[cwhiz]

I believe a total of $620,000 over a span of several decades. I am personally quite happy to fund one-off random projects like this. The amount of money is a trivial rounding error. Funding 100,000 failures at this level would be worth it if one, just one, worked.

I do understand that others might think differently. I like moonshots.

[vidarh]

Put another way: modern chemistry is in many ways a descendant of alchemy. It's the outcome of people pursuing ultimately failing experiments but identifying other interesting things along the way. It laid the foundation for laboratory practices and uncovered a lot of the basics.

Even if all of these experiments fail, chances are some of them will come across findings that are useful in unexpected ways.

If nothing else falsifying these theories will help create a baseline of effects that needs to be accounted for in the investigation of future theories like this.

[ForHackernews]

Referenced elsewhere in these comments https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging

[cwhiz]

We spend about $150 billion per year on science funding in the US. I don't think we're being irrational by giving moonshots roughly 0.00003% of the funding. That's a generous percentage, too, considering the funding for Jim Woodward spans many decades.