do nat'l big science estabs sometimes fund pseudosci?

[Martin]

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep04/0904nfus.html

 

general question about pseudosci sometimes getting support for political reasons----notorious case of Lysenko "genetics" under Stalin

 

what about the "Starwars" research under Reagan?

the idea of building Xray lasers as weapons, and battle-satellites

to zap enemy missiles

 

can some kinds of research be supported because they give hope to

some segment of the voting public, or get a big play in the press,

and not for some more solid scientific reason?

 

what do you think about the US science funding people bringing Cold Fusion research back to life. is there a good reason to do it? or is this a case of

something primarily political?

 

I havent decided what I think, but it seemed a little fishy to me

[jordan]

A few thoughts:

 

1) The policitcians who are funding it probably know more about the political ramifications of the funding (i.e. getting more votes) than they do about the feasability of what they're funding.

 

2) Should additional funding provide results, the resulting technology could offset the efforts of past projects that have failed (star wars etc.).

 

Can you think of any times where this has had succeeded?

 

 

On the whole, a very interesting question.

[swansont]

As was noted, it's a problem when you let idealism drive science. Also, when you have politicians and bureaucrats run science, you can get an obscene version of Pascal's wager - fund something that, if it works, will pay tremendous dividends. But they are unable to distinguish between "difficult" and "impossible" - they just see what the payoff would be. NASA has funded a version of Podkletnov's antigravity experiment, for example.