Large Hardon Collider

[Chun Liroy]

I wish Miz told me to post moar
Anyways, I know most of you guys are physicists but I found an interesting article I thought I'd share.

Newly Discovered DNA Repair Mechanism

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2010) — Tucked within its double-helix structure, DNA contains the chemical blueprint that guides all the processes that take place within the cell and are essential for life. Therefore, repairing damage and maintaining the integrity of its DNA is one of the cell's highest priorities.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered a fundamentally new way that DNA-repair enzymes detect and fix damage to the chemical bases that form the letters in the genetic code. The discovery is reported in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Oct. 3.

"There is a general belief that DNA is 'rock solid' -- extremely stable," says Brandt Eichman, associate professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, who directed the project. "Actually DNA is highly reactive."

On a good day about one million bases in the DNA in a human cell are damaged. These lesions are caused by a combination of normal chemical activity within the cell and exposure to radiation and toxins coming from environmental sources including cigarette smoke, grilled foods and industrial wastes.

"Understanding protein-DNA interactions at the atomic level is important because it provides a clear starting point for designing drugs that enhance or disrupt these interactions in very specific ways," says Eichman. "So it could lead to improved treatments for a variety of diseases, including cancer."

The newly discovered mechanism detects and repairs a common form of DNA damage called alkylation. A number of environmental toxins and chemotherapy drugs are alkylation agents that can attack DNA.

When a DNA base becomes alkylated, it forms a lesion that distorts the shape of the molecule enough to prevent successful replication. If the lesion occurs within a gene, the gene may stop functioning. To make matters worse, there are dozens of different types of alkylated DNA bases, each of which has a different effect on replication.

One method to repair such damage that all organisms have evolved is called base excision repair. In BER, special enzymes known as DNA glycosylases travel down the DNA molecule scanning for these lesions. When they encounter one, they break the base pair bond and flip the deformed base out of the DNA double helix. The enzyme contains a specially shaped pocket that holds the deformed base in place while detaching it without damaging the backbone. This leaves a gap (called an "abasic site") in the DNA that is repaired by another set of enzymes.

Human cells contain a single glycosylase, named AAG, that repairs alkylated bases. It is specialized to detect and delete "ethenoadenine" bases, which have been deformed by combining with highly reactive, oxidized lipids in the body. However, AAG also handles many other forms of akylation damage. Many bacteria, however, have several types of glycosylases that handle different types of damage.

"It's hard to figure out how glycosylases recognize different types of alkylation damage from studying AAG since it recognizes so many," says Eichman. "So we have been studying bacterial glycosylases to get additional insights into the detection and repair process."

That is how they discovered the bacterial glycosylase AlkD with its unique detection and deletion scheme. All the known glycosylases work in basically the same fashion: They flip out the deformed base and hold it in a special pocket while they excise it. AlkD, by contrast, forces both the deformed base and the base it is paired with to flip to the outside of the double helix. This appears to work because the enzyme only operates on deformed bases that have picked up an excess positive charge, making these bases very unstable. If left alone, the deformed base will detach spontaneously. But AlkD speeds up the process by about 100 times. Eichman speculates that the enzyme might also remain at the location and attract additional repair enzymes to the site.

AlkD has a molecular structure that is considerably different from that of other known DNA-binding proteins or enzymes. However, its structure may be similar to that of another class of enzymes called DNA-dependent kinases. These are very large molecules that possess a small active site that plays a role in regulating the cells' response to DNA damage. AlkD uses several rod-like helical structures called HEAT repeats to grab hold of DNA. Similar structures have been found in the portion of DNA-dependent kinases with no known function, raising the possibility that they play an additional, unrecognized role in DNA repair.

The new repair mechanism may also prove to be the key to understanding the differences in the way that the repair enzymes identify and repair toxic and mutagenic lesions. That is important because mutagenic lesions that the repair mechanisms miss are copied to daughter cells and so can spread whereas the deleterious effects of toxic lesions are limited to the original cell.

Understanding these differences could lead to more effective chemotherapy agents, Eichman points out. These drugs are strong alkylating agents designed to induce lesions in a cancer patient's DNA. Because cancer cells are reproducing more rapidly than the body's normal cells, the agent kills them preferentially. However, in addition to toxic lesions that kill the cell, the agent also produces lesions that cause mutations, which can lead to additional complications. Additionally, the efficacy of these drugs is low because they are working against the body's repair mechanisms. If it were possible to design a chemo drug that predominantly creates toxic lesions, however, it should be more effective and have fewer harmful side-effects. Alternatively, if we understood how glycosylases recognize alkylation damage, it may be possible to design a drug that specifically inhibits repair of toxic, but not mutagenic lesions.

