The European Union’s commissioner for research, Philippe Busquin, has set himself the ambitious target that EU member states should increase their spending on research from the current average level of 1.9% of gross domestic product (GDP) to 3% by 2010. Moreover, says Busquin, two-thirds of the extra investment should come from industry. Such an increase, he claims, would create 400,000 extra jobs every year after 2010 – and also fuel further increases in GDP (europa.eu.int/comm/research/era/3pct). The physics-based technologies identified in Busquin’s vision include aerospace, photovoltaics, nanotechnology, and information and communication technologies.
The action plan for achieving this vision, released at the end of April, contains a long list of measures that range from making careers in research more attractive to developing better tax breaks for companies that invest in research. The plan also calls for increased co-ordination between member states in their approaches to R&D, including new guidelines on intellectual property rights, increased public spending on research and innovation, and stronger links between industry and public research.
There is little to argue with here and an analysis of the world’s top 500 companies as ranked by spending on R&D reveals why – and where – action is necessary. Europe’s share of R&D investment by the top 500 is just 28%, compared with 44% for the US, while Japan – which has a population one-third that of the EU – accounts for 23%. Information and communication technologies (ICT) is the sector that receives most R&D investment (27.4%) on a global basis, followed by automobiles and parts (17.6%) and pharmaceuticals (15.5%). In the EU, automobiles account for 24% of R&D investment, with the German car maker DaimlerChrysler spending more on research than any other European company. Pharmaceuticals and ICT both receive 16% of the EU’s R&D investment. The figure for ICT is clearly too low if Europe wants to compete in this sector on the global stage.
There are also significant differences in R&D intensity – investment as a fraction of GDP – across Europe. Sweden already boasts a figure of 3.6%, closely followed by Finland with 3.4%, while Germany (2.5%), France (2.2%) and Denmark (2.1%) all have plans to reach the 3% target by 2010. However, a few large countries – including the UK but especially Italy and Spain – still need to pull up their R&D socks.
Better than nothing
The LIGO gravitational-wave experiment has already made headlines twice this year, following presentations at conferences in Denver in February and Philadelphia in April. Indeed, on both occasions LIGO made headlines without actually detecting any “ripples in the fabric of space-time”, as gravitational waves are so often and so poetically called. It is unusual for negative or null results to receive such attention, even though they can often represent scientific progress by ruling out various theoretical ideas. This was the case recently when physicists at the University of Colorado placed upper limits on possible sub-millimetre forces caused by extra space-time dimensions.
Indeed, the ability of experiments to search for, and possibly detect, ever weaker and rarer effects is essential to progress in many areas of fundamental physics. It is almost certain that researchers in some of these fields – like the search for gravitational waves – will eventually find something, while others – such as those looking for free particles with fractional charges – will probably not. The prospects for those physicists hoping to detect proton decay or measure the electric dipole moment of the neutron or the electron lie somewhere in between these two extremes, but the potential pay-off in scientific terms is enormous. As always, patience and precision will be the name of the game.
