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Chu's Final Breakthrough Before Taking Office
KentuckyFC writes "While preparing for the job of US Secretary of Energy in the incoming Obama administration (and being director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Nobel Prize winner to boot), Steven Chu has somehow found time to make a major breakthrough in the world of atom interferometry. One measure of an interferometer's sensitivity is the area that its arms enclose. Chu and colleagues have found a way to increase this area by a factor of 2,500 by canceling out the noise introduced by lasers, which work as beam splitters sending atoms down different arms (abstract). One thing this makes possible is the use of different types of atoms in the same interferometer, allowing a new generation of tests of the equivalence principle. (This is the assumption that the m in F=ma and the m's in F= Gm1.m2/r^2 are the same thing). Let's hope he's got equally impressive breakthroughs planned for his encore as US Secretary of Energy."
(This is the assumption that the m in F=ma and the m's in F= Gm1.m2/r^2 are the same thing).
That's what she said.
The title seems to imply he wont make any more breakthroughs after taking office. Yet I hope and I think that he should continue to due science work even after taking office and there is no reason why he couldnt.
In case you're an idiot like me, you might appreciate to know that interferometry is about studying the properties of two or more waves by looking at the pattern of interference created by their superposition. The instrument used to interfere the waves together is called an interferometer.
What, you don't remember this stuff from Physics 101? Shame on you...
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There was a researcher named Alex Chu who was involved in measuring the effects of oscillating magnetic fields in near-body encompassments. I remember he had made some significant progress, but haven't heard much else about it in a while.
I wonder if they are related.
Obviously this is just an attempt by the democrats to distract from the nation's problems as Obama takes office. They should be ashamed of themselves for exploiting the public's interest in atom interferometry this way.
It's a nice change from the previous high level government officials of the Bush Administration, who were appointed not based on their knowledge and experience in a given field, but their willingness to bend the truth according to the Bush administration dogma.
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From http://arXiv.org/auth/show-endorsers/0901.1819 :
Holger Müller: Is registered as an author of this paper.
Sven Herrmann, Sheng-wey Chiow and Steven Chu are not registered as owners of this paper.
Sure, it doesn't nail down who did what exactly, but if I had a question about the paper, I'm asking Holger first.
Hard to think of many examples where a brilliant researcher turned into a great administrator. James D. Watson is perhaps exception that proves the rule - he was brilliant but lazy, who seemed to be in the right place at the right time when he co-discovered the structure of the DNA molecule.
Meanwhile at NASA we have Michael Griffin, and the Ares/Direct controversy that sprung up around him. Doesn't this kind of thing make the Obama people (and Congress) nervous?
Our incoming president reads spiderman comics and his secretary of energy is some incredible nobel prize winning genius who ran a program called "Bio-X", can we possibly get more nerdy?
...the article didn't say who did the work.
Just the politician whose name is attached to it.
unfortunately.. you don't understand whats going on.... the man being selected for the DOE position is a scientist, not a politician. And while preparing to become a politician, he still made progress as a scientist.
It says who did the work. Steven Chu. He will soon become a politician who has actually done something in life.
^-- I'm with stupid
There, fixed that for you.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Yeah it's a shame Joe Sixpack hasn't been able to enjoy any of the techno-elitist discoveries of the last 2,000 years (or as he used to be called Joe Sixmule).
What we need to do is elect more people without any experience or education in the area they've been tapped to administer so that government can concentrate on failing to provide any service what so ever.
The last thing you want is someone so hands on in a high level position. Those people need to know how to pick people they can trust to properly carry out tasks. In this case a knowledge of business and how the world works is far superior to some idealistic lab experience.
1. Prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
2. Bring peace to the Mid-East.
3. Turn out that to have made an amazingly human AI in his free time that escaped and now calls itself Randall Munroe and writes xkcd.
...but fu manchu.
