The Island of Doubt

Move over Fritjof Capra. The author of The Tao of Physics captured the imaginations of naive readers a couple of decades back by exploring the similarities between quantum theory and Eastern philosophies. But as the New York Times' Dennis Overbye reported Tuesday, Chinese scientists are more interested in the words of Stephen Hawking than Lao-tzu.

Which is a good thing. For the Chinese. Maybe not so much for those of us in the West.

Just the other day I was listening to our own Chris Mooney taken on anti-intellectual Tom Bethell on NPR's Science Friday. Central to Bethell's case that liberals are abusing science is the evil of government funding of the sciences.

It is, of course, a ridiculous argument. As Chris pointed out, it wasn't private money that took America to the moon. (I know, I know, but does anyone really want to argue the merits of Apollo?) But according to Overbye's story, the Chinese are even less enamored of Bethell's position than is America.

Overbye uses a recent appearance by Stephen Hawking at the opening of the Strings 2006 conference on String Theory at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing as a clever hook for demonstrating just how serious China is about catching up with the West in the lab.

Imagine, several string theorists in the audience mused, if a physics conference in the United States started in the House of Representatives.

And there's more to the story than venue and celebrity:

Jie Zhang, director general of basic sciences for the Chinese academy, said his budget had been increasing 17 percent a year for the last few years as China tried to ramp up research spending to about 2.5 percent of its gross domestic product. By comparison, the United States spends slightly less than 2 percent, according to the National Science Foundation.

Among the big-budget items on the table, Dr. Zhang said, are a giant 500-meter-diameter radio telescope in China's outback to study microwaves from the Big Bang and a multinational particle-physics project, known as the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment to study the ghostly elementary particles known as neutrinos.

To keep track of all this activity, the United States National Science Foundation opened an office in Beijing last month. The foundation noted that China had gone from fourth in the world to third in research and development expenditures from 2000 to 2006.

Hardly a week goes by without an announcement of another research initiative or new investment in a building or an institute. It is hard to find an American physicist who is not on his way to China to consult or collaborate, or has just come from China, glowing about the experience.

"The Chinese are so smart they knock your socks off," said Andrew Strominger, a Harvard string theorist who visits here often. "The impression you get when you go over there is that China is going to take over the world soon."
...
"A lot of people ask for advice but are hesitant to accept it," Dr. Gross said. "In China, they are totally open to exploring how other countries do it. They are totally unarrogant about accepting advice."

The take-home message: China must overcome numerous hurdles before it starts scooping up Nobels by the dozen, but Gene Roddenberry knew what he was doing when he added Sulu to the first Enterprise bridge crew.