Thank you for your thoughtful and illuminating response. It does appear, reviewing the abstract of your project that you are working in an arena that is outside of mainstream research, and may not have been funded through traditional channels. I do agree completely that the issue with pharmacutical reasearch funded by the manufacturers is a much larger issue than the funding sources for FXQI.

Best of luck with you project. I look forward to seeing the results in the future.

Regards,

Elliot

The multidisciplinary nature of the project is one of the reasons I’m enthusiastic about it. Often work on foundational issues in physics is wide of the mark, because the investigator isn’t up to date with the literature in physics or the philosophy of physics – whichever is not their main field. We hope to avoid some (though realistically not all) of those pitfalls.

I hadn’t thought too much about how neurobiology might be involved, but maybe we should – and I’m certainly interested in the perspective a neurobiologist might have on the subject.

Firstly, some comments here (e.g. “I was just saying that some of the proposals didn’t sound like what the FQXi announcement was asking for”) seem to imply that the funded proposals weren’t sufficiently radical, or that the money was going to established people who would work on these questions anyway.

When I was writing my proposal I realized that there was a fine line between out of the box and off the wall — and it was clear that the FQXi people were expecting proposals that described well thought out projects, which could be turned into well-posed calculations. By (rightly, IMHO) insisting on this distinction, the FQXi process is pretty much guaranteed to produce proposals with some overlap with existing work. Sean pointed this out when he said that he thought many of the proposals would be fundable by the NSF or DOE.

Where the FQXi will have an impact is on the *amount* of work done in these “foundational” areas — I will use my money for PhD and post-doc support, and it will lead to ideas that would not otherwise have been have (at least by me and my collaborators) and papers that would not otherwise have been written. And I suspect the same is true of Brian and Eva and the rest.

What this gets to in the end is that people in theoretical cosmology of us could get more work done if we had more post-docs and grad students, and the limitation is primarily financial — not the availability of talented people, or “bandwidth” on the part of most researchers. Certainly there is an upper limit on the number of students and post-docs an individual can directly work with, but I doubt that I or most of my colleagues are at it.

This brings us to wider question of whether the FQXi money is tainted in some way, via its connection to the Templeton Institute. Obviously, I have nailed my colors to the mast on this one by applying for the grant and then taking the money. However, so far as I can see the Templeton people are simply funding the research (via the FQXi), and have not attempted to “bias” the outcome in any way, and this is good enough for me. The most pernicious conflicts of interest I see in science arise in areas like pharmaceutical research, where a drug company may fund a study and then try to suppress its conclusions if it was going to make it harder for them to get new products to market. If our colleagues in the life sciences can negotiate this sort of dilemma, we should have little trouble here.

I would be very excited to see the Templeton Foundation support for fundamental physics and cosmology (provided they continue along the direction they have set with their work with the FQXi). For all that this is the “golden age” of cosmology, the field could do with more money — there are good ideas and good people that are currently underfunded, and any influx of money into the field is going to make life easier for everyone.

Finally, it is interesting to note that many now solid organizations institutions had somewhat “questionable” origins. For instance, Babson, who founded the institute behind the Gravity Research Foundation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation) was, by all accounts, barking mad but lots of prominent people enter this competition every year

What set of skills do you think would be best served to address the AOT problem.
Obviously we are well beyond the days of renaissance men who are at the absolute cutting edge of knowledge in many fields. Certainly there are very smart people who understand multiple areas.

Just curious.

Regards,

Elliot

In other words theoretical physics might be only a small ingredient – or even mostly irrelevant.

Is a theoretical physicist, even Brian Greene, likely to be able to deal with the relevant philosophical and biological issues well enough?

Again, I’m not opposed to philosophical problems, but why would one think that the person best equipped to solve them is a theoretical physicist?

So am I. In fact I’m delighted that someone at BG’s level is going to be working on the arrow of time. Thing is, these people are *already* getting lots of money to do these things.

On the other hand, one could argue as follows: publicizing the fact that someone as well-respected as BG is willing to work on “old” problems like the AOT may serve to render such work “more respectable” — it seems that not everyone agrees with me that work on the AOT is “mainstream”. If giving money to BG serves this purpose, then I am all for it.

I wonder how the process might have/might be different if there was lay participation in the judging process. Just a thought.

I really did expect to see at least one project specifically addressing the nature of dark energy in a radically different way.

I’m with Robert McNees. Does Eva Silverstein really need $50000 to do research that she is doing anyway? Does Brian Greene need $70000 so that he can do research on the arrow of time — surely perfectly mainstream stuff? On the other hand, I would certainly rather see money going to serious things than to “Evolutionary Universe hypothesis, which explains the fine-tuning of the laws of Physics for life by means of an evolution of baby universes”.

To be clear, I’m all for giving Eva and Brian money to work on these things. Eva is, in my opinion, one of the most creative people working in the field. And Brian has a history of taking on new subjects and doing very interesting things with them. These are cool ideas by sharp people. I was just saying that some of the proposals didn’t sound like what the FQXi announcement was asking for.

This is not to say that this remark applies to a majority of the grants.

Curious that there are two experimental grants going to look for possible variation in alpha – but none for any other potentially varying fundamental ‘constant’. I guess alpha is more fashionable…

Still, the experimental projects each individually look well worth supporting.

I highly doubt whether some of the more ‘philosophical’ projects will yield any progress. Particularly ones of the form ‘this problem has been thought about for fifty years already by the world’s finest minds without getting anywhere, but I’m going to make a breakthrough if you give me a bit of free time’. So: Khoury is going to think about Mach’s principle. Levin is going to think about Goedel’s theorem. Good luck there on finding anything that Penrose missed. Greene is going to think about entropy.

And in my opinion giving Oxford $60,000 to hold a conference about the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ is an absolute waste of money. Looks like a pure PR exercise. Not that I have anything against Everett, but his ideas, so far as they lead to anything physically meaningful, are already well known and discussed, for example by Zurek.

The problem about ‘philosophical’ questions is not that they are philosophical, but they tend to lead to large volumes of hot air on the part of physicists.

Anyway, I don’t want to be so negative about the theory projects, some of them look intriguing, though it is hard to tell from the nontechnical abstracts.

But what is Bohmian mechanics doing in a black hole?? Did it suddenly become relativistic?