When I served as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the assistant for science and technology to President George H. W. Bush (1989–93), the administration often needed to deal with funding priorities for science and technology. It’s essential that a committee or panel recommending funding base its decisions on some fundamental criteria for making scientific choices.
Forty years ago, Alvin Weinberg, then director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pioneered such an analysis (see Physics Today, March 1964, page 42). He formulated a scale of values that might help establish priorities among those scientific fields that were supported by the government. In particular, he distinguished between two kinds of criteria: internal and external. The internal criteria, Weinberg wrote, are generated within the scientific field itself. Two such criteria are: Is the field ready for exploitation? And are the scientists in the field really competent? But...
