This sentiment is interesting "Over the past few years, NIF has been getting a fat 'F.'" Perhaps now that 'grade' will change.
Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to?
Instead, we should be asking what we've learned and how the project has advanced science.
Is this even basic science? It sounds more like an engineering problem, albeit a very hard one. I am not a physicist, but I would consider this more like the Manhattan project -- the science being done is not of the 'deeper under standing of nature' type, but rather 'how do you make a controllable explosion' type.
Given that, the way to evaluate the project is not on grants received, articles published or citations in premier journals, but rather 'Did you make a controlled explosion? If not when will you be able to?' And I think, so far an 'F' is fair.
It's definitely still a science. For example, there are still basic fluid-mechanics questions we don't fully understand about how plasmas behave. Also there's this journal: http://www.ans.org/pubs/journals/fst/
Disclaimer: I worked in a fusion lab in undergrad.
"What was happening, of course, was that all the boys had decided to work on this and to stop their research in science. All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering."
Good way of putting it so that people can understand. Feynman was a scientist, not an engineer, so that's a clue that the Manhattan project involved science, not just engineering.
The same is true of fusion research. That's why it's "research", not merely "development".
In particular, the physics of plasma instabilities has always been quite imperfectly understood, and that has been one of the key problems with controlled fusion since the 1950s.
The Manhattan project was a boy band or had a significant boy band component. It clearly involved a number of amateur male musicians[1][2].
Science is about understanding, engineering is about building something.
If the Manhattan project had resulted in no new understanding, but had created a nuclear bomb it would have been a success. The science was incidental to the success of the project.
Engineering is built on science so there will often be scientists involved in Engineering projects, however the assumption with an Engineering project is that the science is already understood (or at least significantly understood) and so the main effort is in the design and
construction.
The problem with Science projects is that they are hard to sell to the public. Thats because its hard for someone who isn't a domain expert to put a value on its significance. This is why a lot of Science projects are dressed up as Engineering projects[1] to sell them to the public.
Its pretty clear that the above fusion research is a Science project, i.e about understanding.
If this facility is being used to produce new bombs then that is an engineering project but if it is just being used to gain understanding about existing bombs then its science.
You mistake my point -- the nature of the work Feynman did at Los Alamos was different than the nature of the work he did at the Institute for Advanced Study. All of the work was science, but at Los Alamos the target was a working bomb, at Princeton it was a deeper and more fundamental understanding of nature, and thus criteria for judging is different.
The Manhattan Project can be judged by the simple question, is there a working bomb? Evaluating basic research is much harder.
That's not what was said. OP said it's not about fundamental science, which is somewhat true. Nuclear weapons research isn't fundamental, although it does require some fundamental research.
That's not enough. Learning what doesn't work is sort of useful, but only if it ever leads to something that DOES work. There's an infinite supply of dead ends out there. You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
It depends what question you are asking. If the question is "should we fund projects even if we don't know if or when they will have demonstrable results?" then I would argue that, yes, some portion of research should go towards that.
How long is "long enough" to deem that a line of experimentation "didn't work out?" There is no period long enough. Sometimes a negative result is quite useful down the road. Some research just comes together when the right things are learned and tried. So any notion of a "dead end" is really just a tentative assessment, frozen in time.
Without harsh assessments, a massive project will eventually dedicate some of its resources into self-perpetuation, that is justifying its existence rather than producing results.
It's a risk we need to take (or mitigate) if we want to have a steady flow of new breakthroughs. Science, just as programming or any other creative discipline, is best done when you have more money than you need and nobody is looking at your hands.
I'm not a scientist, but I am a programmer, and I find that learning new things is very often a process of eliminating dead ends through trial and error. That's how you narrow it down to the thing that actually does work.
It sounds like you're saying "don't bother exploring dead ends, either do it right the first time or give up," which is a lot like saying "I just want a penthouse apartment, stop wasting time building a foundation."
Yes, I think what you are saying can work well for programming. But with certain scientific questions, there are many theories that could work. It isn't just a matter of ruling things out (though that helps too). One key part of the scientific process is generating a theoretical insight (perhaps) that lets you look at something in a new way. Another key part is figuring out how to test that idea.
> You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
Not really. The point of big scientific research is that at the moment a project is being conceived, no one has any idea where it will go and whether it will bring anything useful. Yet in time, it always brings breakthroughs.
I'll put it bluntly: we need more trust. The right way to do science is to keep throwing money at it, no questions asked[0]. IMO the reason we've seen so much progress during last two wars was not because war per se stimulates research, but because during a conflict the military has infinite budget and it starts throwing more money at research that can be used, so scientists can do whatever they want without justifying it for general public[1]. Free of money&management issues, creative minds could focus on doing fundamental research in whatever they felt like doing[2].
Come to think of it, science is best done in the same conditions the programming (or any creative endeavour) is - when you're free to think, don't feel the pressure of looming deadlines, don't have to deal with managerial bullshit, and when you have enough money to not have to think about it (both in life and in cost of work materials).
So yes, I advocate some kind of almost blind trust. Just throw some part of taxpayer money at R&D, no questions asked. It's a long-time investment.
[0] - Of course there's a need to build in a system to limit the amount of parasites who will feed on free money; but they ultimately cannot be avoided, we can only try to limit their numbers.
[1] - I think it was Feynman who pointed out that the problem with science in the 90's was that scientists suddenly found themselves accountable to general public and struggled with explaining why their research was useful.
[2] - If that last paragraph rings bad to you, please note that I'm skipping over a lot of points related to creativity needing to be free of trivial bullshit, intrinsic motivation beating monetary rewards/prestige in performance, etc.
No. Feynman actually criticised scientists who weren't prepared to explain and justify their work to the public. He says this in one of the bbc videos, can't remember which, as part of a critique of the social sciences.
Standing on the shoulders of giants is many times a means of saying that something that "DOES work" was derived from something that didn't work, or perhaps that it was derived from the difficult yet iterative steps of others.
Look at the Large Hadron Collider. Do you suppose they scrub from their data stores all tests that fail to produce a "working" result? Are you suggesting that trying and failing produces irrelevant knowledge?
I would assume that they are only working with a narrow subset of dead ends. They probably have promising leads and work on those. I think it's a constant process of refinement.
Newspapers love to act as if it they call the shots. NPR in particular styles itself as the stalwart of the disenfranchised - has its shit together more than Occupy, but is unsullied by big corporate interests. They're not much worse than other papers, but unfortunately, it sometimes maintains its readers disenfranchised in order to maintain the illusion.
I mean, why don't they admit that this is four-month-old news? Why is this getting sudden publication? Is their agenda as transparent as informing the public, or is there a strategic element to it?
Actually, I think framing it as a grade is beyond silly; it is irresponsible. Giving a letter grade to long-term scientific project makes little sense. It is not a one-shot thing with a predefined notion of correctness. What can we compare such a grade to?
Instead, we should be asking what we've learned and how the project has advanced science.