51–57 of 57 posts
The turning point as far as I am concerned was when Leon Lederman resigned as Director of Fermilab to work more on the LHC.
Yet another high energy physicist who thinks HEP is the only science being done. /condensedMatterPhysicistRant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's common in most countries these days with very few exceptions. What few post-doc positions exist are viewed as a transitory positions and aren't very well paid (considering the qualifications required). If you want to do pure research without moving around the world constantly you can just forget about it! Either you get on the tenure-track or you go into industry and figure out how to steal money on the stock-…
Technocrat in the sense that I want to abolish democracy and have the government run by smart science people in the interest of smart science people? No, I'm not. Bad Things start happening when you take self-governance away from people. EDIT: But that dodges the point! How can people have the balls to complain about too little science being done while making life a miserable shlep for those of us who actually choose…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet another high energy physicist who thinks HEP is the only science being done. /condensedMatterPhysicistRant
ah, but HEP is the one where you can write the funding proposals for the big shiny toys, which the uni can show off.
Here just for fun, a few more (non accelerator) HEP proposals:
1. Let's dig a really deep hole, and fill it with big tanks of distilled and purified Perrier, photomultiplier tubes[2], wires, some soda straws, and the most expensive amplifiers[1] we can get our hands on.
2. Let's do it again, this time under a mountain.
3. At the South Pole.
4. And in Canada.
5. At the bottom of the ocean?
6. All of the above, but this time, in close proximity to a Nuke-yoo-lar Reee-acter[3]
[1] Also, lots of FPGA's. No, wait ASIC's (FPGA's are too slow and expensive). Oh, and High Voltage. Oh, and flammable gases!
[2] If you're Japanese, do it twice! (see: the Super-K PMT disaster)
I agree with the idea that we should invest more in scientific research in this country. But the 18% considering leaving the country metric is insane. This is like the percentage of people who claimed they were moving to Canada when Bush was reelected, and the percentage of people who said they were leaving the country when Obama was (re)elected. People talk big all the time when they're unhappy about something. EDIT…
Story time? I'm a graduate studentat a US college. I study quantum computing, and have for the past year. I went into quantum computing despite the primary investigator being unsure of HHS funding situation, because it was something I had wanted to study for a very long time and I liked the opportunity too much to pass it up. In July, my advisor told me that our funding had been retroactively taken by the sequester.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technocrat in the sense that I want to abolish democracy and have the government run by smart science people in the interest of smart science people? No, I'm not. Bad Things start happening when you take self-governance away from people. EDIT: But that dodges the point! How can people have the balls to complain about too little science being done while making life a miserable shlep for those of us who actually choose…
Democracy would be nice, but I'd rather have a technocracy than a plutocracy, which is arguably what the U.S. really has right now.
A well-run country requires mature and capable people. People cannot really be mature and capable without participating responsibly in the world around them, including being able to make mistakes. It seems to me like people have to be able to participate in government, or they eventually get degraded into a mad, stupid rabble. The mad, stupid rabble then topple whatever oligarchical government they have and their country collapses from an inegalitarian oligarchical shithole into an utterly insane and incompetent shithole.
Certainly I think that it would be better to have a form of government that can quickly and rationally translate voters' expressed policy preferences into consequences. Problem is, existing systems are bad enough at even letting voters express policy preferences, let alone imposing the consequences quickly and thoroughly enough that voters start learning how to vote!
And yeah, you could try to separate the "brain" and "heart" functions of voting, by having voters vote on ideological/moral preferences and then letting them be translated into policies by a technocratic government. That's what the traditional notion of a democratic republic (and social democracy, and really much of Western democracy) actually tries to do. Problem is, that too has demonstrably led to a somewhat-more-benign form of oligarchy when implemented, albeit one in which some of the oligarchs are reasonably benevolent and it ends up being the politically degraded voters who ruin the country by making bad value decisions (like the Tea Party!) for which they are never held responsible.
And that doesn't even start into the problems of malignant oligarchical elites in our current democratic republics, who have largely decided, "Voters are stupid, so I'm going to govern on the class interests of myself and my social peers!"