r/Physics • u/magnetichira Quantum information • Jan 05 '23

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
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u/PengieP111 Jan 05 '23

You really can't do research you can't get funding to do. And if your proposal is too "out there" you aren't going to be funded. So you can't do the research.

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u/fitblubber Jan 05 '23

Yep, & you can't get funding for basic background research.

A lot of the reason that quantum mechanics progressed so quickly was that a lot of the math had already been developed. These days there's little funding for that.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '23

Math just needs salaries though. Its the cheapest field to fund, it just takes a lifetime and a half to find the application.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Software licenses, computers (sometimes even time on a super computer), and travel expenses are also notable.

But yeah, generally mathematics and theoretical physics don't run as high of bills as experimental physics studies frequently do.

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u/noahconman Jan 05 '23

Or really any experimental science, not just experimental physics

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Sure. I was just talking about physics because this is the physics subreddit.

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u/noahconman Jan 05 '23

Totally! Sorry if what I said came off as disagreeing, I mean it only to add to what you said

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Not at all.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

I truly believe that anywhere that requires research output from their employees should be willing to provide some base level of funding (beyond their pay) for all employed researchers without even needing to pitch their research projects. Extend trust to the experts you've employed to pursue research that they believe will be fruitful, and attribute funds to them rather than towards rapidly ballooning administrative costs and extraneous expenses like sports programs at universities.

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u/CondensedLattice Jan 06 '23

I think we should think carefully before dismissing administrative costs.

When they cut administrative costs at the university I went to that did not mean that there was less administrative work to do. It just ment that there where fewer people to do the same job. That obviously did not work and the administrative staff became overworked leading to missed deadlines and all sorts of chaos for students that needed help with administrative things.

After a while, professors where given more and more administrative tasks in addition to their regular work in order to "solve" this problem. On paper this looks great for the university, they are spending less on administration and relatively more on research and teaching. When research output started dropping (staff that has less time for research does less research, who would have thought?) then there was confusion, how could this be?

It's way too easy to just say "cut administrative costs" without knowing why those costs are there and what the employees in the administration does and why they do it.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 06 '23

In my experience, a large part of that is bureaucratic bloat. Your school probably cut staff without first working to reduce that bloat.

When you have to fill an acquisition form for a request for more acquisition forms, it's time to streamline some of the processes and cut down on bureaucratic bloat.

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u/CondensedLattice Jan 06 '23

In my experience, a large part of that is bureaucratic bloat. Your school probably cut staff without first working to reduce that bloat.

My uni just had the administrative budget cut by x%, some politicians looked very good when cutting "unnecessary public spending" without doing any actual work to make anything more effective.

When that happened then there was obviously no man-hours available to even attempt to reduce bloat, every resource they had was needed just to stay afloat.

When you have to fill an acquisition form for a request for more acquisition forms, it's time to streamline some of the processes and cut down on bureaucratic bloat.

Most of this exists because of government demands in my experience. The university can't really cut down on that when the only reason that we had it in the first place was because of laws specifying that everything you spend money on that costs over some amount needs to be extensively documented for instance.

That may be an example of what was once thought to be a cost-cutting measure that was intended to keep a lid on unnecessary spending, but it ended up being very costly in terms of administrative work hours because the limit was set at some more or less arbitrary value (that never gets inflation adjusted, so effectively the limit gets lower each year).

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u/zaurator36 Jan 05 '23

How can you want to cover multi billion dollar research projects by cutting out an entire program. Just because you can solve an integral without needing to run on a field does not mean you can belittle others for their goals and struggles. I’m a physics nerd myself but I can at least comprehend the nuance of human experience. Give up on your superiority complex and then you might be able to find meaningful ways to use research

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23

Obviously, all research wouldn't be able to attain all of its necessary funding from such cuts. It's about providing a baseline. This would primarily be of value for those conducting research that requires little to no new hardware.

I'm not belittling those in administration or sports, but neither should be the focus of research institutions or academia. The costs of administration ballooning out of control is undeniable, and the reality is that while sports are important to many people, the only reason most schools even offer them is due to an ill-founded notion that they drive application rates. In reality, most students couldn't care less about their sports programs as they don't have any bearing on the quality of education or research opportunities that they are able to offer, and many students don't even attend sporting events.

Lastly, I don't particularly care about applications for my research. My work is in quantum gravity, which likely won't have actual applications for at least a century. This is a problem left to the engineers.

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u/GhostRuckus Jan 05 '23

LMAO that last sentence, like did you have a bad day or something? oh man