Lennart Thornros <lenn...@thornros.com> wrote: The fact as you call it is; scientists has made a lot of progress since the > renaissance and you want the government to have the credit for that. >
Yes, because the government paid for it. Also organized it. The scientists could not have done what they did without the government. If I build a factory and I hire people to work in it, I get some of the credit for what they do, even though they do the actual work. I definitely think the State of Utah deserves some credit for cold fusion, since it employed Pons and provided the lab space for the experiments. F&P could not have done it without a paycheck and lab equipment. Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley deserved the Nobel prize, but we also have to thank the management at Bell Labs for hiring them, paying their salaries, providing lab space, secretarial help, etc. I am sure the secretaries and the other support staff did a lot essential work to enable the discovery. Everyone at Bell Labs deserved a small share of the credit. Governments pay for most fundamental research. Corporations do not contribute much, because it does not often pay back directly. Of course corporations have made important contributions, such as integrated circuits invented at Texas Instruments. Following that invention, rapid progress was made mainly thanks to NASA and Defense Dept., which ordered many ICs and paid for additional R&D. Most real-time computer technology such as core memory, the CPU designs, and so on, were invented at MIT in Project Whirlwind (1946 - 1953). Just about every future important hardware designer participated at one time or another. It was the training ground for the whole generation of people who went on to invent modern computing. "Whirlwind alumni/ae have founded countless companies and have made numerous innovations in technology and software." (http://museum.mit.edu/150/21) That was entirely paid for by the U.S. Air Force. In the 1960s, IBM and other corporations took the lead in computer R&D. The Air Force had to lead in the early 1950s because the research was not profitable yet. It was more theoretical. It was vitally important to the military, but not yet profitable. - Jed
