Sowing The Wind...

Hosea 8:7 NKJV - They sow the wind, And reap the whirlwind. The stalk has no bud; It shall never produce meal. If it should produce, Aliens would swallow it up.

Credit: LiveScience

ATLANTA — The United States is at risk of ceding its leadership in science, a number of physicists agreed Monday (April 2), though there was less of a consensus on a clear solution to the problem.

Five physicists shared their worries about America's scientific future during a panel discussion here at the April 2012 meeting of the American Physics Society, saying that governmental funding for science research is in crisis, and not enough U.S. students graduate with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.

"There are some facts and figures that are very disturbing, which show the United States might be losing ground in science and discovery, whereas other countries are gaining," Pushpa Bhat, a physicist at Illinois' Fermi Accelerator National Laboratory (Fermilab), said at a press conference preceding the panel. "We can't sit back and watch."

Bhat lamented the lack of cutting-edge physics facilities in this country. While many of the world's best instruments and experiments, such as Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator, used to be housed here, that frontier has moved elsewhere. For example, the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is located at the CERN lab in Switzerland, while Illinois' Tevatron has shut down.

Not to sound Cassandra (my wife's name, though lovely, Apollo has given her no gift of prophesy), but I see our dilemma as "a trifecta of three Ds":

• Deification of market forces - Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, Outsourcing - in all aspects of public life
•  Devaluation of a well-rounded education curriculum - PE for non-athletes, music helping math scores, art/poetry helping reading comprehension, the discontinuation of learning how-to write in script (texting now dominate) - for standardized testing that teaches life's answers are a, b, c, d, or e (all of the above)
• Disingenuous manipulation of The First Amendment for political gain

Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics: This has historically been the source of wealth since Sputnik. It focused our country to become a technological behemoth before culture wars became dominant. I fear our short-sightedness is a national Attention Deficit Deficiency, a result of our instant access to information, sound-bite dominated media, text messaging, 140-character limits that does not encourage reflection on what we do now, and how it affects the future.

Live Science: Crisis for US Science Is Looming, Physicists Warn
APS: See article "Endangered Physics Department Saved," middle of page