Science and the media: 18 - 24 September

In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses a Wall Street Journal article about the strong views of the head of General Electric concerning US energy policy, a Wall Street Journal op-ed that continues that newspaper’s extensive attention to Stephen Hawking’s new book , some implications of a Nature editorial and news article about higher education and science in Pakistan, a Wall Street Journal op-ed advocating treating schoolteachers as respected professionals, and a lengthy Maclean‘s article profiling Canada’s Perimeter Institute .

GE Chief Slams US on Energy

Thus reads the headline on a 24 September Wall Street Journal business article. The “lede” sentence says, “General Electric Co. Chief Executive Jeff Immelt warned that the lack of a comprehensive U.S. energy policy and the ‘stupid’ current structure of the industry are causing America to fall behind in new energy fields."The article reports that in a speech, Immelt warned that “China is moving faster to develop clean technologies such as nuclear power, electric vehicles and wind power,” that “China has the right mix of a big local market, innovation in technology, a low-cost supply chain and government policy support,” that “China’s State Grid utility ... is larger than nearly all US utilities combined,” that “the energy regulatory system in the US [is] ‘a relic of 1860 or something’ [with] ‘fundamentally no basis in the modern world,’” and that the US must decide “if it is serious about updating the 100-year-old ‘antiquated [power] grid’ and whether the much-talked-about ‘smart grid’ is ‘a hobby shop or a real business.’” The article notes that “GE has long expressed frustration with what it sees as a lack of government support for new energy technologies in the US and for sales of nuclear power and other technologies overseas."The article adds, however, that Immelt’s comments “appeared aimed at prodding the Obama administration, Congress and public toward action, particularly in areas where GE does business” and that “not all competitors and peers share his viewpoint.” It offers Steven Chu as one of its examples, reporting that he “acknowledged the need for an overhaul” but “said the administration is working meanwhile on steps like funding clean energy technology and research.” The news report says that in an interview, Chu declared that the US is “not going to sit idly by” and that “a completely centralized model like China’s would hurt innovation.”

Physics, Stephen Hawking, and theology return to the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page

As mentioned last week , more than one writer in a recent collection of Wall Street Journal letters to the editor insisted that it’s illogical to assert that “something can come from nothing.” But none of them challenged, or even engaged, the quantum cosmological basis that Hawking and his co-author had offered when they wrote, “As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing."Scruton, however, quotes that same line, and does challenge that basis. In the end, though, he reverts to asserting that something cannot come from nothing.

Pervez Hoodbhoy on conditions for education and science

The subject is science and higher education in Pakistan. But the metasubject is the basic social conditions and cultural outlook needed for constructive, enlightening science anywhere.

Three years ago, Physics Today ran “Science and the Islamic World—The Quest for Rapprochement ” by the nuclear theorist Pervez Hoodbhoy of Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. Hoodbhoy publishes popularly not just about science, but about culture and politics. Consider, for example, the thumbnail summary for that Physics Today article: “Internal causes led to the decline of Islam’s scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.”

A decade ago Hoodbhoy published a moving Washington Post op-ed following 9/11. I wrote to him about it, not yet aware that he sometimes worked with nuclear theorists whom I knew. We became e-mail correspondents. Later, I reported from time to time within the American Institute of Physics about his writings. In particular I’ve followed and reported on his efforts to get the international scientific community, as represented by the weekly Nature, to understand something counterintuitive: that throwing lots of sudden money at Pakistan’s higher-education problems, as has been done in recent years, has actually been counterproductive.

In an editorial and a news article , the 23 September Nature shows that Hoodbhoy’s views are finally starting to register.

“Against the backdrop of human tragedy that continues to unfold in Pakistan,” begins the editorial, “it may seem perverse to draw attention to the plight of the country’s higher-education system.” It reports, further on, that among other donors, “the World Bank is now considering a US$300-million, three-year loan to aid the higher-education system,” and declares that those funds should be released. But unlike Nature‘s past coverage, both Nature pieces this time acknowledge the Hoodbhoy view.Here’s a key passage from the news article:

But Hoodbhoy actually puts it more strongly. When I asked him by e-mail about Nature‘s coverage this time, he replied:

Hoodbhoy regularly advocates what sound to me like the principles of the Enlightenment, the philosophical basis for modern science and much else. That’s why his moving post-9/11 op-ed compelled me to write to him a decade ago. This week he has submitted a commentary to Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper. I’ll be reporting about that, because in my view, all of this is about more than higher education, more than science, and more than Pakistan.

Wall Street Journal op-ed: Treating teachers like professionals, not “industrial-era workers”

Members of the physics community whose interest in STEM education extends to elementary schools might want to see the 22 September Wall Street Journal op-ed “A Teacher Quality Manifesto .”

The author, Deborah Kenny, founded and leads Harlem Village Academies , which the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert—not exactly someone routinely in sync with the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page—has called “phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem.” Kenny’s op-ed “manifesto” argues energetically that if “we want to elevate teacher quality in our country, we need to stop treating teachers like industrial-era workers and start treating them like professionals.”

In this key passage, she’s referring to her academies:

Kenny cites “three aspects of culture that attract and develop effective teachers": ownership, as in “affording [teachers] the freedom to do their jobs” instead of “micromanaging them,” teamwork, with dimensions that include having a principal who “has your back in difficult situations,” and “a rich intellectual environment where teachers are treated as scholars and everyone is passionate about continually growing.” She asks, “What happens to bright teachers stuck in schools that don’t have the right to hire by performance, provide teachers with freedom, and build a culture of excellence?” And she answers: “They quit.”

The “ageless desire of great minds” at Ontario’s Perimeter Institute

Maclean ‘s calls itself “Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine” and claims to enlighten, engage and entertain 2.8 million readers with “stories from leading journalists in the fields of international affairs, social issues, national politics, business and culture.” Though that list omits science, in “Mind-bending mysteries at the Perimeter Institute: What the big thinkers know, what they’re trying to learn, and how close we may be to a genuine revolution, ” a nonscientist named Paul Wells seeks to convey to other nonscientists a sense of the theoretical physics work being conducted at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.

Wells describes Perimeter as having Stephen Hawking and Stanford’s Leonard Susskind among its 20 distinguished research chairs, “eminent international theorists who visit ... occasionally to work without the distractions of home.” He reports that Perimeter’s slate-black 6000-square-meter building on the shore of Silver Lake will soon have its floor space doubled, that the faculty size will triple, and that on an ordinary day, you can find more than 100 people at Perimeter, thinking.

Wells wants readers to appreciate what they think about and the ways in which they do this thinking. He exclaims, “What struck me again and again about these people was how much heart they bring to the task.” From “assorted conceptual angles that make up the subdisciplines of modern theoretical physics,” he writes, they think about “ways to refine, extend and, ideally, reconcile the two great early 20th-century advances in physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics.”

Wells elaborates on what he calls the “big conundrum in physics,” namely, “that the great breakthroughs of relativity and quantum theory” seem to conflict:

Wells emphasizes that what’s wanted in participants is the desire for genuine discovery, not just a desire to publish papers, and that Perimeter operates on the common assumption that the very best science often gets done by comparatively young researchers. He highlights what he calls a common theme at Perimeter, a belief that with the advent of the Large Hadron Collider, “a reality check is coming. A generation of theorizing will soon be tested against hard data from significant new experiments.”

He adds, “Nothing motivates a theorist more than new information from the real world, especially if it upends what everyone thought they knew.”

(Note: I thank Hans Christian von Baeyer, Chancellor Professor ofPhysics at the College of William and Mary, for alerting me to thisarticle.)

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.