Why All Areas of Science Should Be Financed?
Science is often part of politics agenda, specially when it comes to funding it, sometimes people question governments about why it supports all kind of science projects, I mean, when it comes to a new technology, it’s easy to understand the reason, but why the money of our taxes need to go to someone who’s studying the microorganism that lives in the stomach of a white whale (just an example that don’t have direct application on the society itself)?
It’s really hard to understand why, because we can’t see how this affect us directly like a new smartphone, yet, I believe that we should endorse every single area of science (true science), and Fractals are a good argument to that.
Fractals are a good reason
Fractals are recursive geometric objects, it can be divided into parts and each part is equivalent to its predecessor but smaller. It was discovered by a French mathematician called Benoit Mandelbrot on 1975, for centuries science believed that the Euclidean concepts of philosophy and geometry were that best described the universe, but after Fractals, everything changed.
Why is that? Well, fractals are basically the Mother nature’s favorite geometric form and it uses in everything because of its efficient capacity of creating an infinite surface with a finite volume, allowing the creation of gigantic structures on a very limited space, hard to imagine, right? Think about the bronchioles on our lungs that may occupy the area of a football field and yet fits in a human body, also the branches of rivers, our arteries and country’s shores are good example of fractal geometry. Nature is so efficient and fractals are so inevitable that our societies structures, like our cities and roads grows on same pattern, even price of actions in stock market.
The same happens in abstract world, like knowledge and culture, think about what happens when someone finishes a PHD thesis, that is supposed to be something new and never studied before, that thesis will bring more questions than answers, will close one door e open others to different people cross them and it goes on, endlessly. We could go further, take book’s genders, like fiction, it has created its sub-genders like hard fiction, soft fiction, from that came the Cyber Punk, and one story inspired others and others and again, endlessly.
What’s the point?
You might be thinking what all of this has to do with the financing “non-mainstream” science projects, well, let’s back in 1975 and you hear about some discover in mathematics area called “Fractal” and you discover that is a geometric figure, you think that public opinion find that it might worth some thousands or maybe millions? Or they’ll think that is just another “toy” that scientists like to play on their little world? As I said, it is hard to see the impact of some scientific studies in our lives, but believe me, is there. And studying about the microorganisms in the stomach of a species of a whale may be the part of some fractal of knowledge that if we zoom in, could show us a whole new world of wisdom and who knows, use it in our own.
Pasteur’s Quadrant
Corroborating with the idea of areas of science, the political scientist, Donald Stokes is the author of a book called, Pasteur’s Quadrant where he proposes a classification of three types of science projects:
Basic research
Systematic study directed to the most fundamental kind of knowledge and comprehension of phenomenon and facts, without thinking on its applicability.
Applied research
It is the systematic in order to achieve the necessary knowledge or comprehension to determine the ways that a specific acknowledged necessity can be satisfied.
Development
The use of the systematic knowledge and comprehension acquired by research, in order to produce materials, technology, the application of some process on society, etc.
Stokes shows the importance of all types of projects, even those started by pure curiosity, after all it is one of the best qualities of any scientist. His importance over scientific community is huge, in Horizon 2020, the main scientific program of the European Union, with a budget of € 80 billion (about R $ 285 billion) from 2014 to 2020, the resources are divided into three parts. One of them is basic research, which finances projects driven by curiosity, but also on themes that propose to support new technologies. The second is research in companies, which provides resources and credits for large, medium and small companies, including programs whose return is considered to be high risk. And finally, the research that seeks to face “society’s challenges” on interdisciplinary topics such as population aging, energy efficiency and food security.
Rates of return of investment on science
There are economic scientific evidence that show why every government should invest on science, the UK govern periodically publish studies about the return of investment on science and innovation, shows evidence confirming that every £1 spent by government yields a return of between 20 to 50 pence per year in perpetuity, it can be found here. Funny to think that it is a scientific evidence on why we should invest in science, it’s recursive, just like a fractal.
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