Life as a Physicist

Persis Drell (SLAC director), along with Steven Chu (LBNL director), and Thom Mason (Oak Ridge Director) had a chance to visit the house speaker the other week.

We explicitly told the Speaker that we three Directors of major research institutions were not asking for anything for our individual laboratories. Our message was that a broad national commitment to scientific research and innovation was necessary—and that this would certainly create an environment in which we, and our partners in the academic community, could compete and thrive.

Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.

I personally doubt there is much more than can be done for this year’s budget mess (but I’m in favor of trying!!), but perhaps we can convince congress to be ready for the ‘09 budget - which probably won’t be settled until well after the election.

As I write this the exchange rate is about $1.54 US to one euro. This will probably come out the middle of next week - no telling what it will be then.

When I moved over here on July 1 the dollar was $1.35 US (see Yahoo! Finance).

Even though France is helping out by paying me a per-diem over here, it is paid in constant dollars. Darn.

Our graduate students and post-docs over here are in the same boat. They are also paid in constant dollars. It is worse for them, of course, as they are paid less than I am and so have less of a cushion to fall back on (I don’t even want to talk about what has happened to my savings account during the stay over here!).

Indeed, we just had to raise the student’s battle pay in order to account for the exchange rate difference. Where does this money come from? Our grant, of course. To supplement the grant so that it can accommodate these increases we are asking for extra cash, of course, but everyone doing physics over in Europe is in the same boat and there just isn’t much extra money in the various funding agencies coffers after the last budget battle.

I don’t see the dollar coming down soon. I keep hoping it will plateau. This latest turn-around is, I think, only temporary. But it is definitely cutting into our ability to send people over to Europe, and we do science with people - less people, less science. It started with a small fraction of bad loans, which is slowly claiming more and more people - and now spreading out from the housing sector to the financial sector and… to the science sector. If there is such a sector!

BTW - when the insurance adjuster dropped by we talked a bit about the financial crisis in the US. He said it was a scandal: “Why haven’t you guys caught the people responsible?”

Should we believe? I read this while trying to not work on the talk I have to give tomorrow.

Mr. Mukasey noted that a 2002 memorandum by Jay Bybee, an assistant attorney general at the time, stating that the president had the power to circumvent the Geneva Conventions as well as laws banning torture, was later disavowed and superseded.

“Would it be a safe characterization of what you’ve just said that you repudiate this memo as not only being contrary to law, but also contrary to the values America stands for?” Mr. Leahy asked.

“I do,” the nominee replied.

“Thank you,” Mr. Leahy said. “Is there such a thing as a commander-in-chief override that would allow the immunization of acts of torture that violate the law?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Mr. Mukasey said.

On one hand, this is encouraging to hear. On the other hand, he isn’t exactly going against any current practices in the Bush administration — as he noted, they have already decided that memo is wrong. But what about all those other memos that came afterwards that redefined various practices as “not being torture?”