This is along the lines of graduate school, where science and engineering students recieve more funding (generally).
Who pays in this case? The federal government, through grants. Someone always pays.
Does this lead to more people getting graduate degrees in science? Definitely, although financial reasons are also a big part of many people leaving grad school without the degree they went in for.
Does this lead to more jobs in science? Yeah, kind-of. More federal funding for science grad students encourages Universities to hire more grad student managers (faculty), but this doesn't create nearly as many jobs as it does qualified applicants.
Are you talking about the same France that had its scientists go on strike a few years ago? I'm sure things are great when the entire scientific establishment feels the need to strike.
The point you're missing in all these posts is that we're not talking about the average student. Great undergrad students in the US don't pay anything for college or living expenses. Decent graduate students get paid to go to school. As a grad student in the US, I do get free health care. There is stem cell research at my school, we have a whole building just for that. Just because we don't do some things on a national level does not mean they don't get done. If you want to work at CERN, or on any major project outside the country, but be affiliated with Stanford, they're all for it. Science at the highest level is a global community and a global culture independant of the country it inhabits. My university is in one of the most conservative cities in the US, but you'll find plenty of self-proclaimed communists and socialists here. It's not that the US as a country is better than anyone else, just that the scientific establishment has done a better job so far of recruiting talent and insulating universities from local and national politics. If you really want to stick it to us, you should point out that we do an awful job of training people born in the US for science.
That headline should read "... stronger than nanotube paper", not nanotubes. Why that's a good benchmark for strength, I have no idea. It's generally used as a filter. It's like saying cotton plants are stronger than trees because cotton paper is stronger than normal paper.
Let me preface this by saying I work with carbon nanotubes (as an "innovator," not an engineer).
Where these guys are right on is that building a CNT factory would generate the kind of money they need to get going, especially if they can reliably grow high quality tubes. They are absolutely right that spin off technologies could more than make up for their current investments. But, as they recently found out, nanotubes are very hard to grow in large amounts, and they grow very slowly... hence the current high cost.
That leads to where they went wrong: They had "contractors" working on nanotube growth. It's not easy to grow CNTs, and it's not well understood. It's very difficult to reproduce published work on CNT growth unless you really, really know what you're doing. They need to form partnerships with the people working with nanotubes who are on the cutting edge of growth research. While they've tried and failed to build a factory, Iijima's group has made major breakthroughs in growing nanotubes in bulk, and he's the obvious person to start off trying to get on board with this (as a well known Nobel laureate working with nanotubes). If not his group, then any number of dedicated CNT-growth research groups in the US.
At some point, it would not be a bad idea to let a scientist into the upper management of a space elevator company. Just as a smart inventor will let go of some control of a company to a business person, these business people would have been wise to let a scientist make some of their decisions.
By (publicly, at least) focusing on robotics, they missed the boat on one key technology they needed which would have also provided them with the funds to keep everything else going. Hopefully whoever takes over leadership of the space elevator community has more luck.
In San Diego, one of the main fruit picking operations involves avocados. From personal experience, I can say that it's hard enough picking those by hand, let alone with a robot. If they can do that, they have done something really remarkable with robotics.
Forget even what we can do in the next 100 or 1000 years.
There's not a "hypothetical" end of the planet as he suggests, it will happen with certainty, but not for a very, very long time. So... what will we be able to do in 1,000,000 years or so? Usually I'm not for this kind of "the future will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams" stuff, but when you're talking that sort of timescale, I really don't see how you can use the word "impossible."
wow, so this is what happens when nerds are overstimulated.
This isn't time travel, or sending messages or anything like that. This guy IS a part of the mainstream scientific community, he's not working in some backwater of physics that no one wants any part of, he just can't find any funding.
The measurement he's trying to do is prove if entangled particles "talk" to each other by sending photons back and forth. Because of the way that works, if they do, it would be the first experimental verification that phonons can travel backward in time (which has been theoretically known for a very long time). He's probably wrong, but not certainly wrong. (Other people have pointed out Feynman, there's faculty at my University who have also looked for this.)
