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[Phys-L] billion dollar gamble



I quote from a 1400-word article by Nell Greenfieldboyce:

«Imagine spending 40 years and more than a billion dollars on a gamble.

That's what one U.S. government science agency did. It's now paying off big time, with new discoveries about black holes and exotic neutron stars coming almost every week.

And while three physicists shared the Nobel Prize for the work that made this possible, one of them says the real hero is a former National Science Foundation staffer named Rich Isaacson, who saw a chance to cultivate some stunning research and grabbed it.

"The thing that Rich Isaacson did was such a miracle," says Rainer Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the 2017 Nobel laureates. "I think he's the hero. He's a singular hero. We just don't have a good way of recognizing people like that. Rich was in a singular place fighting a singular war that nobody else could have fought."

Without him, Weiss says, "we would've been killed dead on virtually every topic." He and his fellow laureate Kip Thorne recently donated money to create a brand-new American Physical Society award in Isaacson's honor.»



The full article is at:
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/19/723326933/billion-dollar-gamble-how-a-singular-hero-helped-start-a-new-field-in-physics

It's an interesting story. It is only one part of the proverbial
elephant, but it's a part that is often underappreciated. When
was the last time you read a story where a government bureaucrat
was the hero of the piece?

You can tell people that scientists work on really hard problems,
but most people cannot imagine what it's like to work on something
for 4 years -- not to mention 40 years -- with nothing to show
for it. There is no guarantee of eventual success; the whole
thing could turn out to be impossible, or you could get scooped
by somebody else.

People are generally aware that science requires mathematical
smarts, but often they don't realize that it also requires
tremendous toughness of character.

Personal note: Kip Thorne tried to recruit me to work on the
gravity wave project, but I declined, precisely for this reason.
I figured (correctly) that it would require 40 or 50 years of
hard work and I did not have enough toughness for that. I've
worked on some hard projects, hard enough to make sane people
flee in terror, but I'm not in the same league as the gravity
wave folks.