To zeroth order, it works out to roughly 30 small research groups for 5 years.
At a place like Berkeley, where I did my PhD (but not in anything quantum related), a PhD student and a postdoc both cost a professor something like $75k/year in salary and benefits (money not spent on postdoc salary basically goes to student tuition). Add in the professors salary as well (which is often substantially supported by grants), figure $150k/year for the prof. So in people costs alone, let’s say 1 professor and 2 trainees, that’s about $300k/year, or $1.5M/5 years. Multiply by 30 professors supported, and you’re at $45M, which is 60% of the $75M. And yeah, this is assuming that experiments are free.
Now is 20-30 professors a lot? If sufficiently narrow and esteemed, absolutely. There were 29 people at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Give them an extra couple months where they aren’t sweating a grant, and that’s a lot of time to think.
At a place like Berkeley, where I did my PhD (but not in anything quantum related), a PhD student and a postdoc both cost a professor something like $75k/year in salary and benefits (money not spent on postdoc salary basically goes to student tuition). Add in the professors salary as well (which is often substantially supported by grants), figure $150k/year for the prof. So in people costs alone, let’s say 1 professor and 2 trainees, that’s about $300k/year, or $1.5M/5 years. Multiply by 30 professors supported, and you’re at $45M, which is 60% of the $75M. And yeah, this is assuming that experiments are free.
Now is 20-30 professors a lot? If sufficiently narrow and esteemed, absolutely. There were 29 people at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Give them an extra couple months where they aren’t sweating a grant, and that’s a lot of time to think.