Monday, April 23, 2012

From the NY Review of Books: The Crisis of Big Science

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/?pagination=false

The Crisis of Big Science

MAY 10, 2012

Steven Weinberg



"What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong. We saw several members of Congress change their stand on the SSC after their states were eliminated as possible sites."

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