It's great and all that he's so smart, but how will his experience translate into change in our nation's energy policy? We get most of our power from coal, oil, natural gas, and hydro, so how does his research have any bearing on those sources?
LRN 2 SWM
There is a world of difference between physics and the Department of Energy. One deals with particles and waves and mathematics, the other deals with human beings, tangled networks of regulations, and discordant policy objectives. Mr. Chu's qualifications as a scientist will have no bearing in his new role.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Chew on THIS, you wankers! We've got a a spidey and an x man inbound, so, unlike yours, we have some enlightened phat to Chu on...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm so tired of the Bush administration. Please, let it die. :(
"... cancelling out the noise introduced by lasers, which work as beam splitters sending atoms down different arms ..."
Lasers work as beams splitters ?
Sending atoms ?
Um, yeah, right.
I don't know about that, but it certainly sounds like a recipe for disaster.
When Obama turns into an evil Oba-man we'll know who to blame.
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I seriously hope that this new administration will end the era where willful ignorance was a virtue.
... Which probably means he is just being credited as administrator of the Lab.
What's more, he's replacing a typical D.C. corporate revolving-door appointment, Samuel Bodman. The man sat on his thumbs while energy prices trebled during Bush's time. He came from Wall Street ferchrisakes, and he'll probably head back to the corporate world, where I'm sure he'll be heartily welcomed for taking up the business agenda while at DOE.
With Chu, there's a pretty good chance he'll point DOE in a new direction, towards funded research for actual energy alternatives.
Good riddance to the Bush robber barons.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
What we need to do is elect more people without any experience or education in the area they've been tapped to administer so that government can concentrate on failing to provide any service what so ever.
There's two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. Managers should have experience in the field so they can make informed decisions based on their background knowledge.
2. Managers should know how to manage and can rely on advisers to provide the technical information upon which they base their decisions
And the thing is, neither school of thought is inherently right or wrong.
It is totally dependent on the position to be filled and many can go either way.
For example, Obama picked the 1st type of manager to be Sec of Energy, yet he picked the 2nd type to head the CIA.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You here that? That's the noise hell makes as it flash freezes.
I think you mean Joe Sixewer rather than Joe Sixmule. Joe Sixamphorae would also be acceptable.
Yeah, because that's worked *SO* well for the past 38 years.
fixed
This is what I get for quitting caffeine cold turkey.
it should read 28 years!
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... I'll bet Chu will be thinking that physics is a piece of cake compared to governing the US.
Steven Chu is the head of a laboratory of 1,100 people. I doubt he has much time to work in a laboratory. It would be interesting to know what work on this he actually did himself.
At least it should not be a national goal to take the people who are expanding the realm of human knowledge and chain them to a desk managing federal middle managers. It's cruel. It's wasteful.
Kudos to the incoming administration for being able to figure out who the thinkers in their country are. That's a refreshing change from the previous administration. Now please - for the sake of us all - when you identify them, leave them in place and appoint administrators to get stuff out of their way. For all our sakes, don't take them from their honest work and make lobbyists out of them. I'd rather you set money on fire. Really.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The highest IQ guy I've ever met (that I know about) drove a car for a living and aspired to not work any harder than he had to. His greatest aspiration was to get laid today if he could. He seldom met this goal. His IQ was measured at 165. He was interesting to talk to. Most people aren't.
His hero was Groo the Wanderer.
What did this experience teach me about intelligence? Exactly nothing. Which is what I gained from your post. But at least you didn't puke in my shoes like he did.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
artor3 (1344997) - "He's the director of a research institute with over four thousand employees and a half billion dollar budget. I think he can handle the managerial stuff just fine."
Politics aside, Bush was a lazy President.
He fucked around and of course things went to pot. He took more vacation days than any other President.
It's that lack of work more than ideology that got us in such a mess. These mistakes had little if anything to do with liberal vs conservative. (disclaimer - I am quite liberal)
The war and occupation would have appeared a whole lot less stupid if they had actually been thoroughly planned.
