No Coercion

Comment from Kelly
Time: January 11, 2008, 3:19 pm

Okay, I’m all for private funds paying for research, but there should be a mechanism to have these proposals peer-reviewed. This guy sounds like a total quack and the reason he doesn’t have funding is because he’s proposals haven’t been accepted by the scientific community. If you are going to have private money paying for research, it should still pass certain standards of being worthy.

Comment from Kelly
Time: January 11, 2008, 3:31 pm

“Almost everything in quantum theory is mind-boggling and outside the box..” Is this a black box? Is it a box with Schroedinger’s cat? The article is crap and so is the science - sorry, Darren.

Comment from Darren
Time: January 11, 2008, 5:29 pm

I don’t know about this guy’s particular experiment, but investigating reverse causality on the quantum level is certainly not “crap.” The article points out that Feynman and Wheeler have considered such research as worthwhile. He may fail to show reverse causality, but it doesn’t deserve to be called crap.

And regarding having a peer-review ‘mechanism,’ no, there shouldn’t be such a thing mandated. It really doesn’t even make sense in the context of private donors. If some ‘official’ peer-review mechanism declared some experiment as unfit for funding, they couldn’t prevent people from donating to it anyway. Each donor, whether an individual or a business/organization, will have their own criteria for deciding whether to donate to a project. If they want to throw their own money at something because they think it sounds cool, that’s their right. By and large, people make rational decisions with their own money (unlike the government) and most truly crazy ideas won’t get a ton of funding anyway. But I bet some really cutting edge stuff could drum up support from quirky private donors that could end up paying off big time. The point is to get government out of the game and unleash the power of voluntary action to transform science and the world.

Comment from Darren
Time: January 13, 2008, 11:40 am

Kelly, I’m pasting your response to this that you left on the other entry so others can more easily follow the discussion:

“Fine, you think his research is worthy of doing. Fine, you think people can throw away their own money to this research. Whatever. He’s going to have a hard time disseminating his results to the physics community since 1) those are the same people who turned down his grants in the first place and 2) will see that the work was funded by “alternative means.” I have talked about this approach with various professors in my department, and it’s viewed very negatively. So let’s say he gets some interesting data - dollars to donuts, the people who invested in this research aren’t going to understand it and again - if a scientist goes directly to major media for dissemination, it looks bad again because it’s 1) not peer-reviewed and 2) so dumbed-down at that point that the underlying problem/solution/observations are totally lost or glossed over.”

I’ve got a couple quick observations here. He may indeed have trouble getting through to the academic physics community, and if that’s really what floats his boat, he may end up disappointed. But if his results–let’s generalize and say the results of any research funded by private donations–are truly solid, he will have success in an open marketplace of ideas, perhaps because his results are seen by a private business as having practical applications in the development of a profitable new product or service, or perhaps because another scientist sees the results as something on which he himself can improve on the way to a practical and profitable application. The market has great natural mechanisms in place to sift ideas and filter out worthless ones. It really doesn’t matter if the people who invested in the research understand it–they thought it was worth contributing to. If further research also strikes certain people as worth contributing to, why does it matter if they understand it? Plenty of people donate to organizations dedicated to curing AIDS, Alzheimer’s, various cancers, etc, and don’t have the faintest idea about the science they’re helping to fund. It also doesn’t matter what the media’s opinion of it is because, again, the market has ways of identifying good ideas, and many of those ways have nothing to do with media coverage. Also, I can’t help but point out that the media does actually cover (sometimes to an absurd degree) research that is either not peer-reviewed at all or ‘peer-reviewed’ in journals of a different field. A fair amount of studies relating to global warming and other environmental ‘threats’ fall under this category, and the media hypes the hell out of them as if they were handed down by a supreme being.