Deserving dollars: should mega budget science be funded in an age of austerity?

With the UK narrowly avoiding France's fate of a triple dip recession, I thought I would bite the bullet and examine some of the economics of current science. In a time when numerous nations are feeling severe effects due to the downturn, it is ironic that there are a multitude of science projects with budgets larger than the GDP of some smaller nations. So who funds these ventures and are they value for money, or even worthwhile, in these straitened times? Here are a few examples of current and upcoming projects, with the lesser known the project the more the information supplied:

National Ignition Facility

The world's most powerful laser was designed with a single goal: to generate net energy from nuclear fusion by creating temperatures and pressures similar to those in the cores of stars. However, to state that the NIF has not lived up to expectation would be something of an understatement. According to even the most conservative sources, the original budget of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project has at the very least doubled if not quadrupled to over US$4 billion, whilst the scheduled operational date came five years overdue.

I first learned of the project some years ago thanks to a friend who knew one of the scientists involved. The vital statistics are astonishing, both for the scale of the facility and the energies involved. But it seems that there may be underlying problems with the technology. Over-reliance on computer simulations and denial of deleterious experimental results on precursor projects, as well as the vested interests of project staffers and the over-confident potential for military advances, have all been suggested as causes for what history may conclude as a white elephant. So perhaps if you are looking for an archetypal example of how non-scientific factors have crippled research, this may well be it.

Unlike all the other projects discussed, the National Ignition Facility is solely funded by one nation, the USA. Of course, it could be argued that four billion dollars is a bargain if the project succeeded, and that it is today's time-precious society that needs to learn patience in order to appreciate the long-term timescales required to overcome the immense technological challenges. Nuclear fusion would presumably solve many of todays - and the foreseeable futures - energy requirements whilst being rather more environmentally friendly than either fossil fuels or fission reactors. The potential rewards are plain for all to see.

However, the problems are deep-rooted, leading to arguments against the development of laser-based fusion per se. Alternative fusion projects such as the Joint European Torus and the $20 billion ITER - see an earlier post on nuclear fusion research for details - use longer-established methods. My verdict in a nutshell: the science was possibly unsound from the start and the money would be better spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, perhaps the facility could get back a small portion of its funding if Star Trek movies continue to hire the NIF as a filming location!

The International Space Station

I remember the late Carl Sagan arguing that the only benefit of the ISS that couldn’t be achieved via cheaper projects such as – during the Space Shuttle era - the European Space Agency’s Spacelab, was research into the deleterious effects on health of long-duration spaceflight. So at $2 billion per year to run is it worthwhile, or but another example of a fundamentally flawed project? After all, as it is the station includes such non-scientific facets as the ultimate tourist destination for multi-millionaires!

Sometimes referred to as a lifeline for American and Russian aerospace industries (or even a way to prevent disaffected scientists in the latter from working for rogue states), I have been unable to offer a persuasive argument as to why the money would not have been better spent elsewhere. It is true that there has been investigation into vaccines for salmonella and MRSA, but after twelve years of permanent crewing on board the station, just how value for money has this research been? After all, similar studies were carried out on Space Shuttle flights in previous few decades, suggesting that the ISS was not vital to these programmes. The Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees has described as it as a 'turkey in the sky', siphoning funds that could have been spent on a plethora of unmanned missions such as interplanetary probes. But as we should be aware, it usually isn't a case that money not spent on one project would automatically become available for projects elsewhere.

On a positive scientific note, the station has played host to the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer - a key contender in the search for dark matter - which would presumably have difficulty finding a long-duration orbital platform elsewhere. But then this is hardly likely to excite those who want immediate, practical benefits from such huge expenditure.

The ISS has no doubt performed well as a test bed for examining the deterioration of the human body due to living in space, if anything seriously weakening the argument for a manned Mars mission in the near future. Perhaps one other area in which the station has excelled has been that of a focal point for promoting science to the public, but surely those who follow in Sagan’s footsteps - the U.K.'s Brian Cox for one - can front television series with a similar goal for the tiniest fraction of the cost?

The Large Hadron Collider

An amazing public-relations success story, considering how far removed the science and technology are from everyday mundanity, the world's largest particle accelerator requires $1 billion per year to operate on top of a construction budget of over $6 billion. With a staff of over 10,000 the facility is currently in the midst of a two-year upgrade, giving plenty of time for its international research community to analyse the results. After all, the Higgs Boson A.K.A. 'God particle' has been found…probably.

