Physicists’ Reign Is Likely to End
The budget guillotines are being sharpened. The aristocracy that rules America’s science and technology establishment is about to be deposed. It will be messy.
For nearly two generations, physicists have dominated American science. It’s not just that physicists were smarter or more charismatic than other scientists--or even that they gave the world the transistor. They had built the Bomb. As the Merlins of the Cold War, their wizardry could tip the balance of superpowers in the twinkling of a quark.
So physics remained the politically preeminent science and enjoyed enormous psychic and economic subsidies. Over the decades, the culture of physicists defined America’s scientific culture. At the White House, International Business Machines, General Motors, Intel, etc.--wherever a research agenda is being set--the odds are that the scientist at the head table is a physicist.
The end of the Cold War effectively ends the reign of the physicists. Their rationale for primacy disappears.
“There’s now going to be a new kind of Darwinian competition going on in science,” says William T. Golden, who has been involved with White House science policy advising since the Truman Administration.
As aristocracies go, the physicists have an enviable pedigree. They’ve presided over the global rise of American science. Physicists have woven their culture and influence through fields as disparate as molecular biology and semiconductor manufacturing processes. The physicists have posed--and helped answer--many of the fundamental questions that have transformed both science and technology.
But at the same time, they’ve taken terrific care of themselves. The multibillion-dollar network of national labs--launched at the dawn of the Nuclear Age--is still dominated by physicists. The “Star Wars” initiative, with its bevy of X-ray lasers and orbital gewgaws, provided a de facto Physicists Full Employment Act. The Super-conducting Supercollider in Waxahachie, Tex., was regarded by many scientists--including some physicists--as high-energy pork barreling at its finest. Clearly, aristocracy hath its privileges.
The real issue here isn’t pork and policy. The questions that should now be emerging aren’t “What direction should a Livermore or Los Alamos go in the wake of the Cold War’s collapse?” or even “Whither American science and technology?” It’s got to be “Who’s in the best position to help set America’s research priorities in science and technology for the next generation--and why?”
One way or the other, there will be a new culture of science in America. Will it do a better job for America and the world than the physicists did?
In an era where global economic competitiveness is rising in perceived importance, does it make sense for physicists to take the lead? Or should engineers be given the nod? At a time when health-care spending tops 12% of gross national product, what community of scientists should be setting the research agenda?
Although physicists still call the shots, other sciences do have political clout. The biomedical community--funded by the mammoth National Institutes of Health--is often capable of mounting effective lobbies. But with the notable exception of the Human Genome Initiative (which was born, please note, at the Department of Energy, not the NIH), the life sciences community does not yet command the policy attention, time and budgets that the physicists do. By the end of the decade, that’s going to change--dramatically.
The physical sciences agenda is going to wither. The national labs are going to shrink somewhere between 20% and 25%.
The biomedical and life sciences community--not the physicists--will be positioned to be the wizards of national health-care policy. It’s far too early to say where all this will lead. But it’s not too early to say that, for better and worse, the Age of the Physicists is over.