Unfortunately, standard science funding sources are decreasing relative to inflation, and no one really wants to fund high risk physics any more, especially where no one else has made any progress. So he found another way to fund his research. Plenty of us have done the same thing. They're not investors, they're patrons, and it's really not that unusual.
The problem is not that there are not high paying jobs for people with science and math backgrounds (there are plenty), the problem is that *research* does not pay well.
Research is what you do during the 6 to 12 years of grad school and post-doc while you make less than a construction worker (I've been a construction worker and a physicist, construction pays better). It's about a decade of working your ass off, with no guarantee of success, very little pay, and frequent ego shattering failure.
Let's say you don't go to grad school or do a post-doc, or that you don't want to work as hard as those jobs demand. What happens? You can still get a good paying job in science or math, and you can still do research, but you'll (almost) never have the opportunity to direct research or have your views taken seriously by the journals, scientific agencies and professional organizations (the gatekeepers of scientific "truthiness").
Essentially, you don't have a chance to be a world-leading scientist. And *that* is what we don't have enough of in the US. Our best scientists are often imported from overseas (and we don't have enough women making it to the highest ranks). But, the barrier to become a scientist is not economic (there's no grad school cost), but something else.
The culture of science is such that many people are turned off for fear of not being good enough, or strange enough or something silly like that. Virtually any slashdot reader could be a physicist, and wouldn't you rather be working on fusion than whatever you're currently doing? Why didn't you?
I see where you're going with that, but the intertube tensile strength doesn't scale with length. Binding energy is different from tensile strength. The work which you're doing in pulling apart nanotubes depends on how the binding energy changes with time, not so much on the total energy. If you pull a 100nm section of a nanotube out of a bundle, you could think of it costing the entire binding energy, but then you get back 100nm less than the starting binding energy when you stop So the end cost of that slippage in terms of energy is very small. You could think of breaking this down to pulling the tube out atom by atom, spending and recieving binding energies as you go. You may worry about initially getting things going, but you don't have to pay that full cost at once, instead stretching a small section of the nanotube to get it started.
In March, there was a good APL which describes how weaving nanotubes together gets you to a maximum intertube tensile strength of 1.5 GPa, and there are lots of older APLs on this subject as well.
If no one could make really long nanotubes, yeah it would be amazing, but arrays like this are routinely made several millimeters in length, and some people make single nanotubes ~150 mm long.
The technology does not yet exist to piece together nanotubes strongly enough to make a space elevator... which is why I was careful to use the word "grow." If one could piece nanotubes together well enough, then everything does get much easier.
Although the PR person who wrote this obviously thinks this is a major breakthrough, these guys are using a method which was originally invented by Japanese researchers three years ago (google for "CNT super growth"). The Japanese guys have since focused on getting the fastest growth rate possible (I think it's about 0.2mm/min... if you want to figure out how many, many years it would take to grow a space elevator). There are lots of people working on improving this growth method, 18mm arrays may be the longest, but it seems to be in the same range as other people working on the "super growth" method. That doesn't diminish this research, rather it means that this method is very likely to work in the long run for industrial scale growth of nanotubes for materials (more simply, it's easily reproducible, and people want "nano-enhanced" golf clubs).
Isolated nanotubes have been grown longer than this (I've grown isolated nanotubes longer than this, and I'm not a growth specialist), as have bundles of nanotubes. This is the longest array of pure, aligned, continuous nanotubes.
A few years ago, I saw a colloquium in my department about carbon sequesterization which basically said: take all the corn stalks and bury them somewhere.
For about 300 years, we wouldn't have to worry about that carbon.
I always assumed that was the entirety of carbon sequesterization. It pains me to know that I once again underestimated the stupidity of my fellow man.
I'm glad someone else noticed that they didn't actually "make" anything. There are lots of theoretical nanostructures out there, but only so many ways of making them, and even fewer ways of making electrical contact.
My whole point is that "biodegradable" is not a good enough label, and why complicate matters anyway?
If we don't have to use dangerous chemicals, we shouldn't use them.