So if the results are confirmed, what next? Apparently, the facility can be re-engineered for a wide variety of purposes, varying from immediately pragmatic biomedical research on cancer and radiation exposure to the long-term search for dark matter. This combination of practical benefits with extended fundamental science appears to be as good a compromise as any compared to similar-scale projects. Whether similar research could be carried out by more specialised projects is unknown. Does anyone know?

As for the future of mega-budget schemes, there are various projects in development extending into the next decade. The Southern Hemisphere is playing host to two large international collaborations: the Square Kilometre Array is due to begin construction in eleven nations - excluding its UK headquarters - in 2016, but it will be around eight years before this $2 billion radio telescope array is fully operational. Meanwhile the equally unimaginatively-named European Extremely Large Telescope is planned for a site in Chile, with an even longer construction period and a price tag approaching $1.5 billion. Both projects are being designed for a variety of purposes, from dark matter investigation to searching for small (i.e. Earth-sized) extra-solar planets with biologically-modified atmospheres.

At this point it is pertinent to ask do extremely ambitious science projects have to come with equally impressive price tags? Personally I believe that with a bit more ingenuity a lot of useful research can be undertaken on far smaller budgets. Public participation in distributed computing projects such as Folding@home and Seti@home, in which raw data is processed by home computers, is about as modest an approach as feasible for such large amounts of information.

An example of a long-term project on a comparatively small budget is the US-based Earthscope programme, which collects and analyses data including eminently practical research into seismic detection. With a construction cost of about $200 million and annual budget around a mere $125 million this seems to be a relative bargain for a project that combines wide-scale, theoretical targets with short-term, pragmatic gains. But talking of practical goals, there are other scientific disciplines crying out for a large increase in funding. Will the explosive demise of a meteor above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk back in February act as a wake-up call for more research into locating and deflecting Earth-crossing asteroids and comets? After all, the 2014 NASA budget for asteroid detection projects is barely over the hundred million dollar mark!

I will admit to some unique advantages to enormous projects, such as the bringing together of researchers from the funding nations that may lead to fruitful collaboration. This is presumably due to the sheer number of scientists gathered together for long periods, as opposed to spending just a few days at an international conference or seminar, for instance. Even so, I cannot help but feel that the money for many of the largest scale projects could be bettered used elsewhere, solving some of the immediate problems facing our species and ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the countries involved offer their populations little in the way of voice as to how public money is spent on research. But then considering the appalling state of science education in so many nations, as well as the short shrift that popular culture usually gives to the discipline, perhaps it isn’t so surprising after all. If we want to make mega-budget projects more accountable, we will need to make fundamental changes to the status of science in society. Without increased understanding of the research involved, governments are unlikely to grant us choice.

From geek to guru: can professional scientists be successful expositors (and maintain careers in both fields)?

The recent BBC TV series Orbit: Earth's Extraordinary Journey gave me food for thought: although presenter Helen Czerski is a professional physicist she was burdened with a co-presenter who has no formal connection with science, namely Kate Humble. You have to ask: why was Humble needed at all? I'll grant that there could have been a logistics issue, namely getting all the locations filmed in the right season within one year, but if that was the case why not use another scientist, perhaps from a different discipline? Were the producers afraid a brace of scientists would put the public off the series?

The old days of senior figures pontificating as if in a university lecture theatre are long gone, with blackboard diagrams and scruffy hair replaced by presenters who are keen to prove their non-geek status via participation in what essentially amount to danger sports in the name of illustrating examples. Okay, so the old style could be very dry and hardly likely to be inspirational to the non-converted, but did Orbit really need a non-scientist when Helen Czerski (who is hardly new to television presenting) can deliver to camera whilst skydiving? In addition, there are some female presenters, a prominent British example being Alice Roberts, who have been allowed to solely present several excellent series, albeit involving science and humanities crossovers (and why not?)

But going back to Kate Humble, some TV presenters seems to cover such a range of subject matter that it makes you wonder if they are just hired faces with no real interest (and/or knowledge) in what they are espousing: “just read the cue cards convincingly, please!” Richard Hammond - presenter of light entertainment show Top Gear and the (literally) explosive Brainiac: Science Abuse has flirted with more in-depth material in Richard Hammond's Journey To The Centre Of The Planet, Richard Hammond's Journey To The Bottom Of The Ocean and Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds. Note the inclusion of his name in the titles – just in case you weren't aware who he is. Indeed, his Top Gear co-presenter James May seems to be genre-hopping in a similar vein, including James May's Big Ideas, James May's Things You Need to Know, James May on the Moon and James May at the Edge of Space amongst others, again providing a hint as to who is fronting the programmes. Could it be that public opinion of scientists is poor enough - part geek, part Dr Strangelove - to force producers to employ non-scientist presenters with a well-established TV image, even if that image largely consists of racing cars?