Vanderbilt graduate student Emily H. Rubinson, A.S. Prakasha Gowda and Thomas E. Spratt from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and Barry Gold from the University of Pittsburgh contributed to the study, which was supported by grants from the American Cancer Society, National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1004112156.htm

[Tyche]

Miz had a ginger...

[Cyn]

Miz had a ginger...

While that's very likely genetically impossible, it's funny nonetheless.

[Max™]

Look what I found:
http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-we...s.php?usr=LHC1

Use the little dropdown menu on the top left to roam around.

http://www.collidingparticles.com/further_reading/

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/The+Particle+Detectives/15273.aspx

More fun stuff there.

http://www.lhc.ac.uk/The+Particle+De...C_project.html

[Eliseos]

Speaking of minus signs:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20101008.gif

EDIT: Also they found dinosaurs in space http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1007145136.htm

[foopy]

EDIT: Also they found dinosaurs in space http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1007145136.htm

that was extremely misleading. i eagerly clicked, but my hopes of space raptors were quickly dashed.

[Eliseos]

Was a reference to this that I thought was way too awesome to pass up, which also confirms how science articles mislead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/th.../2010/sep/24/1

[Ferion]

Physicists don't care about being rigorous in their math (which is the thing I hate most about physics).

So you mean Physicists in general don't like to write formal proofs for their results, or it's just not emphasized by departments at an undergraduate level/if you're not doing theory?

[Eliseos]

They definitely have proofs, and everything physical must go through rigorous proofing, but some of them involve shortcuts. IE if a mathematician says "this integral doesn't converge", a physicist might say "this integral is zero for our purposes." It's mostly used when they are eliminating non-physical solutions to a problem, in my experience.

[Woozie]

and everything physical must go through rigorous proofing

That's far from true. Physicists often use things that "looks right" or "gives the right answer" without any regards to whether or not it's been mathematically justified. It's very common for people on the frontier of theoretical physics to use mathematics or proofs that would not be acceptable to a mathematician. There are branches of mathematical physics dedicated solely to the task of trying to justify the BS physicists use or come up with.

Physicists and physics books often use very shaky reasoning to get to a right answer, and if the answer agrees with their experiment, then they use this fact to justify their reasoning. So it's an "ends justify the means" type of situation. Sometimes when I ask a professor why something he/she or the textbook did is legitimate, they'll answer "oh, it's probably been proven by some guy a long time ago" or "we've been doing this for decades and it's never caused any problems before" instead of showing some sort of proof. If I'm persistent, they'll try to convince me that the proof is pointless because if they already know it works and it gives results that agree with experiment, then who cares why the math is legit.

And this isn't just undergrads. In fact, it probably happens a lot more in advanced physics than undergrad, since the undergrad physics is stuff that's been fleshed out really well by now (and hence most of the math has been since justified).

The most famous example is the Dirac delta function. Dirac didn't even try to justify is methods in his original papers on quantum theory. Mathematicians developed the rigorous framework later on, after the physicists had already been using it for a while.

This is what bothers me most about physics. That's why you'll often hear me say things like "I think more like a mathematician than a physicists" or "I'm a mathematician at heart". I prefer the rigorous treatment of subjects as opposed to "it looks right so let's use it".

Also see:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics...f_rights.shtml

We hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with certain discrete privileges, among them a mean rest life, n degrees of freedom, and the following rights which are invariant under all linear transformations:

1. To approximate all problems to ideal cases.

2. To use order of magnitude calculations whenever deemed necessary (i.e. whenever one can get away with it).

3. To use the rigorous method of "squinting" for solving problems more complex than the addition of positive real integers.

4. To dismiss all functions which diverge as "nasty" and "unphysical."

5. To invoke the uncertainty principle when confronted by confused mathematicians, chemists, engineers, psychologists, dramatists, und andere Schweinehunde.

6. When pressed by non-physicists for an explanation of (4) to mumble in a sneering tone of voice something about physically naive mathematicians.

7. To equate two sides of an equation which are dimensionally inconsistent, with a suitable comment to the effect of, "Well, we are interested in the order of magnitude anyway."

8. To the extensive use of "bastard notations" where conventional mathematics will not work.

9. To invent fictitious forces to delude the general public.

10. To justify shaky reasoning on the basis that it gives the right answer.

11. To cleverly choose convenient initial conditions, using the principle of general triviality.

12. To use plausible arguments in place of proofs, and thenceforth refer to these arguments as proofs.

13. To take on faith any principle which seems right but cannot be proved.

This was written for humor, but it gives you an idea of how physicists think.