It really doesn't matter if they're biodegradable, found in nature or manmade. Something which is not biodegradable and can be poisonous (aluminum) is fine, while something which is biodegradable and may or may not be toxic (Roundup is a great example) is not ok.
You're missing the point. I've already agreed with you on the PDBEs and scale and all that, I'm asking a more subtle question.
Biodegredation does not encompass all natural processes which break down materials, nor does being bio-degreadable mean a chemical is environmentally safe to use. You're focusing on an individual chemical trait and missing an entire SCALE of processes which help degrade dangerous chemicals.
Purified aluminum is one material which fits exactly your last point. There is a minuscule amount of it in nature, it is poisonous, and it can build up in your body. It is mitigated naturally through non-biological processes (it is not biodegradable). Should we ban it?
(By the way, drywall and pure silicon are chemically different from gypsum and silicon oxide... they are different materials which do not naturally occur.)
What about purified silicon? Glass? Drywall? Aluminum, or any pure metal?
I'm a huge fan of not slowly poisoning ourselves, but I think your criteria of using only biodegradable materials is unreasonable. There are ways of neutralizing chemicals outside of biology.
Then what about naturally occurring chemicals? PDBEs are found in nature (with carbon isotopes not found in synthetic chemicals).
While I agree that PDBEs should be replaced with currently available chemicals that are biodegradable, we don't know everything. We don't know where naturally occurring PDBEs come from or where they go. Technically, there may be some bacteria out there capable of degrading PDBEs, but we still shouldn't be using them.
It's enough to say that we shouldn't use dangerous chemicals unless we have to.
That's not the way things work on the molecular scale.
It's easy to take an organic molecule with sp2 bonded carbon (say DNA) and do some spectroscopy on it, as was done here, and find out that there are electrons moving around very quickly inside the molecule. This is really not anything new. What is hard is getting those electrons to move all the way from one end of a molecule to the other and then out the other side. There IS a reason they didn't just directly measure the conductance of this stuff, and that reason is: it doesn't conduct. All she is talking about is finding electrons which are moving around very fast inside the molecule, which is great... the rest is just PR, don't buy it.
If I remember the original Nature article correctly, it's based primarily on what journal research is published in. Thus if a journal claims to be focused on engineering, then articles published in that journal are in the subject of engineering. Links were made by citations between journal articles. They do say what journals they look at. They're selected by Thomson Scientific, who runs Web of Science, and I know they include IEEE journals.
I always laugh at people who try to re-define other people's professions. If the editor of a major engineering journal considers something engineering, then it is. Do you know whether IEEE publishes things which are applicable to astrophysics, or whether Physical Review Letters published topics relevant to engineers? What kind of person does nanotechnology research? Is it engineering, physics, chemistry or biology? These guys have a straightforward solution to these questions. Let the researchers define themselves by submitting their work to journals they consider important, and let the editors of those journals name their field.
What is non-mainstream science? I've seen talks on cold fusion, violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and other "fringe" fields at the same conferences I've presented my work at. They weren't labeled "non-mainstream", or "kooks", or anything like that. Look at who's doing this research. Taleyarkhan isn't some bum off the street, he's a well known physicist, with years of research experience in a "mainstream" lab.
In my experience, scientists are so bloodthirsty for new discoveries that we're willing to overlook almost anything to show that we've found something new. That's why we have all sorts of ethics rules and guidelines for reproducing work. The scientists claiming "bad science" are either looking for an excuse to come in and make the discovery their own, or maybe it really is bad science.
There's no such thing as a stable field in science. As soon as you stop looking for new ways to break the rules, you have ceased to be a scientist. No one is going to come up with something that's going to make being a physicist obsolete, but they may come up with something that means my research is obsolete. That happens all the time. It's a very poor scientist who doesn't realize an opportunity for new work when he sees one.
I agree that it's absurd to call QFT and string theory not science, but I think it might be justified to call both not physics. QFT is a very, very useful mathematical tool which physicists use, but it's a rather difficult tool to test directly (the results we get out are certainly physics).
It's very odd that the math some physicists doubt can be seen as not science. According to an essay last week in Nature, some biologists reject the idea of mathematical laws entirely ("the data is as it is"). Yet despite that, there is no question that mathematical biology is science (before someone screams, it is).
