[saul_goodman]

Very good talk. However I would only disagree with her on the idea that funding will dry up for particle physicists and that the model of funding helps to drive the useless cycle if bad ideas in physics (and any government funded science).

1) Obtaining grants to continue study in any field of science is greatly improved if you are iterating on an established idea that is already understood. Getting a grant on a completely novel idea outside of the mainstream field of thoughts is going to be much harder. Along with this is the reality that government grants are managed by a revolving door of industry and university insiders which is both a terrible and great thing. On one hand you don't want lobotomized bureaunaughts making uninformed decisions on which researchers to support. On the other hand your knowledgable staff on granting agencies are going to be the ~top of a given field and as such will weed out non-mainstream ideas for funding as "they already know" that a new line of thought to be foley.

2) While governments freely waste taxpayers money, they still do it strategically. After Hiroshima the world understood how important it is to keep a close eye on the physics community. Every country with a viable nuclear program must continue to engage in this game of useless increments in particle physics. Making progress is not what is important, what is truly important is that a country has its own base of physics knowledge and active development so that should another physics breakthrough happen elsewhere then they have a chance of recreating it on their own within a short enough window for it to make a difference. If you didn't already have physicists engaged in their craft then you would be 5-10 years behind the curve of any post-nuclear-physics breakthrough. The same game is played in many other fields of science...