This questions sounds a bit controversial, but I will ask it anyway.
The USA, India, Canada, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, France, Singapore, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Japan are spending billions of dollars every year on science.
Some companiesc say their created scientific research centers like Google DeepMind or Microsoft Research. Some billionaires such as Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg are funding scientific research.
Is there any actual evidence that Science lacks money?
That more money would actually help scientists do more interesting stuff?
In PC video games, a gorgeous game called Crysis came out. Everyone was stunned. Since Crysis, video game studios have spent a tremendous amount of money to try to make games more beautiful, but it hasn’t really paid off.
Almost no one notices these small improvements anymore. In fact, many gamers actually question whether studios focus too much on graphics at the expense of gameplay and fun.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Science. I’m happy we are funding Science.
But I’m just wondering whether money is the real bottleneck neck that Science faces.
Right now, do scientists actually have money problems making it difficult to conduct ambitious research?
Would more money actually help them discover new things ?
I think that it’s going to be hard to provide a meaningful answer. There are a wide range of fields that use the scientific process, the stuff that you’d call “science”.
Some of those, no doubt, produce a strong return on investment. You could say, purely on finnacial terms, that research there makes a lot of sense. Producing, say, the integrated circuit is something that transformed the world.
I am sure that if you looked, you could find some areas that don’t do that.
In some of these latter cases — say, cosmology — I doubt that there are likely direct financial returns, but if we want to understand where the universe has been and where it’s going, we have to place some kind of value on that and fund it to that value.
But…science isn’t a single entity that you fund or don’t fund to a given amount. It’s people working in a wide range of fields. It’s like saying “should we fund sysadmins more” or “should we fund human resource departments more”. The answer is almost certainly going to be “it depends on the specific case”.