
Physics worth more to EU economy than retail and financial services, says study - sbdmmg
https://sciencebusiness.net/physics-worth-more-eu-economy-retail-and-financial-services-says-study
======
sbdmmg
The conclusion of this study is not clear at all to me. From reading their
executive summary, the CEBR researchers seem to take the global value added
(GVA) of any physics-based industry, and consider it as a something like a
contribution of physics to the society. That sounds like a gross
overestimation to me.

As an example, they consider "Extraction of crude petroleum" as a physics-
based industry. Naively I would consider that industry at least 33% physics,
33% chemistry, and 33% engineering. Aren't they largely overestimating their
conclusion by neglecting chemistry and egineering?

Disclaimer: I am a former physicist. I really think that science funding is
vital to Europe, that this kind of studies should help supporting the field...
I would just like to better understand how the EPS and CEBR got to such a
clickbait title. I have the impression that this kind of article could
actually undermine the credibility of all the contributions that Physics
research is actually bringing to society at large.

~~~
marcusverus
They're correct in that the production of crude is not possible without the
physics. It is a necessary input, ergo physics _unlocks_ that economic
activity.

It sounds like your concern is that all three fields of Physics, Engineering,
and Chemistry could claim this output, which would be odd, because if every
field did this, their combined 'value added' would be many times the total
GDP, since their contributions overlap, like you mentioned. That doesn't
matter, because we're not concerned about measuring the GDP with this method
(if we were, we would have to divide credit like you mentioned) just the
objective contribution of a single field.

~~~
antoineMoPa
Gravity keeps bank on the ground, thus physics funding is essential to the
finance world. Imagine all banks floating away.

~~~
haecceity
Funny. More seriously though gravity would keep banks on the ground regardless
if we study it or not. So physics research doesn't really contribute in this
case :(

~~~
ben509
But we only _know_ it does because of physics, and without knowing there isn't
a risk of banks floating away, people would be afraid of building banks. And,
of course, mechanics generally are what enable the analysis of large static
loads.

Same issue with how studying life expectancy and mortality allows you to
quantify the risk of death, injury and disease, thus enabling life insurance
and health insurance.

The problem with the claim "this is all physics" is that, yes, Newton wrote
down the original formulas for mechanics, but those had to be translated into
all the engineering practices to be useful. Most of the economic value comes
from engingeers who have mastered nth-order derivations of the original
equations.

~~~
solveit
I really don't think people would be afraid of banks floating away, Newton or
no.

------
lazyjones
The kind of sophistry nonsense that passes as a scientific study these days is
amazing.

Agriculture is worth much more than physics, since it feeds physicists all by
itself. You could come up with many such dependencies to create chains of
"worth more" relations, all utterly pointless. If the idea was to get more
funding for physicists, it's unconvincing.

~~~
dTal
Your example with agriculture doesn't really support your argument that
dependency chain analysis is 'utterly pointless'. Agriculture _is_ more
important than physics; we would never prioritize physics research over food.
So this example seems like a success for this analytical method.

------
skribbj
I'm hopefully a future physicist and the first to defend its importance but
this kind of argument seems quite bad faith to me.

" _Physics-based industries are those that rely heavily on expertise in
physics. These include oil and gas extraction, nuclear fuel processing, and
various forms of manufacturing like fibre optics, lighting equipment, office
machinery, cars, ships and armaments._ "

Oil extraction, gas, and ships. Really? Sure, I get it, these areas wouldn't
be possible without prior physics research, and present physicists will create
new economic opportunities in the future; but blindly inhereting these fields'
economic signifiance to physics seems incorrect. In other news, mathematics
worth more than 80% of EU economy - these industries include finance,
business, engineering, computing, and entertainment.

~~~
madaxe_again
You say that, but an awful lot of people doing maths in industry are
physicists - mathematicians are far more likely to stay in academia. One of my
first jobs was writing trading algorithms in the early 2000s - I was a physics
student, most of the dev team were physicists or chemists. We got a
mathematician in to consult on some gnarly cluster analysis - but after a
month he presented us a white paper that was very, very pretty, and described
our problem mathematically very succinctly - but totally unusable as it wasn’t
so much a solution as a beautifully defined problem.

~~~
walterstucco666
But the point is you are not doing physics, you are at best tweaking some pre
existing model.

I did it in the past while consulting for a major bank, I studied CS, not
physics, and I haven't seen any applied physics in banks.

They hire young people studying physics because they are not scared of working
"with numbers", but when you past 40 you're not scared of anything anymore and
you'll find there a majority of people with a degree in economy, once you
grasped the basics, you can do the job.

While the physics student hopes to be a real physicist someday in the future
and stop working on trading models as soon as somethings better comes up.

------
perspective1
The idea that the (whole economy) = (physics + retail + financials + other
stuff) seems like somebody made a type error. You can't just add a research
field to industries. I guess you could draw out 2 separate pies: 1 of GDP by
industry and 1 by "field" but you're still comparing apples to oranges.

------
droithomme
So they spent an absolute fortune on things which might be cool but really
contributed nothing to the economy except construction and employment. And the
argument is that because they wasted such a huge amount on these vapid
endeavors, an incredible proportion of the entire economy, that therefore they
should continue because it is "contributing" to the economy by virtue of its
_spending_.

Give Universal Basic Income to everyone. That will spend more and then we can
say with the same reasoning that UBI is worth more to the economy than retail
and financial services.

------
mjfl
“All businesses require movement and the existence of stuff to make a profit
and thus depend on physics. Please please please fund our new particle
accelerator”

------
PeterStuer
"Physics-based industries, it says, include electrical, civil and mechanical
engineering, as well as computing and other industries reliant on physics
research."

This model feels overly broad. For instance I'd agree developing a new process
for microprocessor production is physics centric, but writing sofware is not
and both are part of 'computing'.

------
floki999
I don’t dispute the significance of physics to industry and economics, but
basic physics innovation would not be commercialized without the participation
of a host of non-physicists.

------
orbifold
Which is why of course physics departments pay you ~50% to do a PhD, whereas
in Computer Science they pay 100% because otherwise no one will apply.

------
hanniabu
They should pay like it is

------
esotericn
As a physics graduate I would have considered this self evident. Of course we
pretty much single handedly run the economy. Along with our sidekicks [0] in
the other hard sciences we invented it.

[0] [https://www.xkcd.com/435](https://www.xkcd.com/435)

</s>

~~~
H8crilA
This is probably a PR campaign by CERN, though. They're going through a rough
patch after discovering little and needing new money for new experiments.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
hogFeast
Scientist discovers that he is very important and valuable. Much more valuable
than all those idiots who didn't go to university...or those people who did go
to university but earn more than scientist despite being way way more stupid
then scientist.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Our society does not value scientists, you can't become a billionaire by doing
research.

Einstein, Steven Hawkins, and Isaac Newton went down in history, but their net
worth is nothing compared to fast-food chains. Does that means KFC created
more value for society?

