we know that is makes to measure them and how to do it.
As @Bill Buckner put it, this is the birth of an entirely new field of research, and we don’t know what it will yield.
This is a beginning, a fucking awesome one.
@sigaba: If I know my engineers at all, I’m willing to wager that a lot of people on the engineering side of the space programme were mainly motivated by the fact that rockets are really cool and shooting them really far is a challenge :p
But yes, a lot of admirable people worked and work at NASA, definitely! They’re just not at all representative of the culture as a whole, and may as well be from another planet than the government they work for, so it annoys me when those institutions claim the moral credit.
@ a masked avenger: I was kind of subsuming the Cold War missile race under “nationalistic dick waving”, but yeah, I understand that the people funding it had the military benefits in mind as well as the more strictly ideological ones.
I do think it kind of goes together with the broader point I was making: building weapons has nothing to do with curiosity or exploration or some kind of essential human lust for transcending our limitations, which is how the space programme is mostly framed in American national iconography.
And I’m very suspicious of that “Star Trek” sort of image of human nature in general, considering the vast majority of people seem to be fine living and dying within a couple kilometres of the place they were born. I think a lot of it stems from a post-hoc idealisation of colonialism, which is why it turns up so much in American media (and propaganda) especially. But now I’m really getting off topic.
You mean including the ones who were Nazis, or excluding them?
Can’t embed YouTube, but Tom Lehrer has an apropos ode.
@35 The Outer Space Treaty was ratified in 1967 and mutually accepted by the US and USSR. It specifically banned orbital nuclear platforms as well as military installations on celestial bodies. Prior to that it was taken for granted in the late 60s that the next step in the Cold War would be orbital nukes (they make an appearance in 2001, the book and the movie). MIRVs took many of the concepts and attack profiles developed for orbital platforms and stuck them in a suborbital vehicle.
@37 I agree completely, though I am happy to give NASA some moral credit. A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
@40 Thanks for the additional information. To be clear, though, I see nothing you’ve said that contradicts anything I’ve said.
The discovery is only significant as proof of capability. Meaning it is proof (evidence) that LIGO actually can see gravity waves and isn’t just a huge noise detector. This opens it up as a new form of telescope to extend our spectrum of vision. Visible, UV, IR, Radio are old hat, but can’t get past a the Cosmic Microwave Barrier. Gravity waves are not blocked by the CMB so extend our view into the part of space that has previously been “dark”. It is also cute to call gravity waves equivalent to sound waves, where we can now listen to the universe as well as see it.
squeee, I am super happy to here LIGO actually provided a 5sigma level result after so many years of null results.
aah back on topic: the real question here is not “what good is the chirp”, but the misdirection of gov funds into weapons being prioritized over basic research. It is worth being reminded that basic research constantly pays for itself by producing unexpected results.
Jorge Chan has nice, very simple explanations (in comics & video) of the relevant ideas and their testing at PHD Comics.
slithey tove @42: The B stands for Background, not Barrier. The CMB is the oldest em radiation, from the time of atom formation from electrons and protons.
Also, it’s ‘gravitational waves’, not ‘gravity waves’.
But yes, detection of them could take us back much closer to the ‘singularity’.
@29 Zeppelin:
The 24 astronauts who went to the moon (and 12 who landed there) didn’t just play golf. Over 2000 papers have been published using data collected by the Apollo program. I’m very excited for the field of gravitational wave astronomy finally getting results (as I am for the field of neutrino astronomy, which has also become a thing in the past couple of years, and which lies more within my research interests), but that’s no reason to belittle Apollo.
I was hoping Einstein@Home, which is one of my distributed computing programs, might have played a part in the discovery, as it does look at LIGO data. Right instrument, wrong wavelengths. From a notice from Einstein@Home:
Still the possibility to see some interesting science.
Before people panic too much, the only thing that happened was that the House of Representatives passed the bill. As far as I can tell (from congress.gov), the bill hasn’t even been introduced in the Senate, let alone passed. So in order for it to become law, the following would have to happen:
Get introduced in the Senate
Make it through a Senate committee
Survive a Senate filibuster to be passed by the Senate.
Be signed by President Obama (there aren’t enough votes to override a veto)
sigaba @21
Wasn’t Matt Smith the Dr. Who credited with the “wibbley-wobbley time-wimey” quote?
@48 magistramarla
No, it was Tennant. Season 3 of the new series.
On topic with op: it depresses me how the seeking of knowledge just for the sake of it is never respected. One never, *ever* knows what kind of future advances can come from a new experiment and going “oh, that’s neat”
Think the guys who did the double slit experiment for the first time knew that it would eventually lead to the near infinite progression of computing and mapping that it has? No! They just wanted to see if photon\electron particles would behave the way they were supposed to.
When they didn’t, literally the entirety of classical physics was suddenly wrong (well, not exactly. A more proper way of putting it would be “the whole of classical physics was a back of the envelope calculation”)
No one knows where the quest for pure, simple and deep understanding of something we don’t understand yet can lead. And thats why it should continue; the world we live in is still a pretty enormous ball of entagled mysteries and frankly even a discovery that will give literally zero progress outside of that specific field or experiment is precious in ways that cannot be calculated.
Didn’t someone try to get a law passed like this before? I remember reading another post somewhere years ago about how Republicans wanted to cut funding for any research that didn’t have an immediate benefit The refutation was that it had been tried before bu Stalin, who shut down any research that wasn’t immediately beneficial as bourgeois, but said research would have eventually led to growing better crops, which would have prevented the famine that occurred under his rule. Would it give the GOP pause to learn that they’re emulating Stalin, or would they decide that he was just being a strong leader?