Deregulation may have weakened the safeguards of the financial system, but it didn't eliminate them; they just were ignored. That was negligence more than lazzis faire.
The handling of Katrina was a tragedy and the treatment of the victims afterwords was a crime. Any other conservative with the power of the government at their disposal would have used that power to save lives.
Say what you want, but the memo entitled 'Bin Laden determined to strike targets in the US' was ignored. Even if the attack could not have been prevented, the military and intelligence services could have been on high alert and emergency services on a higher alert. Lazy! Lazy! Fucking life threatening laziness.
Then to completely throw the feeling of empathy the world had for the US into the trash. Was it policy, or was it just easier to act unilaterally? What a waste!
It's refreshing to see a team that actually wants to work and get things done.
Governments don't want people in top jobs who are too highly qualified because they tend to think that reality is not just what lobbyists think it is.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Lasers work as beams splitters ?
Sending atoms ?
Um, yeah, right.
I'm not familiar with the details, but at first sight, I don't see a problem with those statements.
Remember, this is an atom interferometry. The "beam" refers to a beam of atoms. It's the wavefunction of the atoms that are being used to produce the signal, not the laser (which is the more garden-variety interferometry like one used in LIGO). From the description I get in the abstract, it sounds like they first laser-cool the atoms in a trap (probably magnetic, as the atoms used are frequently paramagnetic and can be trapped), then release the trap letting the atoms drop.
If you have a laser in the atom's path, by appropriately tuning the laser you can produce repulsive force on the atoms (I forget whether this has to be blue-shifted or red-shifted from the transition, but either way it can be done), so much like a rod in a stream, it will force the atoms to take one path or another as it drops under gravity.
The actual scheme in the experiment is probably way more complicated than this (they do claim factor of 2500 increase in the area covered, so the atoms must travel longer somehow), but it's nothing ridiculous. Maybe a little too technical for someone who's not an atomic physicist to grasp immediately.
How does this relate to the earlier story about a laser-based system having noise that was considered evidence for the holographic principle? If the noise could be eliminated doesn't that mean the evidence is invalid?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Wrong, in so many ways wrong. Here's interferometry for the liberal arts majors: A laser generates a beam of light. The beam can be thought of as a stream of photons. The laser beam is split in two by a beam splitter. The two beams are recombined. Objects in the confluence can be detected by the interference patterns they generate. Note: A laser is a device that produces phase coherent light. A laser is not a beam splitter. A beam splitter is a pair of prisms formed into a cube used to split light beams. Putting a laser in an atom's path is ... best I stop now.
Management consultant here, e focused on HR management....
If by right or wrong, you mean what works, then one school is right. Managers, at least at a moderately senior level, should be selected on their ability to manage. Subject matter experience, for almost all positions, should not ba prerequisite at senior levels. If you're smart enough to get there, you're smart enough to learn what you need.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
I sincerely hope that too. I have no idea where "[presidential candidate] is an average person like me" suddenly became a virtue, but it's disheartening. I won't speak for anybody else, but I don't want the president or other high-ranking officials to be average or as smart as me. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be so brilliant that no matter how smart I am, I feel like an idiot every time he speaks.
Obviously there are other qualities that are important. Being brilliant is essentially meaningless if it also means indecisive. But yes, I want politicians who hear all sides of arguments, consider all sides of arguments--UNDERSTAND all sides of arguments. Then make whatever choice they think is the best based on their intelligence and the knowledge they've just gained. I have no idea why we would settle for less, but we consistently do. There are certainly many others on both sides of the isle, but Bush would have to be the poster child for people with mediocre minds and no concern for expert opinion doing whatever they please without hearing from anybody who disagrees.
I wouldn't preclude somebody without knowledge of a particular field from managing it, if I'm confident that they are smart and dedicated enough to quickly pick up a quantity of information.
