alt Hacker NewsA few hundred people working on String Theory for about four decades is about $500 million. Hope this proof was worth it.
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Or roughly the cost of producing Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Kinda wish that money had gone to string theory.
What would you have them work on? Predatory social media platforms that sell your data to advertisers and commoditize you.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson made an amazing point some years back that string theory costs practically nothing to develop. It takes some human capital to be sure, but in terms of infrastructure investments, it's pencils and paper and some computers. There's no high stakes mega project requiring massive infrastructure investments for questionable returns; no super colliders or gravitational wave detectors.
For a field repeatedly challenged for not bringing testable predictions to bear, the fact that so much of its rich theoretical framework has been able to be worked out with minimal infrastructure investment is a welcome blessing which, I would hope, critics and supporters alike can celebrate.
I suspect more people worked on solving quadratic equations in what I estimate to be the 1000 years since the problem was formulated, to when it was solved. The ancient Greeks knew that they could solve some quadratic equations but not others, and Al-Khwarizmi came up with the general solution. And then it was even further generalized with complex numbers.
If all research bore fruit it wouldn't be research.
so like 12.5 million a year? what an incredible self-own.
aside from that, this number is meaningless without context: how much do other fields of research get?
Your entire life summed up probably costs $500k-4m (On average, depending). Some bean counter could probably argue that it isn't worth it.
I am not a fan of String Theory, but as far as fringe science theories go, String Theory is probably one of the more innocent ones. If you are going to pour money into a fringe science theory, I would much rather it goes to scientists trying to discover some properties of the universe which may or may not exist (and probably doesn’t exist; lets be honest here), than many of the awful stuff which exists on the fringes of social sciences (things like longtermism or futurism) or on the fringes of engineering (a future Mars colony, AI singularity, etc.).
Over a couple of decades VCs have invested in vanity startups that cost billions of dollars like it's nothing, countless times.
I think half a billion isn't that expensive for a program that searches for a potential "theory of everything" that can profoundly change our understanding of the universe (even if it brings no results!)