Tashiliciously Shriked @49:
The first double-slit experiment was with light (Young, 1801), which, with hindsight kind of ironically, seemed to put the kibosh on Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, since it showed that light behaved like a wave. The first such experiment with anything other than light wasn’t until 1961, by which time QM was fairly well established.
It was Planck’s law (1900) and Einstein’s 1905 photoelectric paper which led back to corpuscular light. That matter could be wavelike was hypothesized by de Broglie (1924) and confirmed by Davisson and Germer in 1927 by scattering electrons off a nickel crystal.
And in Australia our main publicly funded science research CSIRO is having more funding cuts, specifically focussed on the climate change areas. They may have changed the figurehead but the anti-science still goes on.
@48 magistramarla
I’m happy to be corrected, but I recall the “wibbly-wobbly” quote first appearing in the first Weeping Angels episode, “Blink”, which was a 10th Doctor/Tennant episode.
@39 No contradiction intended.
Actually I think the ones who were Nazis were even more idealistic. The cruelest monsters are usually the idealists :)
Cervantes @8:
Isn’t that a bit of a non sequitur? Isn’t the unexpected always unlikely to be discovered?
NSF already requires you to write a “Broader Impacts” section for every grant proposal. On mine, we get about half a page to explain how the proposed research will improve society or further advance science in a way that will improve society, or whatever you can think of. And, that’s one of the criteria that reviewers are supposed to base their funding recommednations on (the other is the quality of the proposed research).
So, just send congress the 1/2-page blurb we already all have to write. Let them get a dictionary and look up the big words, they seem to have plenty of time on their hands.
@Rob 51
thank you for missing the forest for the trees (a quick and dirty google search also tells me that the conclusion from the 1801 experiment was not corpuscle\quantized light, but wave-theory of light) >(
I’m a layperson for Science, having mostly self-taught-by-reading-Asimov-articles-collected-into-books when I was in high school. Everyone always seemed to interchange electrons/photons when speaking of the Taylor 1909 experiment (to be pedantic I guess I should have said “the first time some guy did the low intensity double slit experiment with electrons in 1909”)
I think the bigger point is more than standing despite the (arguable) error.
*low intensity double slit with photons. ugh need to proofread
Tashiliciously Shriked @57:
Yeah, that’s what I said. No idea how you could have read it otherwise.
The point about the double slit experiment with electrons was that, by the time it was done (1961), the outcome (interference) wasn’t a surprise, and didn’t revolutionize theory.
If you want people to see the forest, get the trees right.
What we clearly need is a rule that all legislation introduced in Congress be accompanied by a written justification of exactly how the bill furthers the national interest.
I’ve little idea what this all means, but this guy does: http://profmattstrassler.com/2016/02/11/advance-thoughts-on-ligo/
davem @61: Thanks for the link. The takeaway from Strassler;
Oh, and for Lamar and Dana;
to which the market analysts will respond:
Why, that just means there will be an even bigger market for Viagra!
indeed it was.
funny how it is being presented commonly in the media as if all that cash was spent all at once on a single budget item.
excellent point that should be repeatedly stressed.
even back in the 80s, we were often told to adjust our funding justifications to the reality….
but if the reality is a basic rejection of the fundamental principles of science itself?
I’ll take not doing science at all over that, frankly. There is little point in placating ideology that is the very antithesis of the basis for why you do what you do. it is literally self-defeating.
if the goal of the current crop of legislators is do destroy science and education? there is no way to stop that by lying about what the significance of your research actually is.
I saw this trend beginning with the “Animal Research Protocal Review” process that was started at UC Berkeley in the 80s. We were, in essence, expected to lie about what our research was all about and what the goals were, simply to placate those who saw all animal research as inherently bad.
what’s the point of playing that game from a scientific perspective? nothing good, that’s for sure.
@8, cervantes:
The reason to keep at this, including improving the accuracy, is to help us understand gravity better. We know that there is a disconnect between gravity and quantum mechanics. By being better able to study gravity, we can have more information about that disconnect which can help us figure out what new theories can explain both gravity and QM. It’d be akin to saying that there was no need to examine kinematics further now that Newton published his Principia. Yeah, more sensitive instruments, but we already knew that things moved so why bother? Well, when you look closely enough, you see that Newtonian physics is wrong.
At least with gravity, we know there is a discrepancy but we don’t know how. This gives us more tools to find out how.
@18, Infophile:
The Higgs told us a lot, too, for precisely the same reason: By being at a location where we thought it ought to be, it helped eliminate certain theories, strengthened others, and gave us info on where we should start looking next.
Remember when funds for the Super Collider in Texas were cut. And now the breakthroughs in high energy physics are in Europe. . . Neither do they (congress).
I’ve been snowed under and so didn’t see this earlier.
First, gravity waves are a prediction of general relativity–one of the few predictions that had not been verified. This is what scientists do–they test predictions of theories.
Second, general relativity is not an entirely frivolous theory–GPS doesn’t work without it. It explains gravity, which is fundamental to the human experience. Understanding GR is central to understanding the spacetime in which we live, perhaps even the origin of the Universe.
Third, gravitational waves represent a new window onto the Universe. We can observe some of the most violent and energetic events in the Universe once we improve the precision of our observations.
Fourth, the precision of the measurement itself represents an amazing accomplishment, and it will undoubtedly also have applications.
Finally, it’s fricking cool!