508,000 cost. 462,00 salaries. That leaves 46,000 for equipment. Over three years that is roughly 15,300/year. Numbers that low in a government might be only office costs, desks, a few computers and maybe a big printer. I think this might make it the cheapest new-physics experiment in recent memory.
The goal of this program seems to be to keep this guy on payroll. This guy knows something. It is probably totally unrelated to this "patent" but there is some reason the Navy wanted to keep him in their orbit.
Another possibility could be office politics. Perhaps the researcher played golf or whatever with somebody quite senior and convinced them to back his pet project. The senior person's juniors know it's nonsense, but they fund the most bare-bones programme anyway in order to placate them.
Yes, that is their salary but that isn't their total "cost". From the navy's budget perspective people cost much more than their actual salary (benefits, admin cost etc).
Example. I work in the military. I am paid a salary. But, as a government employee I must take certain online courses (anti-bullying, sexual harassment, workplace safety). These are from another department but are budgeted as if they are from an outside organization. When I take the class, at no cost to me, the fee for that class moves from one pile of money (my unit's training budget) to another (the unit offering the course). Such expenses, even though internal to the larger organization, are budgeted by individual units. They are a cost associated with my employment but are not salary, tax, benefits or anything else employees might see on their paychecks. Such costs are real and must be anticipated whenever you hire people.
In business its called an overhead ratio. The total cost of employing someone, giving them a desk and buying them equipment, heating the space they work in, paying other employment related costs like a HR department, payroll etc. In my industry it’s typically between 2 and 2.5 times the gross salary of an employee.
“Salary” numbers almost never include benefits like health plans and pension contributions, and they definitely don’t include things like unemployment insurance payments, and payroll taxes.
I have never seen salary used as the total cost of an employee.
Right that's the point--there's a mismatch. The number in the original article likely includes benefits and overhead. The person I'm replying to is posting numbers from glassdoor and other places that most likely don't.
Federal scientists are on the General Schedule payscale. As mentioned in another comment, they start out at about a GS-12 for PhD-level positions and move up to GS-15 from there (and then a small number of highly influential scientists can become 'super scientists' at the GS-16 level, and a very select few, i.e. Fauci, are on RF rather than GS scales). Then there is a locality adjustment.
The rates are pretty similar to professor salaries at research universities; staff scientists at universities are often subordinate or soft-money positions.
There's no such thing as "GS-16 level" anymore (not since the 70s according to Wikipedia). Beyond GS-15, management moves into the Senior Executive Service or "ES scale". On the technical side, there is a Senior Technical or "ST" track.
I don't know how DoD does things, but in my agency the center director is the only ES at the field center level (presumably there are lots more ES types at HQ). We have quite a few STs, basically the top scientist in each research area is an ST.
Take that with a grain of salt. At the US national labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, PNNL, ...), ~$70k is what a postdoc makes. A Scientist I starts at ~$120k.
National labs are a tiny (and highly sought after) sliver. In my experience of rummaging through public wage records, I have never seen a staff scientist at state run university outside of the $60k-$80k range.
Yeah, he's probably paid around 140k. (Given his age [0], and knowing that first year scientists at similar places start at GS-13, I'm going to guess he's at a GS-14 equivalent with DC area locality pay.)
This, plus your internal grant money not only covers your salary but overhead, means a 140k person costs 300k or more.
Federal scientists are typically paid through a few projects that total to 100%, so I doubt all of the 462k from the article went to paying him, but probably a large chunk of that did.
Costs could be kept low artificially by putting other bigger assets on another budget. Like borrowing some cloud credits / super computer time, or you know the alien tech that powers the experiment :D
Well, I do credit this guy for doing an experiment that isn't in the cloud. So much of physics these days is about detecting a signal out of some giant noisy data set, or divining some truth out of a massive mathematical problem. This guy was looking for a measurable force. Spin a big diamond, throw some liquid helium on it, hit it with a magnetic hammer, and if your theory is correct it floats off the table. The yes/no answer is plain to see. That's a fundamentally physical experiment reminiscing of those done in centuries past.
Eh, he's probably doing good work in other areas and convinced someone to try out this newfangled doohickey. It didn't pan out, and he's on to other things. That's quite normal in R&D at these levels.
Or-- and this is a big or-- the inventions did lead to operable devices and/or craft that we don't fully understand nor have a good grasp on using. So it might be real, but essentially useless. I find that idea much more disappointing than it being totally false.
The goal of this program seems to be to keep this guy on payroll. This guy knows something. It is probably totally unrelated to this "patent" but there is some reason the Navy wanted to keep him in their orbit.