Archived Newsletters

January 1993 Newsletter

Volume 22, Number 1 January 1993

In This Issue

Letters

Physics and Cancer: Leonard Finegold; Ellen Yorke
Global Warming: James Felten; Allan Walstad; David Hafemeister
Space Station as Space Launcher: Louis A.P. Balazs

Articles

Symposium on the Role of the National Labs in Fostering Competitiveness:

Teaming for National Competitiveness: Don Runkle and Rich Marczewski
Los Alamos National Laboratory and Technology Transfer: Terry D. Bearce

Elections

Candidate Statements for Forum Elections. Please Vote!

Reviews

The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age : Review by Paul Craig
The Los Alamos Primer, by Robert Serber: Paul Craig

News

Engineering and Applied Science Societies Collaboration in K-12 - Join the Forum! Receive Physics and Society

Comment

The Hydrogen Energy Economy : Jerome Rothstein
The Objectivity Crisis : Congressman George E. Brown, Jr.
Editorial: Redefining Physics

Physics and Cancer

As a physicist, who happens also to be a sometime American Cancer Society Research Scholar, may I make the following comments on Dr. L. Cranberg's commentary (October 1992)?

Dr. Cranberg seems worried about cancer: Many people eventually die of something or other, so it is not surprising to see that physicists get it, too.
The biology of cancers is an extremely complex subject, far removed from the physics for pre-med students which Dr. Cranberg mentions. For readings on this fascinating field, which is intrinsic to fundamental biology, see a modern biochem or genetics text for graduate students.
The "war" on cancer was, in large part, a politically-inspired one, perhaps on a par with "wars" on illicit drugs. The reader may judge the success of such "wars". (It was rumored, with some truth, that more scientists were supported by cancer funds than died of cancer.)
In spite of Dr. Cranberg's claim, physicists have been active in diagnosis and treatment of cancers (CAT, NMR imaging, etc., etc.).
Should Dr. Cranberg really wish to get excited about preventing cancer, then we already know how to prevent a substantial number of cancers: phase out tobacco smoking (but be kind to cigarette smokers; they're a dying breed). His library should subscribe to Tobacco Control.
Should Dr. Cranberg be personally afflicted or influenced by cancers, then I'm sorry, but my remarks stand.
Dr. Cranberg should join the Division of Biological Physics of APS which is an interface between biology and physics, pure and applied.

Leonard X. Finegold

Department of Physics Drexel University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

I am a physicist in the foxhole! Each day, I descend to the basement of the hospital where I am employed to do direct battle with the enemy, cancer. So do hundreds of other physicists--many of them belonging to the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), a member organization of the AIP. In addition to the hand-to-hand combat of our daily work, many of us are actually involved in research, using our knowledge of physics and mathematics to improve treatment techniques, increase speed and accuracy of diagnosis, and model the basic biology of cancer cells and their response to radiation and other therapies. The AIP. journal "Medical Physics" publishes this research, as do at least half a dozen other journals.

Perhaps, as Larry Cranberg's comment suggests, the role of the physics foot soldiers has not received enough publicity in the wider community. But the enemy is wily and persistent. The war continues and we are always looking for new recruits!

It's good physics and a good fight.

Ellen D. Yorke, Ph.D.

Clinical Physicist George Washington University Medical Center Division of Radiation Oncology and Biophysics 901 23rd Street, NW Washington, D.C. 20037

Global Warming, Further Comments

I take the editor (October 1992, page 15) at his word and write to say that I am encouraged that serious discussions of economics, and not just political exhortations, are appearing in Physics and Society. The letter by John McGervey (October 1992), supporting the oft-proposed federal tax of roughly $1 per gallon on gasoline, is a mixture of the two. McGervey says such a tax would bring in $100 billion per year, and "Forty billion of that could cover the cost of maintaining naval forces in the Middle East --." Absent the need for gasoline, could our naval forces really be withdrawn from the Middle East? Would the Israeli lobby, for example, permit that? Why should drivers alone pay this cost of American foreign policy?

McGervey also wants to use that $100 billion to pay for "public transportation and rail travel." Should a poor but honest rural Nebraskan, commuting over many miles of prairie in an old car to hold a job, be taxed so that well-heeled Washingtonians can have a fancy subway? Raiding the gas tax to pay for mass transit and railroads is a misuse of public money, but I think it's happening a lot. In the dim past we young liberals learned that one group shouldn't be forced to subsidize another, except perhaps on the basis of need, or ability to pay. Has that changed?

