Scientific Method / Science & Exploration


But he warns Congressmen that the payoff can take decades.

America's Astronomer-in-Chief drives his point home by showing magazine covers with NASA's iconic Earthrise photo.
Rob Pegoraro

Neil deGrasse Tyson came to Washington on Wednesday to deliver the science-specific version of President Barack Obama's second inaugural address.

Where Obama emphasized the utility and necessity of government doing what citizens cannot do individually across the breadth of society, Twitter's favorite astrophysicist focused on the case for government having a unique capacity to fund basic research.

The occasion for Tyson's speech was the launch of the new House Science and National Labs Caucus, founded by Reps. Randy Hultgren (R-IL; Fermilab is in his district), Chaka Fattah (D-PA), Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM; Los Alamos is in his), and Alan Nunnelee (R-MS). This group isn't the only one aiming for better science funding—the Research And Development Caucus has similar goals and a six-year head start—so the new caucus opted to call attention to its launch with a name-brand guest at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium.

(The caucus also invited a dozen or so science-leaning Twitter users, myself included, to good seats and a peek at some of the Library's artifacts, including one of Carl Sagan's slide rules.)

Tyson framed his talk around three things that motivate societies to tackle never-been-done-before efforts like the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, Columbus' voyages, and the Apollo program. One of these three factors—praising royalty or a deity—doesn't apply in the US. A second—countering an existential threat, which Tyson called "the 'I don't want to die' driver"—has faded since the end of the Cold War.

That leaves the promise of economic return: in Tyson's words, "I don't want to die poor!"

"If you have a healthy science program in this country, you guarantee your economic future," he declared in one of the moments that could have been snipped from a campaign speech.

But with basic research, that payoff can come at a slow and unknowable pace.

Tyson cited Michael Faraday discovering the basic principles behind generating electricity in the 1830s (with a quote that is apocryphal at best), then noted "We didn't electrify cities until the turn of the century." Quantum physics was born in the 1920s, and it took another 50 years for those principles to see widespread commercial applications in computing: "A third of the world economy is based on quantum physics, because information technology requires quantum physics!"

In one case Tyson spelled out, the reward won't fit in a spreadsheet cell: the shift in our cultural consciousness will be forged by images like Apollo 8's Earthrise and other images of the lonely Earth floating in space.

Tyson criticized two recent examples of the United States pulling back from big science projects that might have had their own long-term payoff. One was the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider that, he said, could have discovered the Higgs Boson "on the first day." The other was the government balking at the Space Exploration Initiative NASA drew up for President George H.W. Bush, estimated to cost $500 billion over 20 to 30 years.

One area where Tyson did not nail his case was when he argued that non-government entities—a few of which aren’t quarterly-earnings obsessed corporations—will never back comparable efforts. He may feel that "private enterprise will never lead a space frontier," as he said during Q&A afterwards, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk seems quite serious about going to Mars.

The director of the Hayden Planetarium did not remind Congressional representatives and staffers in the room of how science funding compares with the $3 trillion and up spent on the Iraq war. But as he'd said earlier: "If you feel threatened, money flows like rivers."

He did, however, break out a prop to emphasize the relatively small amounts of money involved: a dollar bill from his wallet.

"You can take a dollar and cut off this edge but don't get into the ink," he said. "Then cut off the other edge and don't get into the ink. Those two amounts of this dollar, that's the R&D budget of the United States.

"The rest is everyone complaining that our economy is losing ground in the world."

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