Trump's Cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation Will Have Huge Consequences
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Stern-Gerlach experiment is, in my opinion, truly the first test that forced the results of quantum mechanics onto the scientific community. Proposed by Otto Stern and conducted by Walther Gerlach in 1922, it showed that atoms have a quantum structure. Electrons, it turned out, must follow quantum rules. The Stern-Gerlach experiment also highlights a weird feature of the quantum world: it seems that the observer can determine the possible properties a particle can have. If I measure a quantum property known as spin, the fact the measurement happened seems to change the possible values of spin a particle can have later. In other words, whether a particle was observed or not determines its future.
In physics, we are socialised to the idea that we are outside of the physical system, watching it. In this experiment, suddenly we aren't. In my experience, students initially absorb this as a fact they must accept. Only after being forced to think about it a few times do they realise it isn't consistent with their sensibilities about how reality works. Accepting the results is a surreal experience. Wonderfully surreal.
When I sat down and thought about how to communicate what it is like to watch the demise of US science in real time, surreal" is the word that came to mind. It isn't the same kind of surreal as Stern-Gerlach, which feels like being re-introduced to reality - although you realise you had been living with a false sense of the world before, the new one is cool and exciting, so that's all right.
Our current political moment instead feels like realising that we had been living with a false sense of security - that US science and government support for it would be there tomorrow - but without a cool new reality on the other side. Instead, the US government is dispensing with publicly funded culture, throwing it into a black hole. I don't make that metaphor lightly; I think it's important. When an object crosses a black hole's event horizon, it is the point of no return. The object can't go back.
We are in the same situation. While the universe will still be there to be understood, the damage to our capacity for research will be long lasting and the alteration to our trajectory permanent. Already, a generation of master's and PhD students has had the number of available slots reduced. Aspiring professors aren't being trained in the same numbers; this affects not just future scientists but science communicators, too.
[...] This surreal moment isn't just happening to US-based scientists and the US public. Because so much of the science we all read about comes from the US, it's happening to you, too.
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