Author: Muon Ray
17606View
4m 14sLenght
260Rating

Michio Kaku, while remembering a conversation he had with the famous physicist Freeman Dyson, comments on how Dyson noticed that America, in the 21st century, is in a state of scientific decline in the same fashion to how Britain declined in the early 20th century, whereby it no longer was the global scientific, industrial and economic power, as reflected in the number of discoveries, inventions and Nobel Prizes won by British scientists in the 1800s and early 1900s and instead declined to a kind of "junior partner" to the much more scientifically dominant United States from the 1940's to 1990's. However, since most funding in America was connected to the Pentagon, who had an abundance of funding during the cold war to build atom smashers, spacecraft projects, electronics, laser research, computer and high speed communications technology (such as the ARPANET and eventually the Internet) this generated a very unsustainable way to generate a constantly replenishing high tech economy. Hence when the cold war ended many science, maths and engineering graduates had to fund their own education with grants becoming more and more sparse and therefore became very dependent on financial institutions for loans. The best way to pay off these loans was to enter the financial workforce itself and all too often these are only jobs science, engineering and math graduates can get in the western world. Such jobs do not create wealth as much as they do redistribute it, with most of the work being in the field of credit default swaps, investment risk analysis or trend prediction. Michio also reminds us that in the meantime, China and India are becoming more and more developed and see science and engineering as a meal ticket into the growing high tech economy which may easily outperform America in the not too distant future, reducing it to a "junior partner" or service sector as Britain was to America in the 1930's and through much of the late 20th century. As a result, the entire western world could become a "junior partner" to science and industry, to a dominant Asian science and industrial power, with America and Europe essentially becoming a global trade and service area with minimal industry and technological innovation. Such predictions are worth thinking about in considering how the debate of distributing wealth for short term gains is debated in the United States, often in a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type of fashion which is very short sighted given that lack of funding for science now may result in a country being a scientific backwater 20 years from now, unable to catch up with competitors and even nations which were once behind and creating an economy and workforce that is very skewed towards the service sector, creating huge unemployment in the skilled workforce which only leads to brain-drain and decline.