Sad to say, Washington subway fares are now so high that for many trips, particularly outside rush hour, it's cheaper and faster to drive, even for one person alone, provided you're healthy enough to walk to free parking. Conversely, pay parking at the outlying stations is filled at rush hour, and feeder buses are inadequate. The economics of mass transit in some cities is iffy. Change and growth in such systems should be shaped by real marginal costs and not by subsidies. Control of people's lives by the fantastic tastes and prejudices of big-city mandarins isn't a proper use of the tax code.

Finally, McGervey makes the interesting point that the toll paid by a driver on a toll road is roughly $1 per gallon of gas used. He suggests that this indicates the real cost of the highway and shows that the gas tax is too low. Maybe so, but then why is the gas tax being raided for purposes other than road construction? Maybe, on the other hand, the tolls are set politically and are too high. (Many of us, not well off, have learned to avoid toll roads, and instead spew out pollution on stop-and-go streets.) Where are the subsidies? Who knows? Our establishment newspapers print many pages of electoral gossip but are short on economic analysis, and in fact discourage actively any challenge to liberal orthodoxy in matters such as high-occupancy-vehicle lanes on freeways and toll roads. Facing this obfuscation, the American people show good sense by rejecting a heavy gas tax. Would anyone write a competent article for Physics and Society on the economics of highways?

James E. Felten
8569 Greenbelt Road, #204 Greenbelt, Maryland 20770

David Hafemeister's discussion (October) of non-renewable resource pricing reflects little understanding of the market and an apparent unwillingness to learn the lesson of his own experience in government.

The fact that anticipated future prices affect the present value of resources makes the market far more prescient than the government, in which politicians' time horizons tend to stretch no farther than the next election. In a free market, the market value of finite resource reserves is bid up in anticipation of higher prices in the future, when the resource will become increasingly scarce. This causes prices to rise well in advance of the actual depletion of the reserves, thereby stimulating conservation, development of alternatives, and (as Hafemeister does note) the search for new reserves and exploitation of more costly, lower quality reserves. Some people may indeed reap high profits. (Hafemeister calls this "obscene," but what I find obscene are the wholesale robbery and coercion involved in economic collectivism.) Government intervention to prevent such profits disrupts the proper functioning of the market. Then, collectivists like Hafemeister can claim that the market didn't work, when in fact it is government intervention that didn't work.

The $400 billion deficit will not, as Hafemeister claims, be reduced by monstrous taxes on gasoline, for two reasons: first, because new taxes will leave people with less money to spend on other goods and services, thereby decreasing business activity and employment and reducing government revenues from other taxes; second and most important, because politicians will spend every last dollar of additional revenue, no matter how much, and still run up as big a deficit as they dare.

Allan Walstad
Associate Professor of Physics University of Pittsburgh Johnstown, Pennsylvania 15904

Hafemeister responds:

Concerning "somewhat obscene profits": Allan Walstad quotes me out of context. My letter discusses the Congressional control of oil prices after the oil embargo for three years, at a time when the OPEC oil embargo and arbitrary price hikes clearly destroyed normal market mechanisms. My letter states: "Around 1974, excess profits from oil that went from $1.50 to $12 per barrel were somewhat obscene." To first order the domestic profits were about $10/barrel x 10 M barrels/day x 365 d/y = $40 B/y. I think my use of "somewhat obscene" to describe this situation was justified. Since market force springs were broken, a temporary three year band-aide was a good idea, but as I pointed out it was a "political compromise."

Concerning gas taxes: It doesn't follow that a 50 cent/gallon tax, phased in over five years, would be used to create new programs. With a budget deficit of $300 billion, we will need both smaller government and a modest gas tax. My guess is that all three presidential candidates would agree, but that the issue is too political for them to come out for this idea. This is the kind of proposal that most politicians favor when they are out of office. Europe and Japan have much larger gas taxes and are in better financial shape than we are. Only a few large oil fields have been discovered in the past two decades, and the transition to alternate fuels (coal-based or renewable) will not be easy.

