If I were a rich man… - February 22, 2008
Over on his blog Chad Orzel, a physicist at Union College in Schenectady, NY, asks how $3 billion could best be spent on science.
This is how much the Human Genome Project cost over its 13 years. Interestingly Orzel wouldn’t spend the money on physics, saying “if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc”.
Even if the field is narrowed down to physics he wouldn’t go for particle accelerators, saying “is discovering the Higgs Boson going to materially improve the lives of anyone other than the heads of the collaboration that makes the first discovery and gets the Nobel? Not really.”
If I had three billion dollars to throw at a single area of physics, I'd probably go for high-temperature superconductivity. It's a phenomenon that's still not understood all that well, and the potential impact is huge. If somebody could find a way to make mass quantities of material that superconducts at or near room temperature, that would be one of the most revolutionary physics developments since the transistor.
Debate continues in the comments of his post.
Not that $3 billion is really much in the grand scheme of science. For example, the National Institutes of Health spends $28 billion a year on medical research.
Image: Getty
Comments
I completely agree with Orzel, although I would even go as far as saying room-temperature superconductivity is more important, in the long run, that a cure for AIDS plus Malaria.
It is an enabling technology.
Simply think of what it could means in terms of energy usage: tap geothermal energy where it can be accessed cheaply (Afar, hot spots, Japan) and transport it over the world with no other costs than the original infrastructure investment... Energy again, fusion power probably will not happen (if it does at all in the near future) without room-temp superconductivity.
To name but a few, this would probably mean a revolution in transportation (maglev, anyone?), telecommunication, space access, prosthetic devices... This would have on our societies an impact of the same order of magnitude than the transistor.
Posted by: Varkhan | February 23, 2008 03:56 AM
Been there, done that :
http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/bion.htm
Posted by: Thomas Lee Elifritz | February 23, 2008 05:17 PM
Yes, HTS and its implementation.
Right now we could be generating 10 times more energy from wind alone, if the propellers were replaced with wide surface area blades coupled to HTS generators to balance load varience.
Posted by: Venn Mathiam | February 28, 2008 09:02 PM