November 26, 2006
WHY THE US SHOULD SPRING FOR A NEW PARTICLE ACCELERATOR
"The US must develop a compelling bid to host the International Linear Collider in order to safeguard American science."
Harold T. Shapiro in Seed Magazine:
Physics in the United States is at a crossroads. There are scientific discoveries just within reach whose impact is likely to transform and even transcend the field. Yet US particle physics facilities are being closed or converted to other uses, federal investments are stagnating, and the intellectual center of gravity is moving overseas with the construction of new facilities in Europe and Japan.
These were the conclusions of the committee for the National Academy of Sciences, which I had the honor of chairing. Our mandate was to examine the current state, and make recommendations regarding the future shape, of a US particle physics program that has yielded innumerable discoveries and played a defining role in American scientific leadership.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:06 PM | Permalink
Comments
I have this vague recollection that the head of Fermilab once testified at a Sentate budget hearing for funding, and when a senator asked him what Fermilab contributed to national defense he said "Nothing, Senator, it just makes the country worth defending." Something like that.
Posted by: gerry rosser | Nov 26, 2006 11:32:17 PM
The scientific orthodoxy of the U.S. is and has become largely a mutual admiration society, at least, in public.
Since only a relatively few "select" individuals are "selected" to be members of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., and obviously few of them are going to openly criticize the organization in public, it is rare to read of published criticisms of the NAS, of which the author Professor Harold Shapiro is a member.
Here are two published criticisms, both by distinguished Nobel Prize winners. The first is by Richard Feynman in the book "Richard Feynman A Life In Science" by John and Mary Gribbon, Penguin Books, N.Y., 1997, pp. 148-149:
"There were, though, irritations associated with his growing fame. One of his most annoying encounters, to Feynman himself, was with the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which elected him a member in April, 1954. He had never heard of the organization, which made no significant contribution to science, published what he discovered to be, when he looked at it, a distinctly second-rate journal, and seemed to be nothing more than an honorary society, which existed chiefly for the incestuous purpose of deciding who else was grand enough to be allowed to join its ranks. He was persuaded that by refusing to accept membership he would embarrass many of his friends, and taht it was better to accept quietly. But when he went along to a meeting of the society, giving them a fari chance, it was deeply depressing. The main topic of conversation was who else should be elected to this honorary society, while the experiments that were reported were, in many cases, usually unscientific. Feynman was particularly unimpressed by an experiment in which rats had been observed drowning, with their efforts to survive being timed and monitored-a cruel and needless experiment with no scientific value.(15) He eventually resigned from the NAS, but without making a great deal of fuss..."
A second published criticism of the NAS comes from two time Nobel Prize winning Linus Pauling in the book "Cancer and Vitamin C" by Ewan Cameron and Linus Pauling, Camino Books, Philadelphia, 1979, 1993, pp. xviii and xix of the preface to the updated edition:
"The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization that was chartered by the federal government in 1864, with the obligation togive advice to branches of the government when requested. During the First World War, the National Academy of Sciences set up another organization, the National Research Council, to help it with this obligation. One of the activities of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council has been to form the Food and Nutrition Board, which, about every five years, issues a revised report on the Recommended Dietary Allowances of vitamins and minerals. The RDA for vitamin C has been changed from time to time, but usually has been set at 50 or 60 mg per day for an adult. The Food and Nutrition Board states that the values of the RDA that the Board has set are large enough so that very few people receiving these amounts would suffer from the corresponding deficiency diseases-scurvy for vitamin C, beriberi for vitamin B1, pellagra for vitamin B3, and so on. The Food and Nutrition Board, however, shows a bias against vitamins and other nutrients similar to that of the writers of the books on health published by the National Academy of Sciences...
Dr. Hemila concluded that the Food and Nutrition Board is guilty of selecting only the reference that it needs to support its bias..."
Therefore, one may conclude, based on at least these two published criticisms, by two very distinguished scientists, one a physical chemist, the other a physicist, although Linus Pauling studied under four of the world's most distinguished physicists in Europe: Arnold Sommerfeld, Neils Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, and William Henry Bragg (pp. 620-621 Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists, Facts on File, N.Y., 1981), that he could and should be considered a defacto physicist, that just because Professor Shapiro and his cronies are members of the NAS, this in and of itself, does not render their arguments compelling a priori.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Nov 27, 2006 8:27:21 PM
As a post script to the above comments, I would add these:
I wonder if Professor Shapiro and his cronies on the NAS have read the book "The Cancer Industry" by Ralph W. Moss, PH.D., Equinox Press, N.Y., 1996, first published as "The Cancer Syndrome", about 1980? (by the way, this remarkable book, about 500 pages and 500 references did not come from academa or the NAS) If so, why are they not indignant about the apparent corruption of the Cancer Industry and many of the "scientists" involved? I wonder how many of Otto Warburg's 500+ scientific papers professor Shapiro and this cronies on the NAS have read? Do they know that Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D., basically discovered the prime cause of cancer decades ago, and it has nothing to do with genetics? It has to do with the energy used to run a cell; oxygen energy, from Mother Oxygen, and when that energy is removed for a long period of time, the other type of energy from glucose is not able to perform the necessary functions of the cell as is energy from Oxygen. Obviously something is very wrong with the scientific orthodoxy of the U.S., since not only have they violated cardinal rules of science by disregarding experiments and facts previously discovered, but they have been going down the wrong path for decades with failed genetics speculations on cancer which fail because they do not deal with the hard reality of the real world in which we live; still about one person dies every minute either from cancer, treatment or both. When the above book by Pauling was written the number was one person every one and a half minutes (page 10)!
I wonder if Professor Shapiro and his cronies at the NAS have read the remarkable statement "The Truth About Hydrazine Sulfate-Dr Gold Speaks" by Joseph Gold, M.D. of Syracuse N.Y.? This is basically a 20 page criminal indictment of the National Cancer Institute documented with 78 references. I doubt it.
I wonder if Professor Shapiro and his cronies at the NAS have read the remarkable new book "The Hidden Story of Cancer" by Brian Peskin E.E. and Amid Habib, M.D., Pinnacle Press, Houston, 2006, which contains a remarkably simple and safe way to increase oxygen transfer across cell membranes, the most likely cause of the cancer problem from adulaterated foods "approved" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration?
Don't talk to us about great science professor Shapiro. If we are ever to return to great science in the U.S. it will be after the U.S. Gestapo Government has stopped the money flow to corrupted "scientists" at the corrupted "universities" of the U.S., and we all get back to the unpretentious basics of studying science and truth in stead of propaganda, smoke and mirrors, aided by a corrupt journalism "profession", to fool a gullible and unwitting public of the truth. At least if the physicists are wrong about quark theory, the death rate hopefully won't increase, but they do bear responsibility in having sold out over the years in permitting pre med students to take virtually trivial physics courses differing little from high school physics. What if Otto Warburg had been only provided trivial physics classes? Would he have become the great scientist he became? His Father was a distinguished physicist and held the chair of physics at Berlin.
Winfield J. Abbe
A.B., UC Berkeley, Physics, 1961
Ph.D., UC Riverside, Physics, 1966
P.S. By the way, if this effort is so important, why should not the physicists pay for it themselves instead of demanding government do it for them? If anything is done at all the effort should not be for another accelerator and accompanying bureacracy but in cosmic ray research where all energies are possible.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Nov 27, 2006 8:54:35 PM
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