International collaboration has become a contentious issue in the world of academia. From a recent Bloomberg article by Tyler Cowen, I learned that ivy league universities have been accepting huge sums of money from countries like Iran, China and others. The chair of the Harvard chemistry department accepted 50,000 dollars per year and as much as 150,000 dollars in perks from Chinese collaborators and a hundred researchers at Texas A&M, many of whom worked in areas relevant to national defense, had gotten money from China and only five of them disclosed this.
I know people who work for a German lab and they are encouraged to collaborate with Chinese institutes, but I’ve heard that this sort of collaboration is sometimes controversial from the US standpoint, especially when the German lab also collaborates with US institutes. What these people do is all in compliance with the law, unlike US companies that set up work arounds to sell their products by going through intermediaries that are not on US soil, but for people in Germany and South Korea, countries that have always been stuck between two sides of a cold war, trying to remain friends with both sides has become increasingly challenging. They are both well aware that their security is dependent on support from the US, but as technocrats and mafia-sorts do battle, keeping clean shoes is challenging.
By some measures, academia has always operated as an entity that has no respect for international boundaries and this was its strength, but in times of war, knowledge becomes weaponized. Even though conflicts today seem to fly under the radar, this doesn’t mean that there are no casualties. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that people who are involved in the transfer of sensitive technology are simply eliminated in discrete ways.
This leads me to wonder about the extent to which international collaboration in fundamental physics is restricted. There was a conference last year in Hamburg during which dual use (military/civilian) applications of free electron laser technologies were discussed and, from what I gathered, the conclusion was that military uses of the technology have been tried out and ruled out. This left the doors of international collaboration open within that sphere, but what happens if a nuclear physicist goes abroad to spread knowledge to populations that are not typically invited to conferences? (I honestly don’t know since I didn’t study nuclear physics.)
If there is an effort to limit the spread of knowledge of physics fundamentals, how much of this is based on paranoia and how much is based on real danger? I studied physics for twenty years and I have no idea what the answer to this question is.
I only know that terrible physics instruction at the university level is rampant and limited, one-sided perpsectives are the norm.
If the federal government attempted to crack down on academia across the board, I can’t imagine that it would do much more than destroy its own institutions. If a treasonous cancer has metastazised, then shooting oneself in the foot isn’t going to help matters. I wish I had an easy answer. If I were to write a piece of fiction about this situation, I’d imagine a sort of inquisition playing out over the coming years as the federal government hunts down academic traitors – otherwise known as people who believe in the importance of international collaboration.
I’m glad I’m not part of that game.
In his Portal podcast series, Eric Weinstein gives us a peek at people at the top of the game and he seems to be trying to seed a strange narrative about Jeffrey Epstein as a CIA operative who acted as a magnet for traitors within politics and academia. Weinstein didn’t come out and say this but he drops hints about how weird it was that the media didn’t investigate Epstein’s or Ghislane Maxwell’s finances and about how weird it was that Epstein led an eleven figure existence when he was only worth nine figures on paper. Was Jeffrey Epstein really a sort of 007 holding up a pedophile front to draw in rich scumbags with a dragnet?
A good way to control a community that is under the illusion that it can do whatever it wants is to get them into compromising positions with women who appear to be underage and then use pictures and videos to keep them on a short leash. I thought that entrapment was illegal, but what do I know about international level politics.
Kirsten Hacker 