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End of a Scientific Legend?
pacopico writes to mention the sorry state of the well-known Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays, "smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures.The result is a change of management, which the story goes on to discuss in great detail. It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"
Just last Monday, NPR's Fresh Air program featured investigative reporter Sharon Weinberger, who has just written a book titled Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. In the interview, Weinberger breaks down how the US Military has gone from bad to worse in terms of science, rejecting even its own internal peer-review system (including the JASONs) in favor of administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons".
Of course, the problem isn't new -- she points out in the interview that the Clinton administration was just as quick as anyone else to slam the door on global warming results that didn't match their polices. And in fact, the first two-thirds of the interview are studiously neutral in tone. But by the end, after host Terri Gross and Weinberger have laid the factual foundation, the Bush administration comes out looking pretty pathetic. With the current administration's secrecy, paranoia (the Wen Ho Lee fiasco at Los Alamos gets particular attention), and general disregard for the scientific method, it's pretty clear that if Los Alamos falls, it didn't jump -- it was pushed.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Both Argonne and Fermilab may soon be going under a similar change in management.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's of interest that when Google filter's search results in China, they were 'evil'. But a lab that developed weapons that vaporized 25,000 people in a few seconds is considered 'prestigious' and 'a legend'.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Having been for an interview at another nuke design place I can save the whole thing runs against everything I grew up to believe. I can't imagine they get the best scientists these days. Pictures of "community" next to pictures of Hiroshima don't exactly inspire in-line with any morals. The day the place falls into ruin is the day we have some intelligence
Before anyone jumps on the "Descriptive Grammar" wagon; yes, I am very familiar with the descriptive grammar concept in linguistics.
But it is one thing to violate the "don't end sentences with a prepostion" rule, and another thing entirely to take a word or phrase which has a very specific and nuanced meaning and try to make it apply to another situation through simple ignorance.
The best example I can come up with in the computer field is how most knowledgeable people will cringe when someone calls the computer itself the "hard drive" instead of a tower, box, or just "computer". "Hard drive" means something very specific, and calling something else by that name makes it very difficult for people to communicate. Language is an agreement by two people to use the same or at least similar conventions to aid in mutual understanding. People violating those conventions by laziness or ignorance gum up the works for everyone else.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
The US has already fallen way behind in scientific research.
America scrapped its supercollider while the Europeans built their LHC at CERN, so Europe will lead nuclear research for at least the next 20 years. Europe and Japan are doing advanced medical research while the US cuts funding and asks if its ethical to use stem cells.
The US has decided to abandon the Hubble telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere, virtually abandon manned space travel, and divert most of the space research budget to militarizing space. Meanwhile the ESA is doing most of the space research and even China is launching manned missions.
Los Alamos losing its shine is such a minor thing compared to the rest of the US scientific community, it's barely worth noticing. The sad thing is by the time enough people notice the US is falling behind, it will be too late.
I am staff scientist at another DOE lab and spent time at Los Alamos as a graduate fellow a few years ago. From the coverage in the media and from the comments of many politicians (many of whom stood to gain much if UC were to lose out in favor of universities/companies from their home state in the LANL bidding wars), one would think that Los Alamos was full of nothing but incompetence, dishonesty, and arrogance. That simply was not the case -- Los Alamos has had a very similar track record when compared to both other government labs and industry. This was pointed out in a very informative and insightful opinion piece that appeared in Physics Today:
http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-57/iss-12/p60.html
While Los Alamos has certainly had its share of fiascos, I think a lot of bad press they received was because 1) They are the most visible government lab, and 2) Many politicians hoped that if they could humiliate the lab management enough, someone from their state could end up with the (now extremely lucrative) management contract.
(Posted anonymously out of fear of DOE muckety-mucks)
The US is a rapidly declining force, and that includes its science. I'm sure smugness and complacency played a major role in this, but so did arrogance and greed. The current Administration did more damage than most others combined, but the writing has been on the wall for a very long time. Unfortunately those likely to fill the gap aren't necessarily anybody else's first choice.
Next, from the article:
There's one very important thing that everyone asking this question simply doesn't understand, because they don't look closely enough: Los Alamos has gained itself the type of reputation that takes sixty years of world-class science to earn. This in turn draws the best minds from anywhere and everywhere to the highlands of New Mexico, where they voluntarily isolate themselves from the world at large while they work on the problems that the entirety of humankind needs solved.
This reputation is worth far more than even the money it cost to entirely shut the lab down and restart operations: it needed to be done to keep a sixty-year old priceless institution alive, because we simply cannot afford to loose it.