The public does not understand the basic ~100 year old theories we base our experiments on (which were at one point unproven and controversial...). You can even get a physics degree (in some places) without needing to learn QFT. Imagine explaining genomics to people who didn't know what a cell is. That is the situation we are in. Baby steps...
We do need to cut emmissions, but we also need to find a way to also either remove the excess CO2 in atmosphere or otherwise deal with the consequenses of climate change. We've been hearing people come in to talk about "crazy ideas" for this for a few years in my department. The bottom line is, no one is willing to do anything personally about it. Schemes such as carbon sequesterization seem to make sense because they're the sort of industrial, someone-else's-problem solution which may actually get done. Putting a shade between the earth and the sun was originally meant as a joke to shock people into seeing this as a serious problem, no scientist wants to be known as the real life Mr. Burns.
Having been in a few meetings where administrators quoted policy to the people who wrote it and then went on to bash faculty and students over the head with illogical interpretations of that policy, I don't find this surprising at all.
These people have hard jobs, but so do we. Should someone teaching computer security not be able to use or talk about things which are important in doing computer security? I know my University administrators think they shouldn't.
Many people come to academia to get away from the frustration of petty, ineffective management only to find it just as entrenched here.
15 years ago, I could beat games like the original Ninja Gaiden, which I simply don't have the reflexes and patience for anymore. At that time, there were a few games I just couldn't figure out how to beat. I've played some of those old "thinking" games again (Koei's Liberty or Death comes to mind) and find them to be much, much easier.
Career centers are really under-used by companies.
The bit about having other events on campus is key. If you can stand talking (as in actual conversation) to a small group of students for even 10 minutes, it makes a huge difference. I send undergrads coming through my lab to contacts I've made that way looking at potential industry postdoc positions.
Don't go out to lunch with your buddies in your booth. Arrange to go out to lunch with some students or a professor working in an area you're recruiting in, even if it means skipping the school's free lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
This is along the lines of graduate school, where science and engineering students recieve more funding (generally).
Who pays in this case? The federal government, through grants. Someone always pays.
Does this lead to more people getting graduate degrees in science? Definitely, although financial reasons are also a big part of many people leaving grad school without the degree they went in for.
Does this lead to more jobs in science? Yeah, kind-of. More federal funding for science grad students encourages Universities to hire more grad student managers (faculty), but this doesn't create nearly as many jobs as it does qualified applicants.
Are you talking about the same France that had its scientists go on strike a few years ago? I'm sure things are great when the entire scientific establishment feels the need to strike.
The point you're missing in all these posts is that we're not talking about the average student. Great undergrad students in the US don't pay anything for college or living expenses. Decent graduate students get paid to go to school. As a grad student in the US, I do get free health care. There is stem cell research at my school, we have a whole building just for that. Just because we don't do some things on a national level does not mean they don't get done. If you want to work at CERN, or on any major project outside the country, but be affiliated with Stanford, they're all for it. Science at the highest level is a global community and a global culture independant of the country it inhabits. My university is in one of the most conservative cities in the US, but you'll find plenty of self-proclaimed communists and socialists here. It's not that the US as a country is better than anyone else, just that the scientific establishment has done a better job so far of recruiting talent and insulating universities from local and national politics. If you really want to stick it to us, you should point out that we do an awful job of training people born in the US for science.
That headline should read "... stronger than nanotube paper", not nanotubes. Why that's a good benchmark for strength, I have no idea. It's generally used as a filter. It's like saying cotton plants are stronger than trees because cotton paper is stronger than normal paper.
Let me preface this by saying I work with carbon nanotubes (as an "innovator," not an engineer).
Where these guys are right on is that building a CNT factory would generate the kind of money they need to get going, especially if they can reliably grow high quality tubes. They are absolutely right that spin off technologies could more than make up for their current investments. But, as they recently found out, nanotubes are very hard to grow in large amounts, and they grow very slowly... hence the current high cost.
