Science Spending as a fraction of GDP

Published by Marcos on June 30, 2008 under General

The National Science Foundation has an excellent statistics in the appendices to the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators Report.

I used the excel versions of Tables 4-1, Gross domestic product and implicit price deflators: 1953–2007, and Table 4-32, Federal obligations for total research, by detailed S&E field: FY 1986–2007 to produce this chart:

To be clear, I took the constant 2000 dollar values for Physics and Astronomy and Physical Sciences spending from Table 4-32, and divided those into the constant dollars GDP number from Table 4-1.

Physical Sciences, Astronomy, and Physics spending as a fraction of GDP

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According the data, all Physical Science spending in 2005 is equal to Physics spending alone 20 years ago. Grim.

Physicists in Congress

Published by Marcos on June 10, 2008 under General

The New York Times has an article and quotes from a joint interview on the three Ph.D. physicists in the US House of Representatives. Those would be Rush Holt, (D-NJ), Vern Ehlers (R-MI), and the the newest addition, Bill Foster (D-IL).

Now we just need an astronomer in there.