re: #601 medaura18586

5) At the risk of sounding Ben-Stein-esque, I have to say I am disgusted by the attitudes of too many scientists, who seem to think they are morally entitled to funding for their area of research and don’t much care where the money to support their play-world is supposed to come from. I watched this PBS documentary which left me shocked and appalled! A bunch of particle physicists and their technicians are outraged that the Republican Congress froze the funding on building a multi-billion dollar accelerator to inquire into the existence of the Higgs boson! The only reason they even think there is such a thing as a Higgs boson is the fact that their theoretical calculations don’t square. Hence they postulate the existence of this particle…

And they’re upset that the Swiss are building a bigger accelerator for the same purpose. I say more power to the Swiss. Knowledge is free. If the Swiss government wants to subsidize this dubious research with huge fixed-cost accelerators, why should the American government double the efforts? And why should someone who doesn’t give a damn about the Higgs boson (I do, for the record; I just don’t think it exists), who is working a mundane job to support one’s family and to finance very simple aspirations, be forced to contribute to the witch hunt for the God Particle? What if the calculations are reworked, and the theoretical necessity of the Higgs’s existence is obliterated through some elegant mathematical solution? What will taxpayers get in return for the multi-billion dollar accelerators/toys built for the Higgs’s believers?

Scientists, no matter how serious, interesting, and important their work, do not have a God-given right to finance their intellectual-ivory-tower lifestyles with taxpayer money! They should invest some of their efforts in plebeian vulgarities such as PR, awareness raising, fundraisers, popularizing… in order to tap on private resources.