That said, the best managers are going to be option 3: 1 & 2. If you don't know how to manage, or if you're at the senior-most levels of an agency yet bogged down in informational details and micromanaging rather than big-picture leadership, you're not going to be effective. Likewise, if you know nothing about what you're managing you're going to be fairly useless whenever a situation arises that your advisers don't all agree on.
If you want to take a really jaded look at people who fall only into camp #2, you can say they leave themselves exceptionally vulnerable to underlings with agendas giving them erroneous information or hiding other sides of the argument because they know their managers don't know any better. Yes, hopefully these people are found out and eventually fired, but how long does it take and how much damage may be done in the interim?
Most people can learn both camps if they lack in either one. They can learn enough details to make responsible decisions if they're intelligent and dedicated to doing so, and they can also learn how to be better managers and who in their groups they can rely on. People who lack one or both and refuse to work on it, however, are simply doomed to be ineffective, inefficient managers. I do find it hard to believe that in a nation of 300 million people we can't find enough qualified people who fit both bills to simply start off with them at the helm, but if I had to choose somebody who lacked one or the other I'd rather start off with people who know their stuff but aren't great managers. I'd rather the right things happen too slowly than the wrong things happen quickly. Plus, I think it's easier to learn how to manage than to learn a respectable level of detail with subjects as complicated as scientific fields or energy policy or military action or whatever leadership position we're talking about.
(This is the assumption that the m in F=ma and the m's in F= Gm1.m2/r^2 are the same thing).
I think 350 years of experiments on Newtonian physics have shown that they are the same thing except in weird-ass quantum or near-speed-of-light situations that don't really matter anyway.
Don't go confusing the high school kiddies, please. They're already confused enough about evolution thanks to media spinelessness.
I piss off bigots.
That's so funny, you should be elected president!
. . . between Obama and Bush. Bush appointed a professional politician (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Abraham) and then someone slightly more qualified, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_W._Bodman), a venture capitalist who had attended MIT. Abraham had nothing to do with energy Bodman has done nothing but executive positions for the last thirty years. Obama chose someone who's really qualified and isn't financially tied to our current energy industries. Considering that the inauguration is tomorrow and this man is still hard at working trying to provide energy solutions only confirms what an excellent choice he is.
The ineptitude of the Bush administration isn't just in the man himself, it was the slew of yes-men appointed to important positions that has made our government ineffective for the last eight years.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
We'll make it look as close to real as we can. (Roll cheerleader porn).
Do I have to be at death's door first, or can you just plug me into the cheerleader porn machine right now?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
His full name is Steve Chuck Norris
How can they *not* be the same? Aren't they sort of defined to be equal via the fudge-factor "G" in the second equation? If the m's were different, the value of G would just be adjusted to make them the same again, no?
"It says who did the work. Steven Chu." Every paper I've published has the adviser's or principle investigators' name on it. None of them did more than provide funds and bench space. Given this man's stature I doubt he has been involved in more than paper and administrative work for years. Obviously you're not a scientists or you would know this. Science is done by graduate students, post docs, junior staff and faculty. After a certain point a successful scientist gets pushed into creating and running a research group - which has very little to do with the day to day work that is done in the lab. A successful PI will provide vision for their group through the kinds of funding they seek, but little in the way of labwork. And the grant process is nearer to politics than most think. Every successful scientist I've met has been 1/3 politician.
Jefferson was more of a descriptive naturalist, collecting fossils and plants and the like. He commissioned several naturalist expeditions of which Lewis and Clark is the most famous.
Steven Chu has somehow found time to make a major breakthrough in the world of atom interferometry.
Hardly surprising really. Everyone knows how this happens - the graduate students do all the grunk-work and (insert up and coming scientific powerhouse name here) stea^H^H^H^H takes the credit. Business as usual in the science world.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That happened when 'I hate elitists' (e.g. people who rubbed it in your face) became 'I hate the elite' (people who succeeded in life)
This meant that people started getting into office *because* they hadn't succeeded. Doing well in life (which requires knowledge, or at least business sense) became a disqualification.
