robert park

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 18 Apr 08 Washington, DC

1. SCIENCE DEBATE 2008: SOME DAYS GET REALLY LONG.
The "Compassion Forum" on Sunday night at Messiah College was not exactly
the debate scientists had hoped for. It wasn’t a debate at all; Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama were interviewed separately. Jon Meacham of
Newsweek asked Senator Clinton straight out, "do you personally believe
life begins at conception?" "I believe the potential for life begins at
conception," she began. Would she now try to explain to this Christian-

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 11 Apr 08 Washington, DC

1. NO SCIENCE DEBATE: CANDIDATES WILL DEBATE JESUS.
It seemed to be going well for efforts to arrange a debate on science
issues. The National Academies, the Council for Competitiveness and the
AAAS had agreed to serve as official cosponsors; the plan was endorsed by
all major research universities and scientific societies. However, in a
world faced with the threat of global warming, dwindling fossil fuel,
continuous warfare, disease and starvation on the rise in Africa,

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 4 Apr 08 Washington, DC

1. LHC: A KNIGHT ERRANT TILTS AT HIGH-ENERGY WINDMILL.
Technology has changed in the 400 years since Cervantes first told the
story of Don Quixote. Windmills are now particle accelerators and the
knight’s lance is a federal court injunction, but the plot is the same.
It begins with a befuddled lawyer in Hawaii named Walter Wagner. Having
read far too much science fiction as a youth, Wagner fantasizes that he is
a physicist by virtue of an undergraduate biology degree with a minor in

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday 28 Mar 08 Washington, DC

1. ASLEEP ON MARS: THE "WASHINGTON MONUMENT" PLOY?
It’s a lot easier to get Congress to create popular new initiatives than
to pay the cost of keeping them up. The most popular tourist attraction
in the Capital is the Washington Monument; if Congress threatens to cut
its operating budget the Park Service announces it will have to close the
Monument. Told on Tuesday that the cost of the Mars Rover mission must be
cut 40%, Steve Squyres of Cornell, the PI, announced that either Spirit or

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 21 Mar 08 Washington, DC

1. EXOPLANETS: THE SEARCH FOR LIFE BROADENS.
The great discovery in astronomy at the beginning of the third millennium
is that there are planets around other stars - lots of planets around lots
of stars. But is there life? If there is it won’t be on HD 189733b in
the constellation Vulpecula 63 light years distant. A "hot-Jupiter"
planet hugging the skirts of a star a bit smaller than our sun, HD 189733b
is too hot and too massive for life. Nevertheless, the detection of

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 14 Mar 08 Washington, DC

1. PHYSICS BLOC: FERMILAB PHYSICIST WINS HASTERT SEAT.
Tuesday, on his first day in office, Bill Foster (D-IL) cast the deciding
vote to prevent tabling a Congressional ethics bill that would create an
outside panel to investigate ethics complaints against House members. He
will have to run again in November, but Foster’s victory in a special
election on Saturday to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Dennis
Hastert looked pretty convincing. Hastert had represented the vermilion

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 7 Mar 08 Washington, DC

1. WEATHER: THE 2008 ICCC ENDS.
The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held in New York,
ended Tuesday. No, no, it wasn’t that government thing; this one was
sponsored by the Heartland Institute. No, I have no idea what the
Heartland Institute is, or where it gets its money, but I can guess.
Don’t feel bad if you missed the meeting; a lot of people did. One third
of all the scientists at the meeting thought the chilly temperatures in

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 29 Feb 08, Washington, DC

1. FENCES: SOMETHING THERE IS THAT DOESN’T LOVE A WALL.
Technology makes us arrogant. A 28-mile pilot project for a high-
tech "virtual fence" south of Tucson, which cost $100M, is now
acknowledged to be a failure. The history of the world is a story of
fences that failed: the Great Wall of China, the Red Sea, the Berlin Wall,
Robert McNamara’s electronic wall dividing Vietnam, followed by the horror
of Agent Orange. Securing the 2,000 mile border was expected to cost

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 22 Feb 08, Washington, DC

1. EVOLUTION IN FLORIDA: THANK GOD IT’S ONLY A THEORY.
In approving new science standards, the state education board in Florida
has for the first time ever used the word "evolution." That’s a huge step
forward. At the last minute, Southern Baptists on the board insisted
that "evolution" be changed to "the scientific theory of evolution."
That’s even better. Evolution is, after all, "only a theory," as is all
of science. Florida teachers can now cite state standards as

WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 15 Feb 08, Washington, DC

1. PERPETUUM MOBILE: THIS YEAR LIKE EVERY YEAR.
I probably missed a few, but I estimate that every year I see about five
perpetual motion machine claims. You may recall Steorn, the Dublin
company that assembled a jury of scientists to evaluate its 2006 claim of
generating free energy from "rotating magnets"
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN06/wn082506.html. In 2007 the company
went belly-up. The first one this year is the Perepiteia invented by