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The Hobby of Energy Secretary Steven Chu
quanminoan writes "Nobel Laureate and US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has continued to publish even while in federal office. While previous research topics include gravitational redshift, Chu has coauthored a paper entitled 'Subnanometre single-molecule localization registration and distance measurements' which discusses a way to optically image objects as small as 0.5 nm — a major step down from the previous limit of 10 nm. Chu does this in his free time, claiming 'I just consider it my equivalent of ... vegging out in front of the TV.'"
Ouch, the feeling of terrible inadequacy, laziness and lack of accomplishment. :P
When you're a cabinet member, it's probably easier to get published in Nature. Even when your paper is pure theoretical wanking rather than actual application of the amazing ideas you dreamed up.
was doing fred flintstone impersonations
Two comments...
a) how long before right wing pundits claim that this is proof Chu isn't doing the job he was hired for?
b) is this viewing technique applicable in reverse for microchip optical etching/lithography?
There are people around with amazing personalities, definitely not all top level academics are this dedicated, but they exist. Anyone who's done a PhD and postdoc(s) at top tier research universities will have spent time schmoozing with several.
Obama got this guy largely because he asked. If a president doesn't get high level people, he's very likely got a reason he doesn't want them. Bush (cough)
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
How dare he be so honest? Doesn't he realize he is now too a politician?
Yeah, don't they know energy is always conserved? How could we ever run out?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The gravity abstract says:
I thought it was the other way around, that is, gravity results in space-time curvature. How does matter warp space-time if it isn't using gravity (whatever that is) to do it?
Whats he watching? Futurama or UFC?
service.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
It's disgusting that we allow this person to be in office. His pro-science methods are incompatible with energy policy, pure and simple.
Americans aren't spoiled compared to most other Westerners? If you actually read the article, he said "The American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act" with respect to climate change. He seems correct, and I would say that it's a welcome change from PR spinning and political doublespeak.
Signatures are the new names.
Question: Why was the department of energy created?
Answer: Out of the oil crisis of the 1970's, it was formed to attempt to free us from dependence on foreign oil.
Percentage of imported oil in 1977 (when the department was formed): ~35%
Percentage of imported oil in 2010: ~64%
I've schmoozed with plenty of PhDs and post-PhDs, and I haven't met a one whom I'd like to see in a position of any political power or federal-level responsibility. Does this guy Chu sound like he'd be an interesting fellow with whom to have to have a beer? Sure. But you could have described him as a self-taught banjo impresario or the CFO of a large alliance in Eve Online and he'd sound just as interesting, and just as qualified for a cabinet-level job.
Question: What is the purpose of China's One Child Policy is to decrease the Chinese population?
Answer: To decrease the Chinese population.
The Chinese population has nearly doubled since the One Child Policy started.
But one has to wonder What would the population be today had there been no One Child Policy?
Critical thinking: It's more that a knee-jerk reaction based on a sound bite.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The article was submitted last December 26, months before the oil spill began, and he had two coauthors who could have kept working on it in recent weeks if necessary.
BP had better be doing a good job with the cleanup, cause now we have a way to be REALLY sure it gets cleaned up.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
He makes his own Chu Jelly. The blue's okay, but don't eat the purple.
He seems correct, and I would say that it's a welcome change from PR spinning and political doublespeak.
I'm just amazed that someone as smart as Chu would think that you can effectively slow down the locust-like consumption of resources that humans are so good at. I won't begrudge people for TRYING to stop global warming, but really we should be trying to plan for the consequences... this thing is going to happen.
Since that combination of high intelligence and ambition is so often NOT socially beneficial, it's a damned good thing that this one wound up becoming a nerd and distracted with science....
What about it?
Can you name anything that Obama's cabinet, personally or collectively, can do that will in any way get the relief wells drilled sooner?
.. make fun of Chu, but I am such a Chu groupie. A surefire way to draw me to a conference is to announce that he'll be speaking there. ;) I just loved him during his confirmation hearing, how he perked up when finally asked a question that was even remotely technical. "Now we're getting to Science! I love this!" I had read some of his papers before he was even tapped for the position; I was so thrilled to hear he was picked. He really knows his stuff.
His big weakness is that he's no politician, and he sometimes has trouble keeping is mouth shut from speaking politically inconvenient things. For example, dealing with the hydrogen people... ;)
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
You call your pathetic tabletop fusion reactor a hobby??? I laugh at your feeble inadequacy. My Zero Point Energy Extractor will leave you and your puny efforts as a minor footnote of history. As soon as I figure out how to get my dog back through the inter-dimensional vortex, I'm going public with it, and the world will see what a hobbyist can do, quantum bifurcation anomalies and fractional dimensional rifts be damned!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-finds-error-in-fermilab-calculations,1463/
Funny, but the fact that it's funny is also sad (sad that it's so ridiculous to think he'd be interested in science). Glad that what was parody is now sorta true.
