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.

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