American Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 17 article, original title: Prohibiting Scientific Collaboration with China Will Harm American Interests. The U.S. government is currently reviewing a bill that would prohibit scientists receiving federal funding from collaborating with China in any form. In the context of increasingly intense U.S.-China competition, this measure seems reasonable. However, a comprehensive ban on the scope of basic scientific collaboration is overly broad and may cause serious damage to American science. Although we cannot predict how a particular research will benefit us, nor can we determine which research will eventually have direct application value, we are clear that basic scientific research will inevitably bring benefits, and its results will certainly change human life.
Thus, this ban is meaningless. Even during the most tense periods of the Cold War, American scientists maintained cooperation with their Soviet counterparts in the field of basic research. Their joint research covered areas such as earth sciences and environmental sciences, which promoted significant advances in basic science and also maintained a valuable unofficial "communication channel" between the two countries.
Although the outcomes of basic scientific research are unpredictable, and may only become apparent decades later, modern society has recognized that investing in basic scientific research brings many tangible and intangible long-term benefits. Today, conducting research in cutting-edge fields such as particle physics and astrophysics increasingly requires the use of large and extremely expensive research facilities.
Western countries have always maintained cooperation to bear the costs of building new large-scale experimental facilities. However, the cost of these facilities is becoming increasingly high, and Western countries, by themselves, can only build a few at most.
China understands the importance of basic science and has begun to build some of the largest and most significant world-class basic science experimental facilities. For example, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope (FAST), a large neutrino research facility recently put into operation, satellites for gamma-ray astronomy research, and a series of particle accelerators.
Scientists from other countries have started to collaborate with Chinese scientists to design and conduct experiments using these world-class facilities. The United States needs to be cautious, but there is almost no risk involved in cooperating with China in utilizing these world-class experimental facilities and analyzing the data they produce. If the U.S. government prohibits all collaboration with China in even the least risky and most fundamental areas of basic research, it may cause serious and perhaps permanent damage to the U.S. scientific community. (Author: M. Granger Morgan, Professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S., translated by Wang Cong)
Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7574226698753802792/
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