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From: weemba@brahms (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: sci.misc,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: military funding in mathematics
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Date: Thu, 23-Oct-86 21:49:55 EDT
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Posted: Thu Oct 23 21:49:55 1986
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In article <16229@mordor.ARPA> jtk@mordor.UUCP (Jordan Kare) writes:
>as an associate of Peter Hagelstein (the "genius at Livermore"),
>I have some comments on Matthew Wiener's article flaming [...]
>an earlier posting:

>[criticisms omitted]

I agree, my comments about PH were entirely inappropriate and inexcusable.
I was echoing what I read in newspapers--I should know better than to do
that so thoughtlessly.

>>Why should optics suddenly get flooded with funds, and particle physics
>>have to beg?
>
>Rather obviously, because particle physics seems to have wandered so
>far from the "real world" that it is no longer of interest to anyone
>but its own practitioners [...]

Considering that the technological spin-off argument is often claimed as
a "good" reason to support SDI, I should point out that there is a lot of
successful technological spin-off from research in particle physics.  If
I have the time and there is interest, I will look up the fairly recent
issue of the CERN Courier where they gave a good summary of the practical
applications that have grown out of CERN's research.

While it is true that particle physics itself is mostly of interest to
its narrow group of practitioners--I say mostly since there are lots
of outsiders who like to follow the successes--I'd say that many of
their instruments and techniques are of much wider interest.  When the
time comes--God forbid--to build antimatter weaponry, stochastic cool-
ing and its future refinements will suddenly become very interesting
to DoD.  Stochastic cooling, by the way, was what made the discovery
of the W+,W-,Z0 possible, and was what Simon van der Meere was awarded
the Nobel prize for in 1984.

Ironically, in light of the anti-internationalization attitude DoD is
trying to impose on pure research, the theoretical work that vdM based
his work on was originally due to a Soviet physicist.  vdM himself is
Dutch.

I do not think it very wise to make negative predictions about the fu-
ture utility of pure research.  Such has a dismal track record.

>It's also a very debatable assumption about X-ray lasers [...]

You are right about it being debatable.  When trying to analyze the Soviet
response to SDI, though, we must assume that they assume worst-case sce-
narios.  For them, the possibility that someone in the next ten years is
going to find SOME offensive use must be very real.

ucbvax!brahms!weemba	Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720