What does a society gain from curiosity? What justifies public spending on research? Klaas Landsman, professor of mathematical physics in Nijmegen, sees a parallel between investments in storm surge barriers and those in fundamental science. He reflected on this on the occasion of the 2017 Ammodo KNAW Award.
In 1969, the US Senate Committee on Atomic Energy held a hearing on the spending of $250 million of taxpayers' money to build Fermilab, a particle accelerator centre similar to CERN in Geneva. The hearing produced a dialogue between Senator John Pastore and physicist Dr. Robert R. Wilson, the first director of Fermilab, that has become legendary, including the following excerpt:
PASTORE: Is there anything connected in the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
WILSON: No, sir; I do not believe so.
PASTORE: Nothing at all?
WILSON: Nothing at all.
PASTORE: It has no value in that respect?
WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with those things.
It has nothing to do with the miliary. I am sorry.
PASTORE: Don't be sorry for it.
WILSON: I am not, but I cannot in honesty say it has any such application.
PASTORE: Is there anything here that projects us in a position of being competitive with the Russians, with regard to this race?
WILSON: Only from a long-range point of view, of a developing technology. Otherwise, it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.
Congress did indeed make the money available for Fermilab - also thanks to the continuing influence of Vannevar Bush's 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier, which advocated generous public funding for fundamental research.
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The 17th Century not only brought us Spinoza, Huygens and Rembrandt, but also the merchants who could afford the latter's paintings. It also brought the politics of Johan de Witt, which meant that the Netherlands focused entirely on conducting trade and accumulating wealth.
And in many ways, the Netherlands still does: could the slogan: ‘kennis, kunde, kassa’ - knowledge, capability, cash in! - have come from anywhere else? On the other hand: doesn't fundamental science contribute heavily to trade and prosperity? Of course it does. The success stories don't lie.
The success of fundamental science
We owe the computer not to businessmen like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but ultimately to the pure mathematicians and philosophers who around 1900 wanted to know exactly what a mathematical proof was. In the hands of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, this investigation into the foundations of mathematics led directly to the modern computer. If there is ever a quantum computer, it will be thanks to physicists like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, who, in the context of quantum mechanics around 1930, raised fundamental questions about whether or not pure chance or even reality exists.
The World Wide Web was not born in Silicon Valley but at CERN, where the physicists were hunting for the Higgs particle, not for economic benefit for member states.
Wi-Fi, now the indispensable standard for wireless computer networks, resulted from fundamental questions raised by radio astronomers. I limit myself here to examples from the exact sciences, but the list could be extended endlessly across the board.
Beyond the horizon
However, this resounding success of curiosity-driven fundamental research does not convince our politicians and managers to invest generously in it. There seem to be three reasons for this. The first is the long period between laying the foundation and benefiting from the often unexpected application; depending on exactly how the starting and ending points are chosen, that spans 20 to 50 years. That is far beyond the horizon of a politician who wants to win the next election, or that of a CEO who wants to collect option bonuses.
Small-scale anarchy
The second reason dawned on me once when I was sitting at a consultation with officials from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Suddenly one of them showed interest. Fervently he exclaimed: "We can steer with that!" The rest of the meeting was spent on 'subsidy instruments' that could then be used to steer. All were happy. Politicians and their entourage want to steer. "Steer, not row" is even the slogan of the so-called New Public Management. But it has often been said: science cannot be steered. Yes, the particle accelerator LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN and the detectors within it were carefully planned and built over 20 years. But even there, insights advanced along the way and it was trial and error, adjustment and trying again.
Most fundamental science is unpredictable and benefits from small-scale anarchy. Its application, as a reward in the future, is even less likely to be planned. Nobody expressed this as beautifully as Wilhelm van Humboldt over two centuries ago. Freely translated: "Science often bestows its blessings on society just when it seems to have forgotten the latter to some extent. (...) Its real value lies in shaping the human mind in such a way that it does not miss the hard-to-discover point where thought and reality meet and voluntarily merge."
Tiny effect
The third reason is that fundamental science (like biological evolution) is undeniably a wasteful process. Most fundamental science will ultimately lead nowhere. Even of the best pure research, only a fraction is applicable, and only a fraction of that fraction will ever increase our prosperity. And yet almost all modern prosperity stems from this tiny effect: the great innovation of the future will completely overshadow the many dead ends of today.
The experiments at CERN's LHC, one of the most successful experiments ever, are a fine metaphor of this. The vast majority of nuclear particles shot off do not collide with their counterparts. The collisions that do take place mainly generate noise. Only a tiny fraction of those collisions lead to interesting observations in the giant detectors. Yet in 2012, the existence of the Higgs particle was deduced from such extremely rare signals.
Storm surge barrier
For politicians, voters and the media, this is understandably difficult: they would like to see all tax money spent in a demonstrably useful, accountable and traceable way, such as on healthcare, security, or infrastructure. However, this diagnosis suggests a direction for solving the problem.
Perhaps the Netherlands should learn to see fundamental science as a kind of storm surge barrier. After Zeeland flooded in 1953, the Netherlands spent forty years constructing the Delta Works. Many billions were spent. Nobody was sure if and when we would benefit, because you don't know where and when the high tide will come. Yet almost everyone understood the point of this investment.
The Delta Works proved that the Netherlands can best handle long term scales and large investments. And today, those Delta Works are the pride of the country.