You can guess which political party was responsible.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Fortunately, Slashdot contributors seldom fall prey to "media blather". You don't "plan breakthroughs".
i have to break it to y'all ... but this isn't really steve's work. of course he's a genius, but no one (including the press) has mentioned that the last author is Holger Mueller. in the (physical and biological) sciences there's a fairly well established protocol that the first author is the one who did the actual work and the last author is the leader of the project. of course, there's exceptions to the rule and these are always stated in the footnotes.
i think this is an example of the press just trying to use someones name to get more attention.... as usual.
Hopefully he opens DOE facilities back to the public. Fences and guard boxes at the complex entrances don't inspire confidence in security at facilities carrying out non-classified research. (For your reference, I'm referring to LBNL)
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
"What we need to do is elect more people without any experience or education in the area they've been tapped to administer so that government can concentrate on failing to provide any service what so ever."
So in other words, continue business as usual for the last 50 years or so.
The Communists?
the cake is a LIE!
-
Good news, everyone!
Probably the only cabinet member who can use LaTeX. He's gonna add chaos to the MSWord vs. LaTeX debate.
HAHA... 0, Troll. Guess, "Get Over It" won't be enough for bushwanker apologists. You can mark ME troll, but history and historians with duty to humanity will NOT be kind to nor forgiving of that being on his way out... and for good reasons.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Read that as "Cthulu's Final Breakthrough Before Taking Office"
scary stuff!
The man sat on his thumbs while energy prices trebled during Bush's time.
Despite the name "Dept of Energy" it really has very little to do with energy commodities and a lot more to do with nukes.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How does this relate to the beam splitting, noise-plagued GEO600 gravity wave detector that recently made the news for possibly showing the universe to be a hologram?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
You're asking for a man who knows how to manipulate you. People who study for years don't know how to measure 'intelligence.' You think you know what it takes to be President, how to measure those qualities?
You'll get what you want.
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You are describing the garden-variety LASER interferometry.
Ever since we have been able to cool atoms to nano-kelvin temperatures, allowing them to remain coherent long enough for atomic inteferometry to be performed, ATOM interferometry has been possible and that's what the paper is describing. (Actually, to be fair, atom or neutron interferometry has been possible long before that, but not as popular or versatile.)
All "interferometry" means is measuring something by combining two waves together and seeing whether they interfere constructively or destructively. Nothing says that the wave has to be light wave. It can be sound waves, earthquake waves, and, for those of us who aren't stuck in the 19th century (and early 20th century), matter waves.
the man being selected for the DOE position is a scientist, not a politician.
Err... no. You don't get to be the head of a major national lab like LBL without being a politician. You certainly don't win a Nobel Prize without being a politician (just ask John Bell... oh wait, he's dead.)
I grant you that Chu is no dummy, and has clearly done good things as a scientist, because despite the political aspects you don't get a Nobel Prize unless you do that too.
But it is foolish and simple-minded to believe that the bulk of the work that produced this "breakthrough" was done by Chu, rather than by his post-docs, students and collaborators. It is the nature of the modern scientific process that the political leaders within any scientific team are given the bulk of the credit while frequently their actual contribution to the work is confined to finding funding (which is a full-time and arduous job, but is not what most people think of as science).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In September -- when gas in Europe was selling for the equivalent of $8.00 per gallon -- Chu told the Wall Street Journal, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."
Now, if you buy into all the global warming hype, Chu's your man. Reducing everyone's standard of living is a small price to pay, if it will prevent the sea from encroaching into low-lying areas like Miami and Tuvalu.
On the other hand, if you've been paying attention, you know that the earth has been in a cooling trend since 1998, and the extent of sea ice is the same as it was 30 years ago, despite the fact that CO2 concentration increased during both of those time periods. And you'd be wise to not interfere with the decisions made by free markets about the most efficient ways to power vehicles and generate electricity.