My recent piece on Barrett's Challenge drew a strong response from Jay Molstad:
As a scientist with a Ph.D. from a good school, this is an issue of serious concern to me. But I believe that the problem goes deeper than education.I am on the job market after another postdoc, and the job openings that would justify educating more scientists just aren't there. If anything, the average market value of a scientist seems to be going down in real terms. Biotech is booming, and infotech is post-boom, but in chemistry (my field) and other basic sciences the trend has been down for a while.
(snip)
American industry has basically stopped funding basic research, presumably because it doesn't make money anymore (there was a time, not long ago, when it made lots of money). The students may not understand the fundamental economic causes, but they know that the fast track to big bucks no longer goes through the physics department. If anything, science education gets in the way of the gormless optimism that the market really rewards.
I don't think that a PR campaign, or even an expansion in the science education budget, can make a dent in this problem. A massive government investment in basic research might make a difference, if it was big enough (raising the budget of the NSF by a factor of 10 or something similarly ambitious). It may be, in the final analysis, that we're simply starting to reach the limits of what science can do.
There's a lot of meat here. Let's chew on it for a while:
As the uncle of a newly-minted (and unemployed) chemical engineer I can certainly see Jay's point about the market. Gordon Moore was a chemistry major, and like the second-act character in Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" Jay asks, "where's my silicon chip?"
But has science reached its end? That's where I disagree. Sure, as the mine gets deeper you have to travel further to get to the rock face. But has science reached its limits?
The perception, I think, is based on a false assumption that the available work is limited. It's this point I find most distressing (and most false) in Jay's note. God knows this old world has problems. Science is the only hope of solution, other than genocide (or, more precisely, sui-genocide, when a population destroys itself).
The problem is there's a limit to the money we're willing to put into science, and the glory we're willing to give to scientists. (After all, the men of Project Apollo weren't made rich -- they were just working on something bigger than themselves, something important.) Those limits need to be lifted. To solve the problems of this world every scientist and every engineer must have good, fulfilling, well-paid work to do. Nothing less than the world's best effort will do.
I'm urging that Craig Barrett take this as part of his special challenge. Since he's close to retirement age, and shows no signs of tiring, I think this is precisely what he should be doing.
We need to put more money into science, we need to find more good jobs engineers everywhere might do, and we need to make the whole field glorious again.
More important, we need for someone to look at this challenge as a business problem, an opportunity, and Barrett's work at Intel gives him just the right background. (That's Buzz Aldrin stepping off the Eagle lander, from ThinkQuest, and those who don't know the name of the photographer have to repeat the course.)
Send this to him. Urge this on him.
The future is what we make it, all of us, and to those whom much is given, much is expected.
Wow. Good service at this blog.
I agree that there are still frontiers in science with some real promise to them (biotech, most obviously).
I also agree that there is an unlimited amount of science to do, just as there is an unlimited amount of cleaning to do, especially in my apartment. We can sit around observing things all day. But to be practical, science has to work within certain limits.
One limit is the human condition. People are born ignorant; we do not become scientists without years of expensive education. The more sophisticated the state of the art in any field gets, the more education it takes to make a scientist. Since scientists eventually die, it takes a certain amount of investment just to maintain what we have.
Economics is another limit. In a market economy, science must generate a return on investment to be sustainable (nonmarket economies have different problems). When an industrial process is running at 30% efficiency, or a product is very primitive, a small investment in engineering usually makes a significant improvement in the bottom line. When a process is running at 99.9 % efficiency and the product has seen many generations of refinement, it takes a very large investment in engineering to make noticeable improvement to the bottom line.
This means that as a discipline becomes more sophisticated, a typical scientist's career becomes less profitable. Similarly, the price of education keeps rising. These economic factors will, if economic theory works, deflect increasing numbers of young people toward other career choices.
Of course, we can, individually or collectively, fund science that doesn't pay for itself. In the long run, though, both individuals and governments are under pressure to control costs. Uneconomical science is pretty easy to cut when the alternative is cutting Grandma's social security.
As far as the problems of the world go, I consider most of them political, not scientific. All the data in the world is useless if we can't act on it. The greenhouse effect is one obvious example, but an even simpler one is Medicare. Everyone gets older at the rate of one year of age per year. Scientific facts don't come any simpler than that. Enacting policies to accomodate this fact is, so far, totally beyond our capability.
As partial as I am to science, I think that encouraging the young to study history and psychology would probably be of more benefit to the nation. Leaders who have studied the process that leads men into wars, making totally crazy decisions one rational step at a time, would be worth a great deal right now.