by all rights, a private sponsor of the RHIC or any other comparable scientific endeavor, ought to be able to sway and move the results of such an investment towards consumers it chooses. IMO, RHIC would resist any suggestion such results be withheld from public fora, but an investor might request interested parties have, say, an early look. what’s interesting is if such an early revelation seemed to oppose the political interests of the United States government or whatever flash-in-the-pan administration occupied the chief office at the time.

does such a government, in the absence of its financial support, have any right to dictate the priority or totality of revelations of RHIC’s discoveries? does a partner have the right to dictate such merely because it provides a portion of its funding? might not a foreign government wish to make its own contribution to a facility like RHIC for its own reasons? if so, shouldn’t it have the right to sway priorities in revelation?

these are not matters which are pressing, but they are the principles which are affected by government choosing not to fund a major and important institution like RHIC, but private funds choosing to do so.

i, for one, would strongly argue that if a government does not choose to support an endeavor like RHIC and others do, that government cedes any right to specify how or when these results are publicized, revealed, and used. if they care, let them pay.

If you’re talking about direct technological applications, then none spring to mind right now. But then again, General Relativity didn’t have any (that I’m aware of)until we started sending up space probes and built the GPS system, which was a long time after its discovery. Even if no such technological benefits exist, everything I wrote about in the preceding paragraph remains true.

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics was officially launched on October 23, 2000 with a $100 million donation from Mike Lazaridis

The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that’s slamming gold nuclei into each other to…

A word of caution though, because I like to watch what capitalism can do, when it can take over the way it would like to drive society. But enough of that. We have governmental watchdogs for this?

Other accomplishements?

The “Perimenter Institute” up in Canada, and the way in which the agendas have been pushed forwward in terms of science developement. Wiki is a good one too. Of course we have heard of the Templeton foundation over and over again, but lets consider the science shall we?

Who are on the board of directors and we don;’t want to digress to ID this and ID that and oh what string theorists are here, in that regard.

Very frustrating thing to hear, when you are trying to get to the bones of the issues? I know there are purer thoughts out there.

So any others?

Short of endowments or large donations, how else is this type of science going to get done except to rely on federal funding?

I’m less convinced of the impact on long-term funding. Nobody is going to donate $5 billion dollars to build a linear collider. But the government might get the idea that they should — a worry familiar from high-school bake sales is that every time you collect $x of external funding, your conventional funding is decreased by $2x to compensate. And of course, our beloved comment section will now be overrun by Ayn Rand acolytes who think that all science should be funded by private donations.