[Colonel Flagg]

Milhouse and FZ are both right. Even in the 60's and 70's there was less emphasis on science for the sake of learning and more about "let's keep ahead of the Red Menace" (sorry Zhuk, but that's how it was). [Aside: Irony - now we are competing with the last bastion of communism (China) in the scientific arena, and no one seems to care. Maybe that's not surprising, since they're also kicking our ass economically as well.]

Science for the sake of science - that's all people see. That's all the politicians see. Case in point - Fermilab's Tevatron paved the way for practical superconducting technology, and fueled research into HT superconductors, which are still years away from true commercialization, but it used to be decades. Another case in point - the James Webb Space Telescope. It's in danger of being cut from the NASA Budget. The reason - it's over budget. Well duh so is everything these days. The trouble is, even though it's still in development, work on the heat shield has spawned new technology in the area of foldable ultrathin aluminum shields - the kind that can eventually be used as light sails. Other optical advances have been applied already in medical imaging, as an indirect result of the work done on multiple space telescopes - Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler and Webb.

Another reason is the politicization of science. It has been done before (see "Red Menace" above) but in that case, it was America against the world. Now, it's more of a civil war of American Science against American Pseudo-science. And the Pseudo Science Dorks are using the mainstream media to further their cause, getting Creationism rebranded as "scientific" sounding Intelligent Design, bashing global warming as a liberal conspiracy as well as other less visible effects.

I could go on, but it would be more of the same stuff. If I only thought about this from that perspective, it would be really depressing. But I encourage and suggest, one discussion at a time, and persevere. The JWT is still on life support, but there's a grass roots movement to keep it alive. And NASA still provides excitement with the discovery of new exoplanetary systems courtesy of Kepler, confirmed with radial velocity measurements from the VLT and Keck. Fermilab will continue on, not with the Tevatron, but with alternative methods of experimentation and data collection that have been hitherto unexplored. And all these "big ticket items" will continue to spawn new technologies and products that will keep us in the fore, if not at the lead, of technology development for the next hundred years.