> The amusing thing for me* is this is just coffee budgets for pen-and-paper theorists
Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget:
> The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation.
> The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation.
> NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF.
> DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE.
This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics).
In my view, those are very trivial amounts, for an entire subfield of research. I can think of individual federal grants no one on HN has heard of or cares about that are are larger than all of those put together, which are outright fraudulent—those are dime-a-dozen.
Also, note that your first three examples aren't public money, rather private philanthropy. No one can speak against where Jim Simons gifts his billions (and in point of fact Simons is an expert in quantum field theory himself—no one's scammed him, if he's decided string theorists are worth donating to. He reads and understands the papers they write).
It's a fair anchoring point, isn't it? It's the theory and experiment side of the same field. We're just spending 0.01% of the experimental budget on some (possibly wrong and possibly dead-end) theory ideas, and the coffee that produced them.
In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog:
> It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory.
Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling.
Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
The sad thing about that funding is how small it is. To billionaires and governments this is pocket change. Simons (personally, not the foundation) could spend ten times that to fund research into alternative models and not even notice.
A global anything-goes-if-you're-qualified frontiers research program would cost a few hundred million dollars. The odds of it finding some game changers are likely pretty good.
Instead we're getting a $17bn revamp of the LHC to turn it into a "Higgs factory".
Unfortunately not. From his website [0], the extent of the grant funding involved is much more than just coffee budget:
> The Black Hole Initiative that features this on its website: $16 million from the Templeton Foundation, $3.6 million from the Moore Foundation. > The Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography: $8 million from the Simons Foundation. > NSF Grant: $400,000 from the NSF. > DOE Grant: $3.5 million from the DOE.
This kind of money could fund a whole lot of other theory. Hell, it even could fund a lot of experiments (albeit not in high energy physics).
[0] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13770