Friday, 11 June 1999 Washington, DC
1. SUPPRESSION OF "NEW SCIENCE": BUDDY CAN YOU PARADIGM?
Those
attending last weeks Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific
Exploration in Albuquerque
(WN 4 Jun 99),
take pride in "thinking
outside the box." Talks on such uh, diverse topics as divine
intervention, cold fusion, biological transmutation, precognitive
dreams, psychosurgery, after-death communication, alien breeding
experiments, clairvoyance, electronic signaling from the dead and
prayer healing, were all accepted as serious science. There is
no internal criticism in a community that believes it is under
siege. Convinced that powerful vested interests, including the
scientific establishment, are conspiring to hold back a
scientific revolution, speakers complained that "new" science is
denied funding, rejected by journal editors and even subjected to
ridicule, just because it doesn't fit some outdated paradigm.
Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be
persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right.
2. PERSEUS: JEREMY STONE OFFERS AN APOLOGY TO PHIL MORRISON.
In
his memoirs, Stone, the President of the Federation of American
Scientists, linked Morrison, one of the founders of FAS, with a
Soviet spy code-named Perseus
(WN 14 May 99).
Stone based his
identification on two Russian articles by a KGB officer. Oddly,
however, the description of Perseus in the articles did not even
remotely fit Morrison. Perseus, for example, was said to have
served in the Spanish Civil War. But Morrison was a graduate
student at Berkeley at the time and hardly infantry material--he
suffered polio as a child and walks with the aid of a cane. Stone
had previously "accepted" Morrison's denial that he was Perseus
(WN 14 May 99),
but stopped far short of an apology. In a letter
to Morrison, Stone now stiffly apologizes "for the unfavorable
publicity, which raised unfortunate questions of your innocence."
3. SPY HYSTERIA: SIR RUDOLPH AND LADY PEIERLS ACCUSED OF SPYING.
Unsubstantiated accusations of spying at Los Alamos are nothing
new. In 1994 Pavel Sudoplatov, an admitted Stalin era assassin,
resumed his former trade, asserted without documentation in his
memoirs that Bohr, Fermi, Gamow, Oppenheimer and Szilard had all
passed secrets to Soviet spies. None were around to answer the
allegations. Now, the British magazine, The Spectator, dated May
29, accuses renowned physicist Rudolph Peierls of being a spy
code-named Vogel and identifies his wife Eugenia as an agent
code-named Tina, also a nuclear scientist. Peierls, who was
knighted in 1968, died in 1995 at the age of 88. It was left to
one of their daughters to point out that her parents did not fit
the profile of Vogel and Tina. Her mother was a housewife at Los
Alamos, not a nuclear physicist, and had no access to the lab.
4. THAAD: ARMY MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM FINALLY SCORES A HIT.
On its seventh test, the hit-to-kill missile finally hit.
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