That leads to where they went wrong: They had "contractors" working on nanotube growth. It's not easy to grow CNTs, and it's not well understood. It's very difficult to reproduce published work on CNT growth unless you really, really know what you're doing. They need to form partnerships with the people working with nanotubes who are on the cutting edge of growth research. While they've tried and failed to build a factory, Iijima's group has made major breakthroughs in growing nanotubes in bulk, and he's the obvious person to start off trying to get on board with this (as a well known Nobel laureate working with nanotubes). If not his group, then any number of dedicated CNT-growth research groups in the US.
At some point, it would not be a bad idea to let a scientist into the upper management of a space elevator company. Just as a smart inventor will let go of some control of a company to a business person, these business people would have been wise to let a scientist make some of their decisions.
By (publicly, at least) focusing on robotics, they missed the boat on one key technology they needed which would have also provided them with the funds to keep everything else going. Hopefully whoever takes over leadership of the space elevator community has more luck.
In San Diego, one of the main fruit picking operations involves avocados. From personal experience, I can say that it's hard enough picking those by hand, let alone with a robot. If they can do that, they have done something really remarkable with robotics.
Forget even what we can do in the next 100 or 1000 years.
There's not a "hypothetical" end of the planet as he suggests, it will happen with certainty, but not for a very, very long time. So... what will we be able to do in 1,000,000 years or so? Usually I'm not for this kind of "the future will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams" stuff, but when you're talking that sort of timescale, I really don't see how you can use the word "impossible."
wow, so this is what happens when nerds are overstimulated.
This isn't time travel, or sending messages or anything like that. This guy IS a part of the mainstream scientific community, he's not working in some backwater of physics that no one wants any part of, he just can't find any funding.
The measurement he's trying to do is prove if entangled particles "talk" to each other by sending photons back and forth. Because of the way that works, if they do, it would be the first experimental verification that phonons can travel backward in time (which has been theoretically known for a very long time). He's probably wrong, but not certainly wrong. (Other people have pointed out Feynman, there's faculty at my University who have also looked for this.)
Unfortunately, standard science funding sources are decreasing relative to inflation, and no one really wants to fund high risk physics any more, especially where no one else has made any progress. So he found another way to fund his research. Plenty of us have done the same thing. They're not investors, they're patrons, and it's really not that unusual.
The problem is not that there are not high paying jobs for people with science and math backgrounds (there are plenty), the problem is that *research* does not pay well.
Research is what you do during the 6 to 12 years of grad school and post-doc while you make less than a construction worker (I've been a construction worker and a physicist, construction pays better). It's about a decade of working your ass off, with no guarantee of success, very little pay, and frequent ego shattering failure.
Let's say you don't go to grad school or do a post-doc, or that you don't want to work as hard as those jobs demand. What happens? You can still get a good paying job in science or math, and you can still do research, but you'll (almost) never have the opportunity to direct research or have your views taken seriously by the journals, scientific agencies and professional organizations (the gatekeepers of scientific "truthiness").
Essentially, you don't have a chance to be a world-leading scientist. And *that* is what we don't have enough of in the US. Our best scientists are often imported from overseas (and we don't have enough women making it to the highest ranks). But, the barrier to become a scientist is not economic (there's no grad school cost), but something else.
The culture of science is such that many people are turned off for fear of not being good enough, or strange enough or something silly like that. Virtually any slashdot reader could be a physicist, and wouldn't you rather be working on fusion than whatever you're currently doing? Why didn't you?
"Wired" is reporting that the journal "Nature" is reporting on this. Why do we insist on going through middle men?
I see where you're going with that, but the intertube tensile strength doesn't scale with length. Binding energy is different from tensile strength. The work which you're doing in pulling apart nanotubes depends on how the binding energy changes with time, not so much on the total energy. If you pull a 100nm section of a nanotube out of a bundle, you could think of it costing the entire binding energy, but then you get back 100nm less than the starting binding energy when you stop So the end cost of that slippage in terms of energy is very small. You could think of breaking this down to pulling the tube out atom by atom, spending and recieving binding energies as you go. You may worry about initially getting things going, but you don't have to pay that full cost at once, instead stretching a small section of the nanotube to get it started.