The oil spill is larger than 0.5 nm so there shouldn't be a problem.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
Except the Dept was really created to control nuclear applications, both for reactors and bombmaking. It wouldn't have become a Cabinet level post with armed agent personnel without the Nuclear side.
Here's their mission statement. I've highlighted the Nukestuff:
The Department of Energy's overarching mission is to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States; to promote scientific and technological innovation in support of that mission; and to ensure the environmental cleanup of the national nuclear weapons complex. The Department's strategic goals to achieve the mission are designed to deliver results along five strategic themes:
Energy Security: Promoting America's energy security through reliable, clean, and affordable energy
Nuclear Security: Ensuring America's nuclear security
Scientific Discovery and Innovation: Strengthening U.S. scientific discovery, economic competitiveness, and improving quality of life through innovations in science and technology
Environmental Responsibility: Protecting the environment by providing a responsible resolution to the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons production
Management Excellence: Enabling the mission through sound management
You'll notice that Nuclear related technologies are explicitly mentioned three times, and that, while energy security is about 'reliable, clean and affordable energy', and presumably economic security is referenced again by that 'affordable' bit, there's also the phrase national security as a separable clause.
Who is John Cabal?
His big weakness is that he's no politician, and he sometimes has trouble keeping is mouth shut from speaking politically inconvenient things. For example, dealing with the hydrogen people... ;)
Be thankful. Here in the UK we sack our scientists for being politcally inconvenient, just look at the recent drugs fiasco.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I just checked, and I have a crowbar handy. Carry on.
Who is John Cabal?
Yeah he is, that's why he's continuing to do things that contribute to America staying on top of the technical bar rather than sinking into further MBAness (which is what got us in this mess in the first place. Too many MBAs, Lawyers, and Politicians, and not enough legal/technical ways to get rid of them :D
It's too bad one of our employees is writing a paper that appears behind a pay wall.
Yeah, this is slashdot and all, but it wouldn't kill you to RTFA
Just think how much worse that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico would be if he wasn't on the job.
It's a problem that he will speak the truth even though it may be politically inconvenient? Seems like a bonus qualification to me.
Yeah, that all makes sense, but lets remember that Steven Chu has very little to do with any of the stuff that's going wrong. The DoE is essentially a laboratory, pushing research into new forms of energy generation and transport. Steven Chu knows the limits of his power and expertise and stays well away from fields where he doesn't have the necessary expertise and could do more harm than good. Heck, if more politicians followed his lead and STFU about things they know nothing about, the world would be a lot less fucked up at the moment.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/f-cking-magnets-how-do-they-work
Putting on the clown suit designed to look like an over the top pilots uniform and standing in front of the "mission accomplished" banner is the sort of thing people that are not even alive yet will be laughing about in their old age.
I would assume, the intelligent man that he is, that he can pay attention to more than one thing at the same time.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
God I wish. Half the people in office would be street sweepers if that were the case. ... and the other half would be sweeping the other side of the street.
At least now your trip to the proctologist is covered.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
TFA states:
Instead of objects measuring 10 nanometers — thought to be the about the smallest scientists could see using such microscopes — Chu came up with a system using existing technology to see objects... as small as half a nanometer.
Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM) has been an active area of research for over 25 years, and sub-nanometer aperture instruments have been on the market for over 20 years.
Unfortunately, neither the poster nor TFA linked Chu's paper, or any other source of real information about Chu's claims. It could very well be that he has done something new and useful, but it sure doesn't sound like it from this article.
Eh, you're being a little quick to dismiss things. A third author typically had, at the very least, some meaningful role in the research that was done, and is a full member of whatever collaboration did it. (And probably has a Ph.D., or is working on one.)
I'm an associate member of a collaboration, and as such I make it onto the authors list for various little announcements they put out, but although I take a lot of the data, I'm not as involved in analyzing what it all means (I'm still shy of a M.Sc) so I usually just wind up in the "thanks to..." part at the end of real papers. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Yes, last authors are traditionally the older scientist who runs the laboratory, i.e. the guy who paid most everybody else. All the middle authors could be anything from other primary researchers or other grant holders or lab techs or just buddies of the author.
Imho, the first authorship system doesn't work very well because often two people put equal work into a paper but you cannot have two first authors.
In mathematics, we assume that all authors contribute significantly to the research, and all authors are almost always listed alphabetically. You are not usually awarded any authorship position merely for holding the grant that paid for the salaries of other researchers, although some grant holders have tried that trick.
