I am a scientist, I work across multiple disciplines and have to deal with jargon from physics, chemistry, biology, law and the military. It's a lot of fun. Consider for a moment that undefined jargon is used in law and the military to prevent people from fully understanding something. Is a similar tactic a really a good idea in science?

As the various disciplines become more intertwined, the differences in jargon are creating problems. For example, you have terms like "free carrier" and "quantum efficiency" which may relate to light adsorption and the operation of a solar cell. Like much physics jargon, those terms imply a simplicity and elegance which is misleading when you get down to the real, formal definition. A fundamental misunderstanding of the definitions behind those terms has led to skewed estimates of the overall efficiency of some polymer and biological solar collectors. This in turn has led to bad research investments, with the failed companies and careers that come with that. Now, if physicists had done a better job disseminating the formal definitions of those terms, the people without a condensed matter physics background would have had a better chance for success.

Jargon is used within disciplines as a kind of short hand. There are (or should be) perfectly acceptable definitions for each term. The jargon (such as "free carrier") used is not important, it's the definition of those terms which is meaningful and which needs to be present when trying to communicate precisely.

I taught Introductory Astronomy to a bunch of non-science majors looking to fulfill their science requirement. It was fun, that the kids were good at it despite lacking the physics and mathematics background for it. Statistics maybe isn't as interesting as astronomy, so keeping them interested is probably your biggest challenge. That would be true no matter who was taking the class.

Teaching to science and engineering students too often results in off topic discussions which put me off my lecture schedule (that's my problem, but it makes those classes more stressful to teach). Enthusiasm and detail are good, but lectures have a time limit. Pre-meds (a totally different category from science and engineering students) rarely show more than a passing interest in physics. Social scientists were really a joy to teach. They were interested in the material, the historical context and particularly the differences between astronomy, 'movie astronomy' and astrology. There's more than enough historical and current relevance to statistics to pique their interest, but you'll have to point it out.

NASA needs to make the transition from an executing agency to a support agency, more like NSF and less like the post office.

It's still appropriate to have NASA labs and NASA projects, but the next big advances are going to come through private partnerships and creative investments. NASA's budget is more than 5 times DARPAs budget, for example, but DARPA grabs much more of the public eye these days. The key difference is that program managers (people who control the money) serve 3 year terms in DARPA. There's no time for empire building or lawyering up, which are BIG problems at NASA.

I'm a scientist. It's a big problem.

Here's how you fix it:
The metric for success for both researchers and their government funding sources is published papers. It's hard to change the cultural view of the scientific community, but it's easy to change government metrics. Paper publishing as a metric is easy to track between programs, but has had a terrible impact on scientific culture. It's also led to a large bias in how the government decides what areas to fund. If your metric is paper publishing and you're looking at energy issues, do you fund a sub-field with a historic high paper publication rate, a moderate paper publication rate or a low publication rate? It's fine for us here to say we'd fund the best research, but a government program manager may lose his job for picking a field with the lower publishing rate.

Other metrics such as how many other researchers use some results or whether a practical implementation of some new technique is developed will be harder to judge and take a longer time to evaluate, but would at least give us an honest assessment of the quality of government funded research. Tie future funding to what our broader society is looking for out of science, and eventually the scientific culture will follow.

It's more than a little insulting when scientists and engineers are painted with the "uncreative and money grubbing" label simply because we work on things that have practical value.

I don't understand why anyone would criticize a university for training students to "serve the public" and for having an unusually happy and diverse student body.

You're close, but not quite there.

During the Cold War, the government required business to set aside a certain percentage (I think 15%) of funding from defense contracts and spend that money on internal research. They could do anything they wanted, as long as it was R&D.

After the Cold War, we removed that requirement. It cut 15% off the cost of defense contracts, but also removed the incentive for big companies to spend on high risk R&D.

The "official" government funding for R&D has been pretty good since the Cold War, and big companies still get a lot of it. The problem is a $250k research grant doesn't go as far as 15% of a $100 million procurement contract.

