Publication Date: 10/2/2007

What would science do without big government?

Well, when I recently heard Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, claim that most of the great discoveries have been made by small operations and lone scientists, I was intrigued. But I immediately thought of a counterexample, the high-resolution pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope.

I don’t even want to know how much taxpayer money was spent on Hubble. I just look at the pictures it has produced and I think: Wow, isn’t the universe amazing?

And I think: Wow, how could this be done without massive subsidy?

Well, now I’ve been told how: Ingenuity.

Astronomers at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology recently announced a bit of high tech they added to a 60-year-old telescope. It was a special camera. It cost a mere $20,000.

In this case, luck helped. Or, “lucky” did. The “Lucky Imaging” system is what allowed the Hale Telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory to compensate for the atmosphere’s interference, and come up with astoundingly clear photos of stars that are light years away. Clearer than Hubble.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you can’t afford to go the luxury course. You get creative.

That’s how science was done before big government. And it is how much of it will be done after government gets pared down to size.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.