
Europe Pulls Ahead of U.S. in Physics - nickb
http://www.newsweek.com/id/157514
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giardini
Should be retitled "Europe Pulls Way Ahead of U.S. in Expenditures on Particle
Physics". Or "The Albatross is Passed to Europe".

I wish Europe all possible success in nailing down the thirteenth significant
digit of the electron's Lande g-factor. May string theorists ("B Ship") flock
to Europe, abandoning the U.S. in droves, so that those few remaining
physicists can get some useful work done with their ever-dwindling government
grants.

String-theory humour at [http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/01/06/string-wars-hit-
the-msm...](http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/01/06/string-wars-hit-the-msm/)

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william-newman
I am not as sure as giardini that the money is ill-spent --- poking around in
a new regime is an interesting gamble, not necessarily an albatross. But the
article does seem unusually asinine. "Leadership in the branch of science that
delivered just about every major technology of the past hundred years?"
Physics, broadly defined, has delivered major technologies, yes. (Just about
every major technology! Don't be distracted by minor technologies like
antibiotics, restriction enzymes, pesticides, fertilizers, plastics, etc.) But
once you define physics so broadly that it includes transistors and lasers and
satellites, the US is still doing fairly well under that definition. Massive
spending in the subfield of high-energy physics doesn't give you leadership in
the entire broad field of physics, and there's no particular reason to expect
major technologies will come primarily from from the high energy subfield in
the future. Granting for the sake of argument the silly apparent assumption
that outspending is outdoing, CERN still doesn't deliver leadership in
subfields like condensed matter physics that may still have a few technologies
left in them.

