Physics Roundtable: Reinventing Our Future (original) (raw)

With the end of the cold wor, physics is under increasing pressure to become more relevant and practical. Looking back on this period, historians might say that economic security has largely replaced military security as the critical factor in setting R&D policies. The implications of this change for the preparation and performance of physicists are discussed by the roundtable participants. Lubkin: In the 1990s physics is under strong pressure to change. Federal policies that have guided America's science and technology enterprise almost continuously since the end of World War II have come under increasingly close scrutiny in Congress, and once more, as in the 1960s, an attempt is being made to direct basic research supported by the government to more relevant and practical ends. American industry, at the same time, has virtually abdicated its support of basic research, thereby leaving the Federal government as the sole guardian of one of the nation's most important responsibilities-that of assuring the benefits of basic research. All this has happened in a period of unexpected and unsettling political, social and economic changes brought about by the end of the cold war and by the country's technological malaise. At a time like this we physicists