Rolf-Dieter Heuer Quotes
If you don't invest in basic research at some stage you start losing the basis of applied research.
Heuer, Rolf-Dieter. "Rolf-Dieter Heuer: Unlocking the Universe." Talk to Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 22 Dec. 2012.
In the French Revolutionary reign of terror, people were settling old scores and denouncing anyone they had an issue with as anti-revolutionary. And nobility were extremely suspect. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) was not only a great scientist but a wealthy noble who also was an expert on government finance and had served as a tax collector. Lavoisier’s defense was that he could finish his scientific experiments that the whole world could benefit from. Ironically, 3 months after Lavoisier was beheaded, the judge himself was denounced by an enemy and he too was sent to the guillotine.
This is why the American Government has played such a major role in most of the great technologies in American History. Interchangable Parts (A federal contract with Eli Whitney), Canal Construction (New York State built the Erie Canal), the Railroad (federal government gave hugh tracts of land to build the rail lines to the West), the Telegraph (No one would use it until the government financed the experiment to prove it by creating a line between Baltimore and Washington), AC Electricity, there the city of Rochester NY hired Tessler and Westinghouse to Demonstrate Generating Electricity at Niagra Falls and transmitting it over 20 miles which Edison’s Direct Current could not do), immunization (the Army Medical Corps gave the first grants to universities to develop the science of vaccines and immunization, the computer (in WWII the U. S. financed the development of computers sent to England to implement Turing’s breaking of the German “unbreakable” code), atiomic energy (the Manhattan Project—the largest scientific endeavor the world has known), the Internet (Developed with long term research funds for DARPA the future technology research arm of the Defense Department. American investors and businesspeople took each of these and developed them but the initial steps, when no capitalist dared risk on such basic and futureistic efforts were taken by American Government which probably could never have developed these technologies but the private sector could not do it with government in the role Moritz herein describes.
Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer is a German particle physicist. From 2009 to 2015 he was Director General of CERN and from 5 April 2016 to 9 April 2018 President of the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft). Since 2015 he has been Chair of the European Commission's Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, and since May 2017 he has been President of the SESAME. Council