In March, there was a good APL which describes how weaving nanotubes together gets you to a maximum intertube tensile strength of 1.5 GPa, and there are lots of older APLs on this subject as well.
If no one could make really long nanotubes, yeah it would be amazing, but arrays like this are routinely made several millimeters in length, and some people make single nanotubes ~150 mm long.
The technology does not yet exist to piece together nanotubes strongly enough to make a space elevator... which is why I was careful to use the word "grow." If one could piece nanotubes together well enough, then everything does get much easier.
Although the PR person who wrote this obviously thinks this is a major breakthrough, these guys are using a method which was originally invented by Japanese researchers three years ago (google for "CNT super growth"). The Japanese guys have since focused on getting the fastest growth rate possible (I think it's about 0.2mm/min... if you want to figure out how many, many years it would take to grow a space elevator). There are lots of people working on improving this growth method, 18mm arrays may be the longest, but it seems to be in the same range as other people working on the "super growth" method. That doesn't diminish this research, rather it means that this method is very likely to work in the long run for industrial scale growth of nanotubes for materials (more simply, it's easily reproducible, and people want "nano-enhanced" golf clubs).
Isolated nanotubes have been grown longer than this (I've grown isolated nanotubes longer than this, and I'm not a growth specialist), as have bundles of nanotubes. This is the longest array of pure, aligned, continuous nanotubes.
A few years ago, I saw a colloquium in my department about carbon sequesterization which basically said: take all the corn stalks and bury them somewhere.
For about 300 years, we wouldn't have to worry about that carbon.
I always assumed that was the entirety of carbon sequesterization. It pains me to know that I once again underestimated the stupidity of my fellow man.
I'm glad someone else noticed that they didn't actually "make" anything. There are lots of theoretical nanostructures out there, but only so many ways of making them, and even fewer ways of making electrical contact.
Ack. Go back to my original comment.
My whole point is that "biodegradable" is not a good enough label, and why complicate matters anyway?
If we don't have to use dangerous chemicals, we shouldn't use them.
It really doesn't matter if they're biodegradable, found in nature or manmade. Something which is not biodegradable and can be poisonous (aluminum) is fine, while something which is biodegradable and may or may not be toxic (Roundup is a great example) is not ok.
You're missing the point. I've already agreed with you on the PDBEs and scale and all that, I'm asking a more subtle question.
Biodegredation does not encompass all natural processes which break down materials, nor does being bio-degreadable mean a chemical is environmentally safe to use. You're focusing on an individual chemical trait and missing an entire SCALE of processes which help degrade dangerous chemicals.
Purified aluminum is one material which fits exactly your last point. There is a minuscule amount of it in nature, it is poisonous, and it can build up in your body. It is mitigated naturally through non-biological processes (it is not biodegradable). Should we ban it?
(By the way, drywall and pure silicon are chemically different from gypsum and silicon oxide... they are different materials which do not naturally occur.)
What about purified silicon? Glass? Drywall? Aluminum, or any pure metal?
I'm a huge fan of not slowly poisoning ourselves, but I think your criteria of using only biodegradable materials is unreasonable. There are ways of neutralizing chemicals outside of biology.
Then what about naturally occurring chemicals? PDBEs are found in nature (with carbon isotopes not found in synthetic chemicals).
While I agree that PDBEs should be replaced with currently available chemicals that are biodegradable, we don't know everything. We don't know where naturally occurring PDBEs come from or where they go. Technically, there may be some bacteria out there capable of degrading PDBEs, but we still shouldn't be using them.
It's enough to say that we shouldn't use dangerous chemicals unless we have to.
That's not the way things work on the molecular scale.
It's easy to take an organic molecule with sp2 bonded carbon (say DNA) and do some spectroscopy on it, as was done here, and find out that there are electrons moving around very quickly inside the molecule. This is really not anything new. What is hard is getting those electrons to move all the way from one end of a molecule to the other and then out the other side. There IS a reason they didn't just directly measure the conductance of this stuff, and that reason is: it doesn't conduct. All she is talking about is finding electrons which are moving around very fast inside the molecule, which is great... the rest is just PR, don't buy it.
