> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
Not the OP, but instead of "bombing Moscow", try "designing and building a reusable space rocket". A similar task, but much nobler intentions.
This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.
You also have to keep in mind that SpaceX pulled this off 40 years after NASA created the Space Shuttle. I'm not sure if that invalidates the example per se, but it seems a little like giving Apple credit for inventing the modern GUI, when they basically took it from Xerox PARC.
Original creators definitely need credit, but in my opinion, they are not the only ones who should be adequately respected.
Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.
In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.
To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.
Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.
But a great example of the difference between academia and private industry. The shuttle was reusable in theory, but required $1.5B in refurbishment between flights. Refurbishment of the boosters cost more than simply buying new ones would have.
Sure, and the Falcon rocket is not fully reusable, either. It's a lot harder to reuse the second stage, because it's the part that goes to orbit, which means it's moving very fast, and has to lose a lot of energy in order to land softly.
Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.
Saturn V was a huge feat, but Apollo program consumed about 2 per cent of American GDP in 1965.
This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.
Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.
Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..
> Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems.
Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.
The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.
There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.
There's a story that an academic was telling the world that heavier-than-air flight was impossible at the same time that the Wright brothers flew the first plane. Not all engineering advances are based on science, often the engineering comes first.
Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.
The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip
The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge
I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.
OK, but only partially. The invention of IP protocol and HTML happened as byproducts of government-funded projects (they were certainly never invented to be what they are). Since then all the impact (and further development) has happened because of things deliberately developed by industry.
>* Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work).*
You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)
The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.
Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.
The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...
Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.
Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.
Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.