Life and Physics

See also Chapter 3.3 of Smashing Physics.

In a way, I am quite impressed by the Royal Academy of Engineering. They have managed to speak very clearly in response to some difficult questions from our new political masters. What they have to say, however, is pretty depressing.

Their “central belief” is that the priority for government-funded science and engineering research should be:

rebalancing of the economy away from financial services and towards a high-technology based manufacturing sector

ATLAS barrel silicon detector, built in the UK. Photo credit STFC.

This may make sense. I see real deficiencies in the way the UK trains and treats people of who are technically skilled, compared to some of our competitors (I’m thinking particularly of Germany and France, where I have some direct experience). I have a feeling that we place too much emphasis on marketing and management, as though these have value independent of the things they are marketing or managing. But this is not much more than a gut feeling, and unfortunately the RAEng document doesn’t provide any evidence to bolster my prejudice. A missed opportunity, assuming they have such evidence.

Equally evidence-free, and infinitely more depressing, is the way the RAEng think the government should go about achieving this:

The over-riding consideration for BIS should be the impact of research on the economy in the short to medium term

and the way to do this is to ensure that:

the available Science and Research budget should be targeted where it will have most impact in the  foreseeable future

Naively I would have thought that this “foreseeable future” stuff was precisely where private-sector research should take the lead, rather than the public sector, since foreseeable impact presumably means there’s a market. But actually maybe the public sector is better at this than the private sector. Perhaps a command economy is actually the way forward. They’re probably right. Whitehall, and governments in general, are notoriously good at spotting the next transformative technology wave, of course.

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