[Woozie]

Speaking of minus signs:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20101008.gif

EDIT: Also they found dinosaurs in space http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1007145136.htm

I don't know if I posted this before or not

http://funnies.paco.to/GodTenure.html

Why God Never Received Tenure at any University

# He had only one major publication.

# It was in Hebrew.

# It had no references.

# It wasn't published in a refereed journal.

# Some even doubt he wrote it himself.

# It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?

# His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.

# The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.

# He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.

# When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.

# When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample .

# He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.

# Some say he had his son teach the class.

# He expelled his first two students for learning.

# Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.

# His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.

[Ferion]

They definitely have proofs, and everything physical must go through rigorous proofing, but some of them involve shortcuts. IE if a mathematician says "this integral doesn't converge", a physicist might say "this integral is zero for our purposes." It's mostly used when they are eliminating non-physical solutions to a problem, in my experience.

Excuse my ignorance, as I've said I don't really know too much about actual physics, but is your example common? From a mathematical point of view, that's a pretty serious assumption. I can understand some hand waiving when justifying something, but to assume the exact opposite is kind of strange.

Physicists and physics books often use very shaky reasoning to get to a right answer, and if the answer agrees with their experiment, then they use this fact to justify their reasoning. So it's an "ends justify the means" type of situation. Sometimes when I ask a professor why something he/she or the textbook did is legitimate, they'll answer "oh, it's probably been proven by some guy a long time ago" or "we've been doing this for decades and it's never caused any problems before" instead of showing some sort of proof. If I'm persistent, they'll try to convince me that the proof is pointless because if they already know it works and it gives results that agree with experiment, then who cares why the math is legit.

I'm actually really shocked by this, especially if it's happening in theoretical work. I always saw physics as an incredibly rigorous field. I can understand in applied research not really feeling the need to justify your equations if your experiments match your work (to an extent), but I don't see how theory can be accepted without formal proofs. A lot of economics classes are a complete joke at the undergrad level, but the more serious ones the professors always offer to write a formal proof for any of the stuff we're learning, especially in econometrics.

[Woozie]

I'm not too sure about the stuff that's extremely far from experiment (like string theory or something). I'd imagine that they're more rigorous than an ordinary physicists because math is the only thing they have to base their conclusions off of (though from what I hear and the little bit that I've seen, they still aren't rigorous by a mathematician's standards).

[Eliseos]

That's far from true. Physicists often use things that "looks right" or "gives the right answer" without any regards to whether or not it's been mathematically justified. It's very common for people on the frontier of theoretical physics to use mathematics or proofs that would not be acceptable to a mathematician. There are branches of mathematical physics dedicated solely to the task of trying to justify the BS physicists use or come up with.

Physicists and physics books often use very shaky reasoning to get to a right answer, and if the answer agrees with their experiment, then they use this fact to justify their reasoning. So it's an "ends justify the means" type of situation. Sometimes when I ask a professor why something he/she or the textbook did is legitimate, they'll answer "oh, it's probably been proven by some guy a long time ago" or "we've been doing this for decades and it's never caused any problems before" instead of showing some sort of proof. If I'm persistent, they'll try to convince me that the proof is pointless because if they already know it works and it gives results that agree with experiment, then who cares why the math is legit.

And this isn't just undergrads. In fact, it probably happens a lot more in advanced physics than undergrad, since the undergrad physics is stuff that's been fleshed out really well by now (and hence most of the math has been since justified).

The most famous example is the Dirac delta function. Dirac didn't even try to justify is methods in his original papers on quantum theory. Mathematicians developed the rigorous framework later on, after the physicists had already been using it for a while.

This is what bothers me most about physics. That's why you'll often hear me say things like "I think more like a mathematician than a physicists" or "I'm a mathematician at heart". I prefer the rigorous treatment of subjects as opposed to "it looks right so let's use it".

I guess that is the physicist in me then. I don't have enough education (ie I'm not a mathematician first) so I guess the way I think of a proof is #12 in your list, which I guess is what I meant by "everything physical". I don't think it's as bad as Ferion is thinking it is (maybe it is, but I'm just an undergrad so I haven't seen anything grad level) since the concepts all have some sort of "proof". I'm more of the type that gets bored with really rigorous math though, which is probably why I hate proofs so much (which I have probably mentioned here at least once). If there isn't a physical use for a mathematical entity, I don't really see a point in it, which is more of the physicist in me. I understand that a lot of the math comes before a lot of the physics, it's just not something I'm really interested in. I don't know how everybody else is, but I learn math better if I have something to apply it to, instead of some problem where it's just x's and operations.

[Ferion]

Haha I didn't mean for it to seem like I find the lack of rigor to be a terrible thing, I was just a little surprised. Don't get me wrong, I find writing proofs to be very boring most of the time. The only reason it even remotely interests me is because it is necessary for graduate school in econ so I completely understand where you're coming from when you say it's easier to learn when it is related to something you're interested in.

