Quantum leap towards computer of the future

[Trev]

If Heisenberg was an uncertainty surely his mock science is too. Roll on Quantum computers, I'm certainly getting bored paying taxes to research it. Time to put up or shut up!

It's about time they give up on that flying thing, too. It's contrary to common sense and complete rubbish. If God wanting us mucking about in His domain, He'd have built us a space elevator. Why do you think the lost tribes of Israel settled on the center of the earth?

[Trev]

Government funded research in most capitalist countries does little to advance our lifestyles. It mostly advances the scientists lifestyles. Most scientists are largely out for headlines for their next grant.

R+D in real commercial type companies does further our way of life.

There's not much in terms of technology we use and take for granted these days that wasn't originally developed by or with funding provided by NASA.

For-profit businesses employ scientists, too. Some of them are even allowed to--*gasp*--publish their research.

[Trev]

It doesn't have to have a point, it doesn't even have to any real application.

Theory and application go hand in hand.

So researchers go around looking for something to research just to have a job. Moochers is what some people call them.

That's bulls**t, but there's a capitalist slant to that. It doesn't matter what the motivation is as long as someone profits from it.

In commercial R+D it has to have a point, it has to have an application (a way to improve life in some way)

Commercial research and development has to lead to profit. If companies could profit by developing and selling rainbow colored s**t, they would.

I guess what it really comes down to is knowledge verses action. NASA found ways to make planes safer and more efficient. But it isn't NASA that does anything with that knowledge. Its the aircraft companies. And they can't just take that knowledge and make an airplane, they have to do huge amounts of R+D just to use any good idea NASA comes up with.

The only reason those companies are willing to invest resources in such projects is because the risk is being assumed by the government. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Much of the federal R+D that you will see outside NASA etc. is pork. Dr. Whatsisname knows a senator and convinces said senator that studying frog anuses is important because they might be getting smaller due to global warming.

"Pork" is subjective, but more research is funded by private money than you might think. The difference is scale. What the space race accomplished over a period of months or years, modern, private efforts won't achieve for years or decades.

EDIT:

That is how much federal research grants go. If that money actually went to NASA we would see much more real, important science going on. NASA's budget has been cut almost every single year for decades.

On this we agree. We're still riding the wave of Big Government Projects, though, e.g. the Internet and most of its core technologies. It won't be long, however, before things stagnate. Today's innovations are driven by profit and control.