The National Academies of Science produces regular reports on the state of scientific research in the US. Their latest effort along these lines has just been released, and the academy has put the spotlight on physics in a report entitled Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics: The Science of the World Around Us. Despite the dry title, this is an area of physics that Ars readership cares deeply about, even if it doesn't realize it: advances in this field have produced the electronics revolution that we're relying on to read this page.

The report identifies six key questions that will represent the grand challenges that materials science will face over the coming decade: the ones most likely to produce the next revolution. But it also raises fears that those challenges will be met by researchers outside of the US. It highlights the fact that government funding has not kept up with the rising costs of research at the same time that the corporate-funded research lab system has collapsed. As a result, US scientific productivity has stagnated at a time when funding and output are booming overseas. The report makes a series of recommendations that it hopes will get US physics research booming again.

The grand challenges of materials science

Materials science, as the report notes, is not only a broad field of inquiry itself, but advances in materials science enable advances in many other fields, and its progress has a direct impact on consumers. Our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of materials has become essential to creating various processors, sensors, light sources, etc. As such, the grand challenges proposed in the report drift into areas such as biology and computer science:

How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?

How will the energy demands of future generations be met?

What is the physics of life?

What happens far from equilibrium and why?

What new discoveries await us in the nanoworld?

How will the information technology revolution be extended?

The report suggests that meeting these challenges will be essential not only for our scientific understanding, but for future economic growth as well. The countries that do the most to meet them will benefit the most economically.

Although the US has dominated the field during the 20th century, a number of reasons are listed to suggest that it is poorly positioned to continue at this pace. As someone who has followed the funding situation in biology carefully, the problems facing physics appear to be essentially identical.

Stagnating research

The total grant money dedicated to the field has barely outpaced normal inflation over the last decade, but lab costs (especially salaries of students and fellows) have shot up at a much faster rate: grant buying power has declined by 15 percent as a result. Because of this, researchers are applying for more grants, sending the competition up and success rates down: overall funding rates have dropped from 38 percent to 22 percent. New investigators, who are generally thought to take more aggressive and innovative approaches, are faring even worse as their success rates have dropped by more than half and now stand at only 12 percent.

The net result is that the academic community is now devoting far more of its time to writing grants, a shift that has come at the expense of directing and publishing research. In the past, academics have had an escape route from the pressures to retain funding: the "blue sky" research labs run by major companies, such as AT&T's Bell Labs. But the report refers to these institutions as "once great," since recent years have seen them closed, sold off piecemeal, or refocused on product development.

Combined, these changes have caused US research output to shrink in comparison to the rest of the world. Based on publications in Physical Reviews B and E, the US contribution to papers has remained flat over the last decade, while papers originating from other countries have nearly doubled. The report predicts that this reduced output will ultimately exact a price on the American economy.

Money for new directions

Many of their recommendations for correcting the situation are similar to the proposed solutions for other fields of research. Grant success rates should be brought up to the neighborhood of 30 percent, and the funding amounts need to be adjusted to compensate for the fact that academic researchers are now paid semi-reasonable wages. Grants should be pushed towards small research groups, as these are the major source of innovations. More minorities and women should be brought into the field, and career flexibility needs to be provided so that researchers do not have to choose between career and family needs as often.

There are three recommendations that stand out as being distinct from those proposed for other fields. Two suggest restructuring the way grant money is currently allocated. The National Science Foundation currently lumps interdisciplinary studies and educational programs in with other grants, where they are evaluated by people who may not have an appropriate background to judge them. The report recommends that the NSF recruit expertise across fields (such as the physics/biology overlap) specifically to provide a decent evaluation of grant proposals.

It also suggests an emphasis on education and outreach programs, which are essential to increasing public understanding of science and attracting a new generation of researchers. These programs need to be targeted to both college and K-12 education, and the funding for them needs to be separated from general research funds. Evaluations of education grants need to be separated as well, as research scientists are often incapable of properly evaluating them.

But the most radical proposal is that the equivalent of the great industrial labs needs to be reestablished. It suggests that all interested parties, ranging from industry through the Department of Defense and Energy to the academic world, should meet and determine what's needed to recreate the research environment they once fostered. Unfortunately, beyond calling for these discussions, the report is remarkably vague about how to resuscitate these now moribund labs.

Prospects for change

Most of the recommendations of this report are very similar to those proposed for other fields of research. As such, they face a common set of financial and institutional problems. With the federal government expected to be in deficit for the indefinite future, it's not clear whether funding for science will outstrip inflation any time soon. Given that, any efforts to increase the value of grant money will have to come at the expense of the number of grants, a shift that would surely meet resistance from the scientific community. Similar resistance would be expected to greet changes that favored small research groups, as these will come at the expense of established investigators that wield the most political clout.

The educational proposals are in line with the general scientific community's recognition that it's facing a public that's poorly equipped to evaluate the scientific developments that affect them directly and are thus unable to make reasoned decisions regarding funding and research allocations and restrictions. It's hard to say whether they will be enacted, but the proposed changes would make for one of the better structured efforts at public outreach I've encountered.

In contrast, the proposal to return to the days of large labs that sit on the border between basic research and product development are frustratingly vague. I find it hard to imagine that anyone would view it as a bad idea, but in the absence of money, a plan, and a clear view of who would be involved, it seems to be an invitation to talk rather than action.

This is a shame, because it's hard to question the contention that they made huge contributions to science in general and materials science in particular. The report is right that materials science is likely to be key to both scientific and economic advances over the coming decade, and the lack of an achievable plan leaves the US likely to be left out on some of them.