Life as a Physicist

In issue #13 of SEED magazine Chris Mooney has a short article discussing the role of the White House Science advisor. After discussing the current guy, Marburger, and how badly that seems to be working, he has this:

The top democratic presidential contender, Hillary Clinton, has officially pledged to right the wrongs against Marburger—or at least, against his office. If elected, Hillary says, her science adviser will be named early, get the “Assistant to the President” title back, and report directly to her.

I guess she may not be the top contender any longer… I searched the Internet but was unable to find anything referring to similar statements from Obama or Edwards. Does anyone know? During the budget cuts Obama came out quite strongly in favor of restoring funding to Fermilab (which is in his state, after all).

I really hope that if any of the tree got into office it would restore a more rational approach to science policy, but Clinton is the only one I know of that has made such a specific statement.

So, at the end of the last post I noted that it was stupid to get angry at some stranger in a bar over the science funding situation in the USA - and there had to be a better place to direct it.

Well, for a small start, I just sent $250 off to Bill Foster’s campaign. He is an ex Fermilab guy. I interacted with him back when the particle physics community was trying to decide linear collider or something else - he had some novel ideas for accelerators.

I like his “Meet Bill” sentence:

Bill Foster is a scientist, a successful businessman, and the father of two children raised in the Fox Valley. He lives in Geneva and has lived and worked in the tri-cities for most of his adult life, arriving in the Fox Valley in 1984 to raise his family and to work at Fermilab.

His national politics sound (from his web site) pretty standard democrat. And I’m sure that is how most of his votes will be decided - all politics is local, as they say. But that isn’t why I’m supporting him. The fifth word in his intro is “scientist.” That is why I am supporting him.

I’m under no illusions. One junior congressman from Illinois is not going to change the conversation. My hope is that he will at least raise the level of conversation on the hill when it comes to science issues. My hope is that it will be one of his core issues and that he will eventually become to be seen as an expert on science policy in the congress. There are so many issues that our congress has to deal with there is no way any single member can be expert in all of them - one member will often seek another’s advice when they are trying to decide on a bill that is not in their area of expertise. I hope Bill is around long enough and builds a reputation and becomes a go-to guy for science and research policy.

At the very least he will know how to talk to the community the next time we are screwed.

At any rate - good luck Bill.

Feeling a bit better. Now, need to find some other places to redirect my anger. BTW - this is the first time in my life I have every donated money to a political campaign. Took 41 years!

You ever get pissed off, but not realize you were? You only realize it when you discover than you are taking it out on someone else? As a scientist I’ve been trained to approach every problem logically. So, logically, I should never take out my anger on one thing on someone that is not a fault. Right? Ops. Forgot I was a human!!

I met some friends in the 5-Star bar this evening. Lots of fun. While there I met a couple about 5 years older than me. Three kids, oldest is 16 (wow). The woman is a real-estate speculator, and still doing well because she got into it long before the bubble started. The guy is a lawyer here in downtown Chicago. Sounded pretty successful.

I’m not sure how it happened, but the politics thing came up. He made a huge series of jokes, each one ending with “but, I’m apolitical! I don’t have a political bone in my body!”.

All of a sudden, to my horror, I discovered I was lecturing him on how it does actually affect what you do and you should care. Let me make this clear: I’d known this guy about 5 minutes, in a bar, after about 3 beers. And I was lecturing him!

This was clearly my suppressed anger from the way politics seems to have messed with particle physics. While I’m sorry I lectured him (he was good natured - offered to buy me a drink), I’m not sorry I got angry; I just wish I could have yelled at the right people! So, the real question now is: where to direct that anger so it makes a difference!?

The National Academy of the Sciences released a recent report: Science, Evolution and Creationism. I’m not sure who, at the NAS, decided on the release date, but it was a pretty poor choice: the day of the Iowa caucuses. But it has been a few days now, so I thought I’d check to see how it is doing by looking at #’rs of hits in News:

• NAS report - 337 hits
• Clinton - 478700 hits
• Obama - 152100 hits

Oh well. Wishful thinking, I suppose. My favorite headline: “US doomed if creationist president elected: scientists“. This is from the news organization AFP. Never heard of it, but I like it (is it French)?

Ok — this is more of a question than a comment… Because I just don’t understand. The united states had an international agreement - a treaty - that specified how we would fund ITER — and that we would.

But during the latest budget cuts for science, ITER was totally zeroed out. How can we do that? Are we just saying “we don’t honor treaties” or something? Aren’t these things binding? At the very least it makes our country much harder to deal with - a serious lack of credibility.

Or is there something special about the ITER treaty that allows us to do this? An emergency escape clause, where the emergency definition is left up to the country?

