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AIP Probes Bush, Kerry On Science Issues
martensitic writes "Physics Today (the 50-year-old monthly publication of the American Institute of Physics) continues their election-year tradition with this special report, posing nine questions 'in an effort to get the candidates to specifically address questions of interest to the science community'. The 'sometimes direct and sometimes vague' written responses 'show fundamental differences on several key issues.'"
It is also safe to say that after reading this article, an average voter would have lost interest in the first few sentences, wiped the drool from the corner of their mouth, and gone back to finding porn site passwords.
Of course I can only speak for myself...
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Frankly, I hate to see the biased, left-wing liberal media make such a huge issue out of George W. Bush's support for the Geocentric Universe Hypothesis.
Kerry:
Seems like the most important difference is in their interpretations of reality itself.
Please let me know who I contact at the GOP to get an astro-turfing contract like yours.
;->
I can always use extra money.
you forgot poland.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-10/p28.html /
Kerry answers by noting that most of the R&D money is going for weapons systems and defense spending related to the war in Iraq, not basic science programs. Marburger and other administration officials point to several R&D initiatives, including new nanotechnology centers, the Moon/Mars space initiative, and the program to develop hydrogen fuel technology.
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Money for weapons is most certainly not money for science.
Somewhat off topic...
During the debate (a few hours ago) Cheney incorrectly referred people to factcheck.com instead of factcheck.org.
It looks like the guy who registered "factcheck.com" was watching the debate. Check out where it redirects! BWAHAHAHAHA
Spending on science actually underpins national security, the economy, health care and the environment. And I guess that soft sciences like psychology and sociology have an impact on social security (as well as national security, if you take criminology into account.) So you are right in stating the attitude of dumb-cluck voters, but wrong in that you don't understand how the world works. I don't know enough about the overall pattern of US R&D to be able to say which possible administration would do the best job, but I do know that an administration that does not understand the fundamental importance of science is not in America's - or the world's - long term interest. And if you are aged less than 70, you should be very interested in the long term.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
If you were a real physicist, you'd know that was wrong. Here's an electron - tell me exactly where it is, where it's going, and how fast.
Physicists don't drink the kool-aid on global warming. If you can prove that global warming is happening, then that is one thing. Trying to prove it is a bad thing is something else.
... so we're going to keep studying it (while continuing to dump CO2) and if it turns out that it was bad... then we'll stop it". This is insane. It's a very dangerous, very stupid experiment we're playing with by burning huge amounts of fossil fuels.
Um. Huh? Physicists are smart enough to know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the Earth has a limited capacity to absorb it. Long term temperature trends show pretty clearly that the Earth is warming up. Much of it may be due to orbital eccentricity drift, but the problem is that CO2 levels are spiking dramatically (due to human activity) as well. This hasn't happened in any period of Earth's history that we can study.
Physicists would also be smart enough to know that the question isn't whether or not global warming is happening (it clearly is - the top five warmest years on record have happened since 1997, and if you look at the average global temperature, it's clearly going up) but whether or not human activity is causing it. And the problem with this is that we don't know enough about Earth to say it. We don't have a "control Earth". We know that humans are dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere - far more than natural causes. We don't know what that will do. Any physicist worth his or her salt would know that this is, to quote a paleoclimatologist from Ohio State, "is a dangerous, uncontrolled experiment."
Bush is saying "well... we don't know what dumping huge amounts of CO2 is going to do
If there's one thing Physicists love to talk about it is energy. No one understands what energy is better than physicists. Energy is the end-all idol they worship, if they worship any idol at all. How do we exploit the energy out there? How do we get more and more of it delivered to the masses? If it were up to physicists, we would be doubling our energy production every ten years. There are so many useful things you can do if only you had enough energy! Even time travel is possible with enough energy!
What in the heck are you talking about?? Physicists would also know that any energy you produce has to go somewhere. And unless we start moving off this planet (which is one thing where Bush is correct - if he wasn't saying it just to be politically correct, as is evidenced by the fact that he didn't back it up in NASA's budget) that energy is going to be dumped somewhere on Earth. I could probably do a back of the envelope calculation figuring out how long it would take to incinerate Earth if our energy production doubled every ten years, but it's not worth the effort. Given that it's exponential growth, though, that number would be well less than probably 100-200 years.
And I really, really challenge you to find a real physicist who honestly believes that time travel is possible with enough energy.
Bush is willing to shovel the money they need into their labs.
News to all of the physicists I know. Well, those that aren't working on weapons programs.
I am accelerating towards a brick wall but I'm not sure if the wall was constructed by humans, or whether I will be able to slow down enough to avoid it at all, so instead of cautiously deccelerating I'll just put my foot down and keep accelerating because lack of information justifies arbitrary action.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Right b/c that weapons program the Manhattan project did nothing to advance science.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.