Having said that, science professionals aren't infallible communicators: Sir David Attenborough, a natural sciences graduate and fossil collector since childhood, made an astonishing howler in his otherwise excellent BBC documentary First Life. During an episode that ironically included Richard 'Mr Trilobite' Fortey himself, Sir David described these organisms as being so named due to their head/body/tail configuration. In fact, the group's name stems somewhat obviously from tri-lobes, being the central and lateral lobes in their body plan. It was an astounding slip up and gave me food for thought as to whether anyone on these series ever double checks the factual content, just to make sure it wasn't copied off the back of a cereal packet.

Another possible reason for using non-science presenters is that in order to make a programme memorable, producers aim to differentiate their expositors as much as possible. I've already discussed the merits of two of the world's best known scientists, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, and the unique attributes they bring to their programmes, even if in Dawkins' case this revolves around his attitude to anyone who has an interest in any form of unproven belief. I wonder if he extends his disapprobation to string theorists?

What is interesting is that whereas the previous generation of popular science expositors achieved fame through their theories and eventually bestselling popularisations, the current crop, of whom Helen Czerski is an example, have become well-known directly through television appearances. That's not to say that the majority of people who have heard of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins have read The Selfish Gene or A Brief History of Time. After all, the former was first published in 1976 and achieved renown in academic circles long before the public knew of Dawkins. Some estimates suggest as little as 1% of the ten million or so buyers of the latter have actually read it in its entirety and in fact there has been something of a small industry in reader's companions, not to mention Hawking's own A Briefer History of Time, intended to convey in easier-to-digest form some of the more difficult elements of the original book. In addition, the US newspaper Investors Business Daily published an article in 2009 implying they thought Hawking was an American! So can you define fame solely of being able to identify a face with a name?

In the case of Richard Dawkins it could be argued that he has a remit as a professional science communicator, or at least had from 1995 to 2008, due to his position during this time as the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. What about other scientists who have achieved some degree of recognition outside of their fields of study thanks to effective science communication? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has appeared in over fifty documentaries and counting and has written several bestselling popular science books , whilst if you want a sound bite on dinosaurs Dale Russell is your palaeontologist. But it's difficult to think of any one scientist capable of inspiring the public as much as Carl Sagan post- Cosmos. Sagan though was the antithesis of the shy and retiring scientist stereotype and faced peer accusations of deliberately cultivating fame (and of course, fortune) to the extent of jumping on scientific bandwagons solely in order to gain popularity. As a result, at the height of his popularity and with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book behind him, Sagan failed to gain entry to the US National Academy of Sciences. It could be argued that no-one has taken his place because they don't want their scientific achievements belittled or ignored by the senior science establishment: much better to claim they are a scientist with a sideline in presenting, rather than a communicator with a science background. So in this celebrity-obsessed age, is it better to be a scientific shrinking violet?

At this point you might have noticed that I've missed out Brian Cox (or Professor Brian Cox as it states on the cover of his books, just in case you thought he was an ex-keyboard player who had somehow managed to wangle his way into CERN.) If anyone could wish to be Sagan's heir - and admits to Sagan as a key inspiration - then surely Cox is that scientist. With a recent guest appearance as himself on Dr Who and an action hero-like credibility, his TV series having featured him flying in a vintage supersonic Lightening jet and quad biking across the desert, Cox is an informal, seemingly non-authoritative version of Sagan. A key question is will he become an egotistical prima donna and find himself divorced from the Large Hadron Collider in return for lucrative TV and tie-in book deals?

Of course, you can't have science without communication. After all, what's the opposite of popular science: unpopular science? The alternative to professionals enthusing about their subject is to have a mouth-for-hire, however well presented; delineating material they neither understand nor care about. And considering the power that non-thinking celebrities appear to wield, it's vital that science gets the best communicators it can, recruited from within its own discipline. The alternative can clearly be seen by last years' celebrity suggestion that oceans are salty due to whale sperm. Aargh!