If I remember the original Nature article correctly, it's based primarily on what journal research is published in. Thus if a journal claims to be focused on engineering, then articles published in that journal are in the subject of engineering. Links were made by citations between journal articles. They do say what journals they look at. They're selected by Thomson Scientific, who runs Web of Science, and I know they include IEEE journals.
I always laugh at people who try to re-define other people's professions. If the editor of a major engineering journal considers something engineering, then it is. Do you know whether IEEE publishes things which are applicable to astrophysics, or whether Physical Review Letters published topics relevant to engineers? What kind of person does nanotechnology research? Is it engineering, physics, chemistry or biology? These guys have a straightforward solution to these questions. Let the researchers define themselves by submitting their work to journals they consider important, and let the editors of those journals name their field.
What is non-mainstream science? I've seen talks on cold fusion, violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and other "fringe" fields at the same conferences I've presented my work at. They weren't labeled "non-mainstream", or "kooks", or anything like that. Look at who's doing this research. Taleyarkhan isn't some bum off the street, he's a well known physicist, with years of research experience in a "mainstream" lab.
In my experience, scientists are so bloodthirsty for new discoveries that we're willing to overlook almost anything to show that we've found something new. That's why we have all sorts of ethics rules and guidelines for reproducing work. The scientists claiming "bad science" are either looking for an excuse to come in and make the discovery their own, or maybe it really is bad science.
There's no such thing as a stable field in science. As soon as you stop looking for new ways to break the rules, you have ceased to be a scientist. No one is going to come up with something that's going to make being a physicist obsolete, but they may come up with something that means my research is obsolete. That happens all the time. It's a very poor scientist who doesn't realize an opportunity for new work when he sees one.
I agree that it's absurd to call QFT and string theory not science, but I think it might be justified to call both not physics. QFT is a very, very useful mathematical tool which physicists use, but it's a rather difficult tool to test directly (the results we get out are certainly physics).
It's very odd that the math some physicists doubt can be seen as not science. According to an essay last week in Nature, some biologists reject the idea of mathematical laws entirely ("the data is as it is"). Yet despite that, there is no question that mathematical biology is science (before someone screams, it is).
The public does not understand the basic ~100 year old theories we base our experiments on (which were at one point unproven and controversial...). You can even get a physics degree (in some places) without needing to learn QFT. Imagine explaining genomics to people who didn't know what a cell is. That is the situation we are in. Baby steps...
We do need to cut emmissions, but we also need to find a way to also either remove the excess CO2 in atmosphere or otherwise deal with the consequenses of climate change. We've been hearing people come in to talk about "crazy ideas" for this for a few years in my department. The bottom line is, no one is willing to do anything personally about it. Schemes such as carbon sequesterization seem to make sense because they're the sort of industrial, someone-else's-problem solution which may actually get done. Putting a shade between the earth and the sun was originally meant as a joke to shock people into seeing this as a serious problem, no scientist wants to be known as the real life Mr. Burns.
Having been in a few meetings where administrators quoted policy to the people who wrote it and then went on to bash faculty and students over the head with illogical interpretations of that policy, I don't find this surprising at all.
These people have hard jobs, but so do we. Should someone teaching computer security not be able to use or talk about things which are important in doing computer security? I know my University administrators think they shouldn't.
Many people come to academia to get away from the frustration of petty, ineffective management only to find it just as entrenched here.
15 years ago, I could beat games like the original Ninja Gaiden, which I simply don't have the reflexes and patience for anymore. At that time, there were a few games I just couldn't figure out how to beat. I've played some of those old "thinking" games again (Koei's Liberty or Death comes to mind) and find them to be much, much easier.
Career centers are really under-used by companies.
The bit about having other events on campus is key. If you can stand talking (as in actual conversation) to a small group of students for even 10 minutes, it makes a huge difference. I send undergrads coming through my lab to contacts I've made that way looking at potential industry postdoc positions.
Don't go out to lunch with your buddies in your booth. Arrange to go out to lunch with some students or a professor working in an area you're recruiting in, even if it means skipping the school's free lunch.