As an example, they consider "Extraction of crude petroleum" as a physics-based industry. Naively I would consider that industry at least 33% physics, 33% chemistry, and 33% engineering. Aren't they largely overestimating their conclusion by neglecting chemistry and egineering?
Disclaimer: I am a former physicist. I really think that science funding is vital to Europe, that this kind of studies should help supporting the field... I would just like to better understand how the EPS and CEBR got to such a clickbait title. I have the impression that this kind of article could actually undermine the credibility of all the contributions that Physics research is actually bringing to society at large.
It sounds like your concern is that all three fields of Physics, Engineering, and Chemistry could claim this output, which would be odd, because if every field did this, their combined 'value added' would be many times the total GDP, since their contributions overlap, like you mentioned. That doesn't matter, because we're not concerned about measuring the GDP with this method (if we were, we would have to divide credit like you mentioned) just the objective contribution of a single field.
Unlike what most people think, engineering is only partly based on physical/mathematical models. In fact, much of engineering is based on heuristics and empirical knowledge/know-how, and some of this knowledge isn't quantitative and it's not in the province of most physicists.
The difference between physics and engineering is actually quite vast.
I think the economic activity referred to in the article is around large-scale physics activities by organizations like CERN.
How about financing investments, accounting, sales, supply-chain logistics and managing the business?
Don’t know why you need supply chain logistics for a subsistence farm, because that’s the best you’ll get without physics.
Saying you are a physics company as soon as you use advanced materials does not seem that far-fetched from where I stand.
And the criterion of "these companies competitive advantage depend partly on recent physics research" is a pretty good one that may indeed include drilling companies and geological exploration.
There's no value in calling a company a "physics company" because that means nothing outside of this very specific conversation we're having
These 72 sectors have a revenue of 4.40 million euros. This means that for example, if you ban all physics education tomorrow, all this revenue will drastically fall because they critically depend on physicists. Note that this is about ensuring that physicists of today are trained to continue working in this industry. And not what some physicists might have done in the past.
[1] https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.eps.org/resource/resmgr/policy/eps...
Agriculture is worth much more than physics, since it feeds physicists all by itself. You could come up with many such dependencies to create chains of "worth more" relations, all utterly pointless. If the idea was to get more funding for physicists, it's unconvincing.
"Physics-based industries are those that rely heavily on expertise in physics. These include oil and gas extraction, nuclear fuel processing, and various forms of manufacturing like fibre optics, lighting equipment, office machinery, cars, ships and armaments."
Oil extraction, gas, and ships. Really? Sure, I get it, these areas wouldn't be possible without prior physics research, and present physicists will create new economic opportunities in the future; but blindly inhereting these fields' economic signifiance to physics seems incorrect. In other news, mathematics worth more than 80% of EU economy - these industries include finance, business, engineering, computing, and entertainment.
I did it in the past while consulting for a major bank, I studied CS, not physics, and I haven't seen any applied physics in banks.
They hire young people studying physics because they are not scared of working "with numbers", but when you past 40 you're not scared of anything anymore and you'll find there a majority of people with a degree in economy, once you grasped the basics, you can do the job.
While the physics student hopes to be a real physicist someday in the future and stop working on trading models as soon as somethings better comes up.
Give Universal Basic Income to everyone. That will spend more and then we can say with the same reasoning that UBI is worth more to the economy than retail and financial services.
This model feels overly broad. For instance I'd agree developing a new process for microprocessor production is physics centric, but writing sofware is not and both are part of 'computing'.
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Einstein, Steven Hawkins, and Isaac Newton went down in history, but their net worth is nothing compared to fast-food chains. Does that means KFC created more value for society?