Cosmic fugues: the myriad connections between music and astronomy

Although there has been a surfeit of the damp dishrag that typifies British weather hanging over our night time skies recently, there have also been a few clear, crisp evenings allowing some fine views of Jupiter, even from my light-polluted suburban London garden. Having recently upgraded my stargazing equipment from a pair of ancient yet serviceable binoculars to a modest reflecting telescope (courtesy of an unexpected tax rebate), I thought this might be a good opportunity to sketch a few observations (pun intended) regarding the connections between astronomy and music. I was partly inspired by the BBC's Stargazing Live programmes earlier this month, whose co-host was the increasingly ubiquitous physicist and ex-keyboard player Brian Cox. Admittedly, Professor Cox is more space-orientated in his broadcasting than his professional work, but it does seem to be the case that astronomers have provided plenty of musically-attuned scientists, with the opposite direction also supplying musicians with astronomical interests.

Much has been written about the semi-mystical search to understand cosmic harmonies that motivated the research of both Kepler and Newton, so the phenomenon, if I can call it that, is hardly new. It has been a while since connections were formally recognised between music and mathematics, from harmonic progression to the idea that both subjects rely on similar cognitive processes. And of course, many aspects of astronomy rely to a large extent on mathematical underpinnings.

The correlation is not a recent one: in the Eighteenth Century composer William Herschel was inspired to switch to a career in astronomy after developing an interest in the mathematic aspects of musical composition. Today his symphonies are largely forgotten in favour of his key role in astronomy, including his discovery, with his sister Caroline, of the planet Uranus. There is at least anecdotal evidence, such as that provided by the musical Bachs and mathematical Bernoullis, for some degree of direct genetic inheritability in both disciplines. So perhaps utilisation of the same area of the brain may play a key role in the association between the two seemingly disparate fields. I feel much more research could be undertaken in this area.

Although increasing urbanisation (and therefore light pollution) may lead most people to consider stargazing as about as dynamic and interesting as fly fishing, the wonder of the night sky can offer a poetic experience free to all. This suggests an obvious aesthetic motivation or sensibility that links the discipline directly to music. But if this seems pretty facile, at a slighter more involved level I would like to consider the geometry, timing and mathematical relationships that are found in astronomy and which have their own aesthetic charm. There are projects currently in progress that cover many aspects of this, working from both sides. On the music-led approach, music professors at Yale, Princeton and Florida State University are attempting to reduce musical structure to geometries that seemingly echo the Pythagorean tradition. From the astronomy angle, Stargazing Live featured a scientist converting astrophysical phenomena into audible signals, even though the results couldn’t be classed as music in any traditional aesthetic sense.

It has to be said that there are little in the way of prominent musical works that utilise astronomical methodology or facts in the way that Diane Ackerman's wonderful volume of poetry The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral succeeds. Contemporary astronomy-inclined musicians including Queen guitarist Brian May, who admittedly originally trained as an astronomer and finally completed his PhD on the Zodiacal Light in 2008, and sometime Blur bassist Alex James, he of Beagle 2 call sign fame. Yet neither has produced an astronomical-based piece that can complete with that most obvious example of space-related music, Holst's The Planets, which was inspired by purely astrological rather than astronomical themes. My own favourite of the genre is Vangelis' 1976 album Albedo 0.39, which culminates in the title track detailing a geophysical description of Earth. Whether the Open University astronomy degree taken by Myleene Klass will inspire her to an astronomy-orientated meisterwork is...err...possibly somewhat doubtful...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Or who validates popular science books?)

Gandhi once said "learn as if you were to live forever", but for the non-scientist interested in gaining accurate scientific knowledge this can prove rather tricky. Several options are available in the UK, most with drawbacks: there are few 'casual' part-time adult science courses (including the Open University); the World Wide Web is useful but inhibits organised, cohesive learning and there's always the danger of being taken in by some complete twaddle; whilst television documentaries and periodicals rarely delve into enough detail. This only leaves the ever-expanding genre of popular science books, with the best examples often including the false starts and failed hypotheses that make science so interesting.

However, there is a problem: if the book includes mistakes then the general reader is unlikely to know any better. I'm not talking about the usual spelling typos but more serious flaws concerning incorrect facts or worse still, errors of emphasis and misleading information. Admittedly the first category can be quite fun in a 'spot the mistake' sort of way: to have the particle physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw inform you that there were Muslims in the second century AD, as they do in Why does E=mc2? (and why should we care?) helps to make the authors a bit more human. After all, why should a physicist also have good historical knowledge? Then again, this is the sort of fact that is extremely easy to verify, so why wasn't this checked in the editing process? You expect Dan Brown's novels to be riddled with scientific errors, but are popular science book editors blind to non-science topics?

