The Impressionist read with horror an article in today's London Times by one Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University. The thrust of Dr Kealey's article is that Science is best funded by private enterprise. He cites IBM with its huge R&D effort as the paradigm for science funding. Even Einstein's sojourn at the (privately endowed) Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is trotted out in support of his daft hypothesis.
A look at Buckingham University's online prospectus reveals the attitude of this esteemed centre of learning to the sciences. We see that the 'sciences' it offers are in fact Computing, Business Information Systems and, curiously, Psychology. Computing and Business IT are technologies, not sciences. Don't even ask about Psychology. Technology is the application of scientific principles and results to engineering problems. Science provides the theoretical basis on which technologists can confidently engineer their solutions.
Science is not the handmaiden of commerce and never has been. In fact, commercial and hence political pressures often suppress good science. The Thalidomide episode in the 1960s being a classic example.
Good science comes from free thinking. Commercial organisations want patents and intellectual property rights, not theories. Imagine where the economy would be now if no one could make a computer or a mobile phone without the express permission of and licence payments to the estates of Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac et al. These people were publicly funded and laid the groundwork for the modern world of information technology.
The Impressionist is concerned that a simplistic belief that market forces are the answer to everything is the precursor to a world devoid of real innovation. A world where fundamental ideas never get out of the company lab because the finance director reckons there's no immediate profit.
And Einstein in privately funded Princeton? Well he spent the last half of his life there working on his Unified Field Theory. All the stuff that has turned out to be useful, like Relativity (needed for Global Positioning) and Quantum Theory (computers, mobile phones, lasers) was done while he was publicly funded. Go to the back of the class, Kealey!
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