Weinberg points to some un-named Congressman for the line on finding priorities in science funding, but that's not necessary. He should be looking at his colleagues in a physics department, many of us feel the same way!

What particle physics has lacked is true oversight. At this point, their papers aren't really peer-reviewed, their grants aren't competitive, and their results are borderline relevant to actually understanding new physics. Their culture is so monolithic that they actually believe internal competition and review is all they need.

Astronomy is an example of a field of physics where oversight and competition have been beneficial. Weinberg is incorrect, we do not need space based resources to do the top level work. There have been some creative solutions to doing astronomy cost-effectively. Astronomers and the spin off field of cosmology have effectively taken leadership on research of fundamental physics away from particle physicists using small and moderately sized projects, with a few exceptions.

The social and funding effect which we're seeing now in particle physics can be found in any other big field of physics. Superconductivity research is famous for it. At a certain point, it's not really worth continuing fundamental research in a given field; funding and interest drops. It's not that everything is solved, but simply that creative research is no longer encouraged by the community and funding agencies get tired of seeing the same proposal every year. Eventually, more interesting research plans are accepted; funding and interest increases again. That will happen with accelerators, but first this old mindset needs to be challenged.

That is interesting. In California most of the (good) politicians have a local office. If the choice is travel to the capital or e-mail, you're in a tough spot to actually use the government properly.

If you want to get through to your local politician, show up at their district office. If you care enough to go to their office, you'll at least get a few minutes with a staff person.

Politicians do get tons of emails, and it is functionally impossible to tell the difference between a constituent sending an individual e-mail on their own and a constituent paid to send an individual e-mail.

I've visited my representatives many times, sent individual emails and been part of organized lobbying efforts. The more you talk with your representatives, the more they will respond to and respect you. Our system is very slow and sometimes very frustrating, but it is possible to get things done. You will get personal emails back after the automated responses, but it may be months later. If they're doing their job well, they're going to figure out what stance they should take and not simply agree with you.

I am a scientist. I have a choice. When a government organization I don't like comes to me for help I can either
ensure that organization gets good advice or I can refuse to help and risk that they're going to get bad advice. If no one "good" agrees to help, we're collectively ensuring they get bad advice. This is OUR government, why would we want that?

For a moral scientist or engineer, the clear correct choice is to help the government make good decisions. "Help" may mean convincing the government NOT to go down some technological path. He's giving up a chance to help direct DoD efforts in this area toward, for example, disaster relief.

"Helping the government" in some rare cases may mean exposing abuse or corruption, it's not always warm and fuzzy. That's not the case here. He's just abdicating responsibility for his work.

They may be cutting off federal highway funding... it's a good thing the TSA is funded separately, otherwise who would randomly patrol our highways?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/02/29/the-tsa-is-coming-to-a-highway-near-you/

I think I read about this 20 years ago, during the first graphene boom, back when all it was used for was STM studies of carbon on metallic surfaces.

Well, we've come full circle on graphene then, what's next?

As much as a ship like the Enterprise is important to the Navy (and it's hard to find one which is more important to the modern Navy), what is truly amazing about modern carriers are the way the people on them work together.

If you ever have a chance to cruise on a carrier, go for it. Watching launch and recovery of planes is amazing, particularly at night. People die if someone makes a small mistake, stands in the wrong place, leaves a tool or spare nut lying around, or sets the pressure on an arresting cable just a little off. So they don't do anything wrong. Several hundred people working together flawlessly is really something to see.

Criticizing the water use of grain crops is sure to get a rise out of midwesterners.

I would never imagine that someone would claim that a professor of water management in the Netherlands needed to learn more about water in earth science. That is highly entertaining, thank you.

If you're good at something, enough that someone will pay you to do it, then go for it.

We need some people with the "hacker" mentality, they're like the blueberries in a blueberry muffin. Sure, you can make a muffin without them, but it's just not going to be as good.