[Kaylia]

So you mean Physicists in general don't like to write formal proofs for their results, or it's just not emphasized by departments at an undergraduate level/if you're not doing theory?

It's usually an educated shortcut since you know the model you're using is flawed at the extremums. One of the most common explanations you see is the finite nature of the universe versus the continuous nature of the equation. The integral might diverge because you assume the world is infinite, when in reality, the equation break at a quantum level. That kind of thing cause issue that prevent you from solving the problem in a legit way, but you can force a small fix into the equations to correct it.

Woozie gave Dirac as an exemple of physicist who used mathematics without any demonstration, but you need to understand that back then, no mathematicians knew the proper langage to word the problem. In this situation, a physicist might have to invent his own mathematics. If the universe works this way, then there has to be demonstration or a proper way to write it mathematicaly.

[Woozie]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...not-exist.html

First life-friendly exoplanet may not exist

* 20:36 13 October 2010 by Rachel Courtland
* For similar stories, visit the Astrobiology Topic Guide

Last month, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of the first alien world that could host life on its surface. Now a second team can find no evidence of the planet, casting doubt on its existence.

The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 g, was found to orbit a dim, red dwarf star every 37 days, according to an analysis by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in DC, and their colleagues.

Unlike the four previously known planets in the same system and hundreds of others found throughout the Milky Way galaxy, Gliese 581 g sits in the middle of its host star's habitable zone, where temperatures are in the right range for liquid water to exist. It is also puny enough – weighing about three Earths – to have what is likely a rocky, solid surface.

But it might be too early to claim a definitive detection. A second team of astronomers have looked for signals of Gliese 581 g in their own data and failed to find it.

"We easily recover the four previously announced planets, "b", "c", "d", and "e". However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days," says Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. He presented the results on Monday at an International Astronomical Union symposium in Turin, Italy.
Extra data

The two groups arrived at their disparate results using some of the same data, which was collected by HARPS, an instrument mounted on a 3.6-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. HARPS, which measures the spectrum of starlight, is used to look for wobbles in the motion of stars that could result from the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Vogt and Butler's team found the new planet by combining 119 star velocity measurements from HARPS with 122 measurements taken with a similar instrument called HIRES, which is mounted on the 10-metre Keck 1 telescope in Hawaii.

Pepe and his Geneva colleagues examined about 180 star velocity measurements collected by HARPS, a third more data than was available to Vogt and colleagues when they wrote their paper. The Geneva team, which manages HARPS, is allowed to keep new data for one year before it is released publicly, Pepe told New Scientist.
Two data sets

Although the Geneva team cannot find evidence for the new planet, they cannot exclude the possibility that Gleise 581 g exists. "We are not trying to prove the nonexistence of a planet," Pepe says. "It's really difficult to prove that something does not exist. We are just saying we do not see a significant signal that is really different from noise."

The discrepancy has raised some questions about the discovery. "The Geneva team's report at this meeting has certainly raised doubts," says astronomer Ray Jayawardhana at the University of Toronto in Canada, who broke the news from the symposium on Facebook.

Steven Vogt, who did not attend the meeting in Turin, said he did not wish to comment on the Geneva team's result since he has yet to see the data. But he added that the negative result is not entirely unexpected. "I am not overly surprised by this as these are very weak signals, and adding 60 points onto 119 does not necessarily translate to big gains in sensitivity," Vogt told New Scientist.

The team found that the HIRES data – which were not used by the Geneva team – were needed in order to see the planet. "I feel confident that we have accurately and honestly reported our uncertainties and done a thorough and responsible job extracting what information this data set has to offer," Vogt added. "In 15 years of exoplanet hunting, with over hundreds of planets detected by our team, we have yet to publish a single false claim, retraction, or erratum."

I hope it's real. I'm going to need a place to go after next after I take over Earth.

[Kaylia]

It's quantum mechanics. The position of the planet changed when we observed its movement.

[foopy]

since i view this as a one stop science thread, i wanted to hear what you guys thought of the following:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...-my-long-life/

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Anthony Watts describes it thus:
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment. (H/T GWPF, Richard Brearley).

Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety
Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

---

i apologize in advance for the derail, but i thought a lot of people who read this thread would enjoy it. cheers.

[Kaylia]

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence

It still is!

I will read the rest now, but I chuckled at this line since job prospects in physics are non existant.


[edit]
I'm not quite sure what to think. There is obviously an industry behind global warming (or any sciences topic you will see in the media), but I have no idea how corrupted the APS actually is. Is he overeacting, or there is a real issue with physics right now? I have no idea. That being said, I do agree with his ideal, and I wish sciences would be about sciences, instead of money.