George Bush, Hans Bethe and big questions

Former science columnist turned blogger and all-round wise old guy Chet Raymo writes on his blog today that his Irish neighbors don't understand what's going on in America when it comes to the ascendancy of religiosity. I don't have an answer, but his question suggests a possible answer to a problem identified, co-incidentally, in today's Science magazine.

First, Chet's Irish friend's poser:

What puzzles the Irish is how a nation unequaled in its scientific and technical prowess can at the same time be so in thrall to what they see as rank superstition. To their mind, there is little difference between the Christian end-times fervor of evangelical Americans and the almost identical Islamic scenario propounded by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What frightens the Irish -- as it frightens other Europeans -- is what they perceive as an unholy alliance in America between apocalyptic religion and neo-conservative politics.

Now we turn to Science magazine. In a piece on the legacy of physics giant Hans Bethe -- "the region where nuclear physics and astrophysics fuse, from neutrinos to supernovae, and ordinary stars to neutron stars" -- writer Robert Irons lays out the questions that continue to bedevil Bethe's heirs.

How do giant stars explode and forge the elements around us? What happens when neutron stars or black holes crash? And what is the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that suffuse space?

. Then comes the tricky part:

But as Bethe's scientific descendents marked what would have been his 100th birthday on 2 July, they worry about their ability to address such questions anytime soon. Cuts in the science program at NASA have cast a pall over missions designed to turn the cosmos into a high-precision physics laboratory. The damage to Bethe's legacy could be serious, they warn.

"In the worst-case scenario, the young people we need may feel hopelessness," says Saul Teukolsky, chair of the physics department at Cornell University--Bethe's academic home for 70 years. "They may not enter the field at all."

Which brings me back to Chet's Irish puzzle. This is a country in which those who hold the funding pursestrings are satisfied with Biblical answers to the ultimate questions to life, the universe and everything. What are the chances that those same officials will see a need to pour resources into trying to find scientific explanations to the same?

This is not a particularly profound observation, I recognize. But it does hint at the scale of the challenge facing high-energy physicists, cosmologists and anyone else trying to convince the government that their $18-million grant application is worth funding. The conventional strategy, dressing up the research in sexy garb (see this post) is a waste of time if there isn't any genuine respect for the field in the first place.

If that's the case, then scientists are going to have to get political, whether they like it or not, and start trying to change the culture in Washington. And that means changing the people in charge. Last word comes from the conclusion to the Science article.

...there was no consensus on how the community might gain the necessary political support for its priorities. Indeed, the room seemed infused with a wistfulness that Bethe couldn't be there to rally his colleagues in their time of need. "The scope of problems he could solve pretty much had no limit," Brown wrote last year in Physics Today, recalling his struggle to keep up with a friend 20 years his senior. "In that sense, I think [Bethe] was the most powerful scientist of the 20th century."