Friday, September 30, 2011
Passed by Congress and signed into law by the President on 2 Aug 2011, the
Budget Control Act brought conclusion to the 2011 debt ceiling crisis that
threatened to lead the U.S. into sovereign default on 3 Aug 2011. Like
amputating a limb to stop an infection, it may have been necessary but it
didn't end our suffering. In a Science editorial last week that every
scientist should read, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) predicts that science will
bear more than its share of the $2.4 trillion in federal spending cuts
required by the bill. I have no doubt he's right. The only remaining PhD
physicist in Congress, Rush has served the 12th district of New Jersey
since 1998. Before that he was the Assistant Director of the Princeton
Plasma Physics Laboratory. "With the budget control act," he
writes, "Congress appears to have said in effect, that federally sponsored
science has no role to play in advancing the economy, that unemployment is
a problem that only time will cure, and that the nation's best days are
behind us. How contrary to American tradition that would be! It must not
prevail."
Located at Fermilab National Laboratory on the Illinois prairie about 50
miles west of Chicago, the Tevatron is no longer the world's most powerful
accelerator. Later today Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, is preparing
to issue the command to shut down the most successful particle accelerator
ever built. It should be the occasion for celebration. The command
to "shut down" is an announcement that Tevatron has completed the tasks for
which it was intended. We should all be so lucky.
I oppose the death penalty and would have preferred that al-Awlaki
surrender himself for trial, but Im pretty sure he didn't have that in
mind. Im glad we had the technology to take al-Awlaki out without major
collateral losses among innocents. However, the handwringing over the
killing of an American citizen without "due process" loses me. War is, as
it has always been, due process. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have
resulted in many thousands of civilian and military deaths without any due
process other than war. President Obama characterized the killing of
radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki as "a major blow to al Qaeda's most active
operational affiliate." That's what the war has been about.
I am told that Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow in arXiv:1109.6562v1 make
the observation that superluminal neutrinos would radiate by the same
effect as Cerenkov radiation when particles exceed c/n. That makes it
clear, if it wasnt already, that the claim of superluminal neutrinos was
wrong. No one knows why.
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