WEALTH AND KNOWLEDGE
In “Billionaire Science, for Better or Worse” [From the Editor], David M. Ewalt suggests that with cuts to government funding, “many researchers are going to have to rely on business—and, yes, billionaires.” He also cautions that such “billionaire science” can go wrong.
Most, if not all, self-made billionaires exploited a singular focus in their field with limited diversification. This offers both risks and opportunities in science. As a recovering academician, I’ve found that the pressure to publish articles for advancement in the context of bureaucracy and limited funding has led to research efforts tailored toward the most likely source of funding—and that do not seek to answer unique questions.
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New sources of funding from individuals or family offices should serve to accelerate innovation in resource-rich environments with passionate inventors, scientists and academics. As long as the latitude to explore stays constant and the intentions of the sponsors remain in the public interest, I foresee a net positive impact. Recruiting more billionaires who might otherwise not have invested in scientific endeavors could fuel additional advancements.
JONATHON JUNDT VIA E-MAIL
As a long-time subscriber and a poet whose poem “Extravehicular Activity” appeared in your April 2023 issue [Meter], I’d like to offer my take on billionaire science as a prose poem:
The problem with billionaire science is billionaires are smart enough to make boatloads of money and stupid enough to think making boatloads of money also makes them universal geniuses who know everything about everything and who therefore do not need to give prolonged attention to anything besides making boatloads of money.
HOWARD V. HENDRIX VIA E-MAIL
DEEPWATER EFFICIENCY
In “Drink Deep” [Advances], Vanessa Bates Ramirez reports on efforts by Norwegian start-up Flocean, led by CEO Alexander Fuglesang, and other companies to remove salt from seawater in the deep sea.
The article states that the higher water pressure in such deep water can make desalination via reverse osmosis more efficient. But even with the higher pressure, the pressure on both sides of the filtering membrane would be the same. Some kind of pump would be needed to reduce the pressure on the freshwater side to make the procedure work. So you are right back to where you were with standard reverse osmosis: needing to use power to maintain the pressure difference to generate the filtering process. I don’t see how this is any more efficient.
WILLIAM J. MILLS BREWSTER, MASS.
FUGLESANG REPLIES: Mills is correct that reverse osmosis works only if you maintain a pressure difference across the membrane and that you need pumps to achieve that. We do not eliminate the need for pumps, but we leverage the pressure to greatly reduce energy demand.
What changes in a deepwater installation is where the pressure comes from and where you apply it. At a depth of several hundred meters, the seawater is already at very high absolute pressure. Instead of taking low-pressure seawater at the surface and using a large pump to push the entire feed stream up to high pressure, we can place the high-pressure pump on the permeate side of the membrane. This allows us to focus our pumping work on the product freshwater stream. We leverage the reduced volume of pumping only freshwater to cut energy emissions by 30 to 50 percent. In addition, we avoid some of the large, high-pressure surface equipment a conventional plant requires.
Last, moving water upward underwater does not cost energy. The ocean itself provides counterpressure. We “lift” water only when it leaves the sea.
DUST IN THE LIGHT
As Richard Panek notes in “The Cosmos Revised” [September 2025], researchers’ distance calculations to determine the universe’s expansion rate have used the known brightness of celestial bodies such as type Ia supernovae.
There must be dust in the millions or billions of light-years of distance from Earth and thus in the early universe. How is the attenuation of light caused by such dust accounted for in these calculations?
AL SPENCER VIA E-MAIL
PANEK REPLIES: Astronomers account for dust by examining the unequal amount by which it scatters—that is, redirects the path of—light at different frequencies. For instance, a supernova appears various degrees of red for the same reason a sunset appears red: the scattering of light because of particulates. In the case of the 1990s discovery of evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating (via what we now call dark energy), the two collaborations relied on a method developed by researchers Adam Riess, William Press and Robert Kirshner. As they wrote in a 1996 paper, their method uses multicolor light-curve shapes, or MLCS, “to estimate the luminosity, distance, and total line-of-sight extinction of type Ia supernovae.”
GIVE FUSION A CHANCE
In “Fusion Dreams,” by Clara Moskowitz and Matthew Twombly [Graphic Science], Laura Berzak Hopkins of the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is quoted as saying, “I’m confident that we need fusion [energy], so that makes me very confident that we will solve fusion.”
Do the energy demands the article cites as “high and getting higher” mean fusion reactors must be possible? Might it be possible that a practical fusion reactor is impossible? Efforts to develop such reactors may be justified, but unless and until they are proved possible, it would be prudent to remind ourselves that they may never be developed. We ought to act on the need to reduce our energy demands until fusion reactors are actually operational. Necessity may be “the mother of invention,” as Berzak also noted, but some would-be mothers never have children.
DICK WALTON BILLINGS, MONT.
MOSKOWITZ REPLIES: Walton makes a good point. But I believe Berzak Hopkins feels confident both because fusion is necessary and because it is possible. The challenges at this point are in engineering and logistics—not in the physics. Scientists understand enough about fusion to know already that it is possible, which is why many feel so motivated to make it a reality.
