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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?"
Remember, several of the labs (and I think Los Alamos falls into this group) are managed by Universities. And I just don't think those university administrators are really equiped to deal with managing a bunch of scientists whose IQ's are often very far above theirs, and who are sometimes willing to break rules and do end runs around them.
The college I went to many of the professors were famous in their fields and the admins were all just typical people. The things the profs would do to them (and while some were funny, some were pretty darn cruel) were often amazing. Yeah you might be a brilliant admin with an IQ of 110 or 120. But that 180 IQ professor is going dazzle you like you've never seen in your life and high end research is not a pursuit for the faint of heart! They're not just smart, they're often tough too!
I've heard some rather shocking stories from friends who work at two of the National labs that seems to bear this theory out.
I am probably one of the few people left who agrees with you, and this raises the question: isn't the meaning of a phrase determined in large part by its usage. If the majority of people use "beg the question" to mean "raise the question" then who are we to say it doesn't mean that. We don't need the phrase "it begs the question" anyways; you can always say "the argument is circular".
Philosophy.
"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."
You must not be aware of JWST or CEV, both of which are going at a surprisingly rapid clip. Your comments about the shuttle program and Hubble are amazingly misleading - there's lots of internal support at NASA for dropping the shuttles, and moving to CEV, and a similar sentiment for Hubble and JWST. In fact, the administration has been reasonably friendly to NASA in this time of budget cuts - compared to most other agencies, they took far less of a cut in the last budget. How do I know? I was working there until I left for my own personal reasons, none of which had jack to do with the administration.
Or, let me summarize: you have no idea what you're talking about in terms of NASA, and that makes me suspect your other comments are equally misinformed. Way behind? Right.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I worked at Sandia Natl Labs the last 3 summers, and heard lots of weird stories about people from Los Alamos. There was the guy who wore a cape everywhere, of course. There was also an individual who transferred from Los Alamos to Sandia (rarely do people transfer the other way), who could not get along with anyone, and did not last long. One of the researchers even initially worked at Sandia, transferred to Los Alamos, and then transferred back, saying the whole environment is just... off. Los Alamos is basically surviving on their history now. Their museum hasn't had much to add this last half a century; they mainly focus on the history of designing and testing the atomic bomb.
There's much more drama at these national labs than the general public might think...
It is impossible to tell just how bad the labs under the control of the University of California are or aren't. Its murky since its hard for anyone to peer inside high security facilities because thats what security clearance are for. Also much of the information coming out of them in recent years may be the Bush administration intentionally trying to make them look bad because they want to transfer their control to Republican friendly contractors or the University of Texas to pump billions of dollars in to his home state.
"administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons""
Unfortunately this is what you get out of governments whose top priority is delivering pork to contractors who happen to be big political supporters of the people in power (like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin). This is a disease that predates the Bush administration by a long ways, but the current administration has just taken it to new and breathtaking levels. Not sure the Bush administration really cares if it gets anything for the money, they are just delivering large quantities of our tax dollars or borrowed dollars(our deficit) in to the pockets of their friends. It has an important added political benefit of creating artificial stimulus in the economy and jobs by pumping large amounts of money and profit in to the private sector, and it makes the U.S. economy look a lot better than it is. The U.S. economy is becoming massively dependent on government spending since its one of the few parts of the U.S. economy that isn't being crated up and shipped to China and India. This massive government intervention in the economy used to be referred to as either Socialism (under FDR) or more like Fascism today. Its sad to see how the Republican's have tarnished the name Conservative. There is nothing conservative about them any more unless you qualify it with Social Conservative. Political and fiscal conservatives are for limiting government power, size and spending and that is the antithesis of today's Republican party so they are aghast at today's Republican party. Someone should make them, Limbaugh and Colter stop claiming the title, Fascist is a lot more accurate term its just a taboo term since World War II. Conservative != Fascist so stop claiming to be conservatives, you aren't.
The national labs, DOD weapons programs and satellite manufacturing are GREAT places to pump money in to the pockets of your friends because you can use the high security clearance, and "state secret privilege" to crush any oversight that might catch some of the fraud, waste, abuse and incompetence. A subset of Congress is the only body that can provide oversight but.....
There is an intereting article on the Christian Science Monitor today about Congress's feeble efforts to restore legal and financial oversight on the Bush administration and the DOD. I didn't realize it till this article but when the Republican's gained power in 1995 one of the first things they did in the House Armed Services Committee was disband the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. This subcommittee's role was to reign in the fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon. It was like they fired the last cop in town, and created open season for thieves. It is now quite clear why there is such rampant corruption in the DOD now. There is NO real Congressional oversight to stop it.
Harry Truman rose to prominence with the "Truman Committee" which basically performed this role during World War II and saved the country billions in fraud, waste and abuse.
Its a basic problem in the current government that the Bush administration and DOD is running amuck using 9/11 as an excuse and since they have control of all branches of the government there is NO oversight of anything going on. Congress has abdicated so much power to the Executive branch we really are teetering on the edge of a term limited dictatorship.
As a result we get Duke Cunningham, satellite programs billions
@de_machina
I was just chatting tonight with a manager in one of the larger divisions at LANL who said that, all in all, not much has changed with the recent change in management. And speaking from personal experience (three years, on and off), the people at LANL today are doing science that is just as amazing - if not more so - as they at the Lab in it's "hey-day."
It turns out that, for government labs, any PR really isn't always good PR.