A web search revealed the following:

• The treaty only came into effect on Oct 24. That didn’t last long, did it!?
• It is listed in the EU treaty database (who know they had such a thing!).
• PDF of the 20 pages of the treaty. Wonder if the USA had the same text?
• The treaty has a withdrawal clause — but it is designed to be possible only after 10 years - in short, they designed things to be stable during construction of the device. Which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
• There is mention of financial responsibilities, but the treaty contains no actual numbers - just references to budgets that must be submitted to the director general of ITER.
• The DOE ITER web site.
• US responsibility seems to be about 250 million (I may not be reading those numbers right).
• 160 for FY 2008.
• Can tell what we were obligated to give by the treaty from this.

So, it is a big mystery to me. If we were not to pay anything then we are clearly in violation of the treaty. Is that what has happened? My impression is the language in the spending bill from congress was very specific about not moving money around to fund ITER - so, they really want us to violate the treaty.

This isn’t totally academic, btw. This funding model — using international treaties — was one of the possible ways to arrange funding for the ILC. Of course, we may have just shown the way to making this useless.

If anyone knows how this is actually working, I’d appreciate a note in the comments or send me an email.

I’m on shift. At D0 this means we are 4 stories underground, in an all concrete building. One of the shifters looked up and saw a single drop of water fall from the drop-ceiling (think those awful ceilings that every school has).

We called the guy responsible for this sort of thing - even though a single drop of water isn’t much of anything, it seemed like a very odd place: in the middle of a room, many feet from any exterior wall.

After a few minutes of investigation we discovered cracks in the concrete floor and water was dripping through from the large AC unit above (which cools our Level 3 computer farm of 1200 CPUs).

No no one wants to sit over in that corner of the control room.

I was just reading about the recent newspaper poll results in Iowa. Wow, that must be causing lots of jitters right now - especially in the Clinton camp (and perhaps the Edwards camp as well).

I remember at the very end of the Top quark discovery (and to a lesser extent the evidence for single top) walking on pins and needles. We were so close to the end that  nothing could be done to change the analysis. On the other hand, there could always be something wrong. And it was such a big result you were hoping that it wouldn’t be wrong. So each email that would arrive with the subject heading “Comments on Paper” would cause butterfly’s in the stomach.

I imagine a poll like this must cause problems. Though I have to say I would have thought the various campaigns would do their own internal polling and so would know about what was going on….

At any rate, this and the previous Science 2008 post I did got me to thinking who I’d like to win the primaries. I think I come down as a Clinton supporter - though I could live with any of the top three. I wish we could have seen more of Richardson; I think he might have been a very interesting possibility if he was a contender. Edwards makes me a bit nervous when it comes to dealing with business. For example, NAFTA (scrap it?, as most of his supporters seem to think -at least those willing to vote online). My problem with Obama is his inexperience - looking over his record in the Senate it seems like he has tried to avoid doing anything controversial in order to make him self free of baggage when it came to this run. I give much more respect to people that try — for example, McCain. My worries about Clinton are most that there are too many special interest connections. However, she is surrounded by an infrastructure of political insiders and is paralleled to none (read: experience!!!). Even though elections are won on domestic issues, I think the foreign ones are more important - and I think she will do better there than almost anyone else (as I said, I wish Richardson was more of a contender).

On the republican side, I like McCain. Though, not for what he is now, but what he used to be and what he represented. If he were to win the nomination he would have to move back towards the center — back towrards the McCain we were used to. My ideal presidential debate would be a McCain v. Clinton. Actually, it wouldn’t - no debate is: by the time they are doing the final debates, unless one is very far behind, there is just no chance anyone will say anything other than a carefully vetted sentence. Perhaps the ideal debate would be if McCain and Clinton both lost, but then had a runners-up debate! Then I might learn something.

Actually - what would be cool is a Charlie Rose like conversation, but with someone like Bill Clinton and, say, McCain. I’d pay to download that podcast.

So, I’m rambling at this point — are there any good podcasts out there that discus international issues? I’d love to get some to listen to for my daily commute. Like a “Foreign Policy” magazine podcast.

At any rate, back to the presidential election. In the end, it almost won’t matter who the Republicans put up. For example, if it is Huckabee I’ll just vote democratic. That will be easy, and depressing. Romney - almost certainly the same situation. McCain is one of the few people that would make me think twice - though some of his current positions make me quite nervous. I’ll wait until the Republican’s decide before I decide.

It has been a great year! Thanks for reading and especially thanks for leaving comments! I hope you all have a great New Year!

A while back the science blog over at NYTimes posted a bit on the Science Debate petition (I’ve written about it previously too). The comments added to Tierney’s blog make for some good reading - lots of good suggestions.

Though one person points out, if the debate is a Republican v Democrat, and the Republican has said they don’t believe in evolution, there may not even be a point of having this sort of debate: it would be very unlikely to change anyone’s opinion! On the other hand, the exposure would be nice!!