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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.'"
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.
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.