ormr

The problem is not that one has to communicate the significance of research. However since the people with money don’t understand the science, they can easily be mislead. And there are also big trends when it comes to funding so you can participate in the buzzword olympics to secure your funding. And this is where you leave the path of just communicating your research and its potential honestly.

The second point where this Nobel prize winner is very right is that it’s all about networking, all about names. I don’t know why we can’t just publish research under a pseudonym, a number would suffice. This would make publishing and reviewing less susceptible to bias.

Sorry, my irony detector must be malfunctioning.

And which reviewer or publishers verifies how “significant” a contribution is beyond seeing some initials matched with tags like “visualization” or “experimental design”? That’s right, nobody. It’s not even remotely traceable who did what if you’re a reviewer.

Academia is full of fraud and people trying to secure their share of credit because in academia it’s all about names, as the twitter exchange above illustrates so profoundly. And the other driver for the sad state of academia is of course having the quantity of published papers as the most important criterion for academic success. The more papers, the more citations, the bigger your name will become. It determines your chances of getting funding and therefore your career. If you want to make a career in science you have little options but to comply with this system.

Stupid at this point in humanity’s history? Why should it be stupid to make it cheaper to fly payloads into space when we have unprecedented demand for renewable energy? Without interference of the atmosphere we could harvest solar energy much more efficiently and reliably.

We are likely to see a space elevator build in 100 years and it will be a good thing for humanity. For example we’ll be able to remove nuclear waste from earth and send it away for good with negligible costs.

These are just two economic examples. From a scientific perspective cheap space flight is valuable because it enables a lot of advances, like the next generation of space telescopes, working as interferometers without atmospheric disturbances.

So I think it’s everything but stupid for humanity to expand it’s space operations if this is accompanied by meaningful regulations. The latter of course will require a lot of energy to achieve.

Ah cool. First time I’ve seen that!

Rock and stone brother