It's gonna be a long long wait."LA Times
Re “Climate change dust-up,” Nov. 22 and “A legal dry hole,” Editorial, Nov. 22
It will be interesting if the hacker who reportedly broke into the secret climate files will try the same defense as the student who disrupted the oil lease sale. His motive? To dramatize the climate issue before the politicians who have already made a mess of things do irreparable harm to the economy at their upcoming U.N. climate conclave in Copenhagen.
There is a larger issue here, though, and it shouts out from the files that have been released so far: cognitive dissonance. If climate change is indeed such a serious problem, why do they send in the B-team to solve it?The filched files reveal an appallingly low level of comprehension and competence among those entrusted with such critical research.
This is where we need another Richard Feynman, someone with the integrity and ability to seek the truth, however the chips may fall. Otherwise the public is bound to ask: If you don't think this is worth the very best science available, why should we care?
Gilbert Dewart
Pasadena "
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6 comments:
Good question. Hadn't thought of it, but come to think of it, yes, if this is so important, why have such bozos entrusted with all these data? As AA says, though, yes, it's gonna be a long, long wait for another Feynman. They don't come down the pike as often as big fat Al Gore -- not by a million miles.
Tecs, I thought you were wont to criticize Feynman's Nobel since all he did was write down some integrals that don't even make any sense.
I think we'll be waiting about as long for Tecs to get consistent as we'll be waiting for another Feynman to come around.
Hell, for another Einstein to come around.
Incidentally, a Teutonic deep-thinker in New Orleans criticized Einstein for simply ripping off Lorentz' ideas.
Ah, right. That \sqrt(1-(v/c)^2) was really the point of all that SR shit and GR follows directly. Ja.
Actually, I first heard of Feynman when I was a kiddo, in high school. A very smart friend of mine was reading Feynman notes -- I think from a course he'd given, perhaps at Stanford? At any rate, this friend of mine -- who later on went into nukular physicky stuff -- was trying to convince me to read those Feynman notes, as being great stuff. But it was too much for me, so I decided to stay with the easy stuff, like CDs. Maybe I shoulda made the effort to read those notes, after all...
I think they're from CalTech. Yeah, killer books those. Not very useful for our undergrads, sadly.
Here they are. Great stuff. Try teaching that now. You'd be bombarded with rotten tomatoes.
They are still read widely at places like CalTech.
They never have really been textbooks; I'm not sure CalTech dared use them as such once Feynman went on to other teaching. "Now" they are an inspirational classic for the interested undergraduate. At least that is how they were used at Chicago.
I guess I'm saying rotten tomatoes have a long pedigree.
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