Since the above is an historical error many readers may be aware of the mistake, but the general public will often not be aware of inaccuracies relating to scientific facts and theories. Good examples of the latter can be found in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, the bestselling popular science book in the UK in 2005. As a non-scientist Bryson admits that it's likely to be full of "inky embarrassments" and he's not wrong. For instance, he makes several references to the DNA base Thymine but at one point calls it Thiamine, which is actually Vitamin B1. However, since Bryson is presenting themed chapters of facts (his vision of science rather than any explanation of methods) these are fairly minor issues and don't markedly detract from the substance of the book.

So far that might seem a bit nitpicky but there are other works containing more fundamental flaws that give a wholly inaccurate description of a scientific technique. My favourite error of this sort can be found in the late Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium and is howler that continues to astonish me more than a decade after first reading. Gould correctly states that raw radiocarbon dates are expressed as years BP (Before Present) but then posits that this 'present' relates directly to the year of publication of the work containing that date. In other words, if you read a book published in AD 2010 that refers to the date 1010 BP, the latter year is equivalent to AD 1000; whereas for a book published in AD 2000, 1010 BP would equate to AD 990. It's astounding that Gould, who as a palaeontologist presumably had some understanding of other radiometric dating methods, could believe such a system would be workable. The 'present' in the term BP was fixed at AD 1950 decades before Gould's book was published, so it doubly astonishes that no-one questioned his definition. You have to ask were his editors so in awe that they were afraid to query his text, or did his prominence give him copy-editing control of his own material? A mistake of this sort in a discipline so close to Gould's area of expertise can only engender doubt as to the veracity of his other information.

A more dangerous type of error is when the author misleads his readership through personal bias presented as fact. This is particularly important in books dealing with recent scientific developments as there will be few alternative sources for the public to glean the information from. In turn, this highlights the difference between professionals and their peer-reviewed papers and the popularisations available to the rest of us. There is an ever-increasing library of popular books discussing superstrings and M-theory but most make the same mistake of promoting this highly speculative branch of physics not just as the leading contender in the search for a unified field theory, but as the only option. Of course a hypothesis that cannot be experimentally verified is not exactly following a central tenet of science anyway. There has been discussion in recent years of a string theory Mafia so perhaps this is only a natural extension into print; nonetheless it is worrying to see a largely mathematical framework given so much premature attention. I suppose only time will tell...

It also appears that some publishers will accept material from senior but non-mainstream scientists on the basis of the scientist's stature, even if their hypotheses border on pseudoscience. The late Fred Hoyle was a good example of a prominent scientist with a penchant for quirky (some might say bizarre) ideas such as panspermia, who although unfairly ignored by the Nobel Committee seems to have had few problems getting his theories into print. Another example is Elaine Morgan, who over nearly four decades has written a string of volumes promoting the aquatic ape hypothesis despite lack of evidence in the ever-increasing fossil record.

But whereas Hoyle and Morgan's ideas have long been viewed as off the beaten track, there are more conventional figures whose popular accounts can be extremely misleading, particularly if they promote the writer's pet ideas over the accepted norm. Stephen Jay Gould himself frequently came in for criticism for overemphasising various evolutionary methods at the expense of natural selection, yet his peers' viewpoint is never discussed in his popular writings. Another problem can be seen in Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve, which received enormous publicity on publication as it gratifies our desire to understand human origins. However, the book includes a jumbled combination of extreme speculation and pure fiction, tailored in such a way as to maximise interest at the expense of clarification. Some critics have argued the reason behind Sykes's approach is to promote his laboratory's mitochondrial DNA test, capable of revealing which 'daughter' the customer is descended from. Scientists have to make a living like everyone else, but this commercially-driven example perhaps sums up the old adage that you should never believe everything you read. The Catch-22 of course is that unless you understand enough of the subject beforehand, how will you know if a popular science book contains errors?

A final example does indeed suggest that some science books aimed at a general audience prove to be just too complex for comprehensive editing by anyone other than the author. I am talking about Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. At over one thousand pages this great tome is marketed with the sentence "No particular mathematical knowledge on the part of the reader is assumed", yet I wonder whether the cover blurb writer had their tongue firmly in their cheek? It is supposed to have taken Penrose eight years to write and from my occasional flick-throughs in bookshops I can see it might take me that long to read, never mind understand. I must confess all those equations haven't really tempted me yet, at least not until I have taken a couple of Maths degrees...