Mathematicians are usually prevented from adding their name onto the research of their students and postdocs because solo author papers are critical for career advancement. In other words, if you add your name to your students work, then you'll hurt their job prospects, which'll hurt your reputation indirectly.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Is he paying attention?"
No, he isn't. He does not have the social ability to handle the enormous conflicts inside the U.S. Department of Energy. I sent him a long letter before he decided to take the job expressing that opinion.
He doesn't give politics or social conflicts much attention: "Mr. Secretary, I would say I'm worried that you only know what you read in the papers about what's being approved."
There is more about my opinions concerning the DOE on my web site.
Dr. Chu is, however, FAR better than the Secretary of the DOE under President George W. Bush.
It's pretty easy to demand other people change their ways ways. Almost teenager-like, in fact. What has he done to change his ways to behave the way he should with respect to climate change?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Oh? Why not read the DoE's charter from 1977? You might well read it's mission statement from today, but that doesn't change the validity of my statement!
Yeah, a friend of mine has worked with him occasionally. She's frighteningly smart (I've known and worked with large numbers of smart people, and she's scary smart in a population of a lot of smart people) and she thinks he's frighteningly smart.
He is a Nobel Laureate. If that does not help him out then the extra boost for being a cabinet secretary is probably not going to be much extra help.
True...but I hope there are some ethical safeguards in place between him and funding decisions for DoE grants. Having someone scientifically qualified in government is great, having them actively pursuing their research program while in an office that decides which research to fund is potentially dangerous. Presumably he can set budgets for the different research areas and influence those who adjudicate grants?
Just to be very clear - I am not in any way at all suggesting that he has acted inappropriately and there may well be adequate safeguards and procedures in place. However this is an unusual situation and if those safeguards are not there I can see it leading to trouble. In political office it is not enough to just behave correctly - you have to be able to show that you behaved correctly.
Chu's leap in optical resolution using existing technology almost mirrors Marvin Minsky's first major invention, the confocal microscope (1957).
We got ourselves a good one kids.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The Chinese population has nearly doubled since the One Child Policy started.
uhh, [citation needed]? i'm not debating the merits of the policy, but that's a bogus claim.
Population 1979: 965005000
Population 2008: 1324655000
Source: World Bank, http://tinyurl.com/23b8tdx
Have any reference or citation to back up the validity of your statement? I did find an unsupported statement on Wikipedia making the same claim, but skimming the Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977, and reading President Carter's statement upon signing it, it doesn't sound like freeing us from dependence on foreign oil was a major focus. If DOE had been "formed to attempt to free us from dependence on foreign oil", I would think the subject would be raised more prominently by one or the other.
But one has to wonder What would the population be today had there been no One Child Policy?
A bigger question is: what would the standard of living be? And what would the balance of males to females be?
If the Chinese weren't so busy slaughtering (mostly) their female children and its future workforce, they might be wealthy enough that their population growth would have gone down due to economic pressures.
But, no, one of the most horrendous human rights abuses of the 20th century is a great fucking idea, really it is.
You're obviously not a politician.
(For which you may well be truly thankful. Or just casually thankful.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Can you name anything that Obama's cabinet, personally or collectively, can do that will in any way get the relief wells drilled sooner?
Oh, there is a lot more to be done, like figuring out how to reduce the oil spilling from the current well, figuring out how to reduce the ecological impact of the oil that has already spilled, drafting legislation preventing such problems in the future, figuring out a better energy strategy for the US, supervising BP on their current efforts to drill the relief wells so that they aren't cutting corners again (they aren't done yet, you know).
If the secretary wants to get his hand dirty technically in addition to his legislative and strategic duties, those are also excellent areas. If that's not where he can apply his expertise, he can do what he is there to do: figuring out funding, legislation, and long-term strategy.
Sorry, but cabinet-level positions and the presidency are 24/7 jobs. You can see what kinds of disasters happen if people treat them as just day jobs when you look at the Bush years.
It's nice anytime a superpower recognises the difference between politics and science, and has leadership with an IQ above room temperature.
This is the first couple of years in a very, very long time where I haven't been afraid of you lot. Not that I shouldn't still be, perhaps, but the current situation is that I'm not.
Good on you, mate.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
heh room temperature in the Netherlands is about 21 degrees celsius, so according to our standards most politicians have an IQ above that (Except for Geert Wilders of course) :)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
There is always, in my experience, something sensible underlying what Dr. Steven Chu of the DOE says. However, in this case, and in many, many others, he did not make himself clear to the interviewer.
That's a social conflict, and he didn't handle it well.