I magine that you have been appointed to the leadership position of a company or institution with a significant record of success in a particular area of endeavor. Your job is to see to it that success continues. Your pleasure at this appointment is quickly attenuated when you realize that the conditions under which that success was achieved are almost certainly not going to continue into the future. In fact, the conditions have already changed quite a bit and the health of your organization is starting to look fairly fragile if you look just a little below the surface. Every indication you have is that the environment in which the organization operated in the past is nothing like the environment ahead.
Experts produce charts, graphs and tables all of which suggest that change is coming.
Every expert has a different idea of what the future will look like, but all are sure it will not be in the least bit like the past. That's not too far away from the situation in which we find ourselves at Lamont. The success of the Observatory in Earth science research was achieved at a time when the rationale for public funding of basic research was based on some fairly simple arguments of national preparedness developed at the end of the second world war, now more than 50 years ago. Funding was plentiful, the oceans were essentially unknown, the science was new and in a major growth phase. Our science and national priorities that govern public funding of science have changed greatly in those 50 years, there's no doubt about that.