Question: What is the biggest problem that the world of science is facing at the moment?

Claire Lee answered on 24 Jun 2013:

Whew, I’d have to probably say Funding.

It takes money to do research, you often have to build things that were never built before, or go to places not many people can go to, and you have to protect the people and make sure they survive because they’re the experts and you don’t want to lose them. Of course you get the rewards back, you always will in some form or another, that’s the great thing about science. But often you only get the rewards many years down the line. (Einstein developed general relativity in 1916. GPS, which relies on general relativity for accuracy, was only fully functional in 1994).

Unfortunately the world’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and more and more people are focusing on “quick fixes” than things for the long term. Also, politics, war and the military are all sucking resources away from science – and it’s pretty hard to argue for possible breakthroughs to come in the future when you can easily scare people with the threat of terrorism.

The US had a chance to discover the Higgs boson years ago – they were building an accelerator called the Superconducting Supercollider, that would have had more energy than the LHC. But they canceled the project due to budget trouble in 1993. So CERN gets the glory of the Higgs discovery, US physicists have to fly to Europe to do the same work, and spend US dollars in Switzerland and France instead. Do you think that was a good idea for the US, in the long run?

This is why things like this “I’m a Scientist” is so important – to get people like you to realise the importance of science on a global scale. You might not become a scientist when you grow up, maybe you’ll become a politician, deciding on how to spend the country’s budget. At the very least you’ll grow up to be a voter, and at some point your view on science will affect a choice that you will make. Make it a good one!