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Physics for Dummies Presidents

By bioephemera on December 3, 2008.

In the December issue of Physicsworld, Rob Goldston reviews Richard Muller's Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines. The book's not addressed to Obama, exactly; it's based on Muller's extremely popular course for non-science students at Berkeley. But it seems that in the wake of the last administration, more and more people are asking how science-savvy a president needs to be - I even tried to answer that question myself at the Apple Bloggers' Panel back in October. My top request? That a science-savvy President be comfortable with the provisional nature of truth in science.

So I liked the review's last paragraph, which sidesteps the questions of which facts a president needs, and gets straight to the practical realities of how making science policy works:

My own advice to aspiring future presidents (and to president-elect Obama) is that you should treat this book as a starting point for understanding how physics affects many issues of importance to society. But more importantly, you should appoint a presidential science advisor with great stature and perspective, and quickly put together a broad and respected Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. You provide policy goals, these thoughtful scientific leaders provide accurate scientific information, and your staff will help you with the analysis needed to bring these together. The outcome of this interaction, as a House Science Committee staff member once suggested to me, is good decisions.

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I was shocked to see such misleading innuendo in Rob Goldston's review:


Although the book does present many of the complexities of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, it does not dig deeply enough into the risks of nuclear proliferation from the greatly expanded use of nuclear power. What would a world that burns two million kilograms of plutonium a year look like, when the Nagasaki bomb needed only six kilograms?

Here we see Rob Goldston as an apparently respected Physicist, one who emphasizes his credentials "as a nuclear-fusion researcher", casually equating controlled fission with a deliberate nuclear strike.

Q: What would the world look like if it "burns" two million kilograms of plutonium a year? A: There will be more reactors, and more waste sites, and more mines, and yet it will look nothing like Nagasaki at noon on August 9th, 1945.

Apparently in the mind of Rob Goldston, if you neglect to traffic in the most idiotic, anti-nuclear innuendo you aren't "digging deeply enough."

Far be it from me to quibble with a "a nuclear-fusion researcher" but it bears emphasizing that the destructiveness of "burn[ing]" plutonium is a function of whether the energy of the "burn[ing]" Pu is harnessed for domestic consumption over a prolonged period of time or whether it is instantly released at the optimal altitude in an assembly painstakingly engineered to destroy as much as possible. This is a minor detail the author should keep in mind. One wouldn't want the reader to conclude that Rob Goldston is deliberately pandering to the anti-nuclear lobby by stoking scientifically-illiterate hysteria.

Perhaps the most immediate example of the provisional nature of science that most people would be familiar with is weather forecasting.

If the weatherman says it will almost certainly be rainy, then that doesn't mean definitely; but it does mean that rainy is the very best information that anyone has, and that someone who insists that it won't be is being a bit foolish. *Even if they should turn out to be correct*.