Resumen de Science and national prestige: early dutch radio astronomy
In the first post-war decade, the new field of radio astronomy grew steadily in several countries, including Great Britain, the USA, Australia and the Netherlands. The instruments it used (radio telescopes) required a lot of funding. As radio astronomy originated from wartime radar research, and the first radio astronomers were mainly engineers and physicists trained in radar technology, military patronage and funding were self-evident.
There were good reasons to fund radio astronomy during the Cold War. It was supposed to stimulate technological innovations that could be used for military purposes. Moreover, big science projects served national prestige. Especially in the USA, the ties between radio astronomy and the military were very strong throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
In my talk, I will analyse the funding of radio astronomy in the Netherlands. The Dutch situation differed strongly from the other countries. It has not been thoroughly studied yet. The Netherlands was the only country where radio astronomers were formally trained as astronomers, and where the research exclusively served astronomical goals. At first sight, there are no clear links with the military or with possible spin-offs.
Nevertheless, the government and the Dutch Organisation for Pure Scientific Research (ZWO) provided a huge amount of their science budget for radio astronomy. The question is why –in an era of post-war recovery– they gave radio astronomy such a priority.