Space Station as Space Launcher

There has been considerable debate over the usefulness of a low earth orbit (LEO) space station. The civilian redirection of military sensor, guidance, homing, steering, global positioning, capacitor and electromagnetic massdriver (or "coil-gun") technology may enable such a station to become an integral part of a relatively inexpensive space-launch system.

Small high-acceleration-tolerant payloads could first be launched from Earth, e.g. by small linear mass drivers (MDs) to just barely reach points just above the atmosphere with zero velocity; launch velocities no higher than about 1.8 km/s should be sufficient to reach 140 km. Here they would be made to home in on and be "caught" at zero relative velocity by pre-accelerated catchers or buckets attached to external armatures sliding along space-station magnetic-coil MDs, and be rapidly slowed down to rest relative to the station by the MDs acting in reverse. The momentum of the station can be conserved by ejecting part of the payload at twice LEO speed relative to the station, so that it then ends up in an orbit opposite to that of the station.

Payloads which can tolerate up to 10^5g would require 65m-long catcher MDs and 260m ejector MDs, including the catcher-bucket pre-acceleration and deceleration distances. For a 16kg payload every 9 minutes an MD capacitor of 20 tons would be required with near-future capacitor technology, unless lighter superconducting or other alternative energy storage is developed. The 1 MW average power required could come from a nuclear reactor or a 120 x 120 m^2 3-ton solar array, although the latter would be exposed to the sun and provide power only half the time without mirrors or other relays. Eventually, however, the power could come from material launched by MDs from the moon and arriving just above the atmosphere with about 20 times its original launch energy, perhaps after undergoing one or more complete high-eccentricity "parking" orbits to guarantee optimal or continuous delivery. Most of it could then be slowed to LEO or zero velocity (relative to earth) by 365m-long MDs acting in reverse, thereby generating electrical power (which could also be beamed by microwave or laser to points in space or on Earth or the moon). But a portion could be speeded up instead and sent back to the moon to provide similar power for launching additional material and repeating the cycle.

Low-acceleration payloads could first be lifted by air-fuel explosions impacting "pusher plates" attached to the payloads to again just barely reach points just above the atmosphere with zero velocity. Here these plates would be impacted by explosively-expanded orbiting packets assembled at and launched in succession from the space station (or the moon). By using shock absorbers between the plates and the payloads (as in Orion-project nuclear-bomb propulsion) non-damaging acceleration of even relatively fragile payloads into LEO should be possible.

Louis A.P. Balazs

Department of Physics Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1396

Symposium on the Role of the National Labs in Fostering Competitiveness

Physics and Society presents here articles based on two of the five talks given at an invited session sponsored by the Forum on Physics and Society at the March 1992 APS meeting in Indianapolis. The session was chaired by Ruth Howes, Past Chair of the Forum.

Teaming for National Competitiveness
Don Runkle and Rich Marczewski

I'm here today to tell you why I think it's absolutely critical to the economic well-being of our nation for American industry, our federal laboratories, and our universities to team together to improve our national competitiveness.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing a very real crisis in this country. It's a turbulent crisis, but not in the classic sense. Instead of a military conflict, it's an industrial contest. Instead of arsenals or armament factories being blown up, commercial manufacturing plants are being shut down. Instead of battleships being sunk, companies are going under. Instead of a theater of operation being lost, industries are being surrendered. And instead of lives being lost, the casualties are measured in the high-wage jobs upon which we built and sustained a large and prosperous middle class.

Make no mistake about it. Manufacturing is critical to the nation's well-being. Manufacturing is the primary driver of jobs and wealth in our economy and the simple fact is that to live well, a nation must produce well.

The economic challenges we face today are partly the result of the national priorities set during the forty years it took to win the Cold War. During that time, this nation's competitors operated under a blanket of security that we provided. They took advantage of this opportunity and invested their time and resources well. If you think about it, virtually all of this was paid for by industry, either thorough corporate taxes, or taxes on personal income derived from wages paid by companies.

Automobile competitiveness
During the Cold War, it was as if we were asleep with regard to preserving our industrial strength. We didn't make a stand on consumer electronics, or steel, or machine tools. Will we make a stand on cars? Is this industry expendable? Or will we let yet another industry go and then make a stand on computers? Or wait to make the stand on commercial aircraft? Or biotechnology?

You might ask, is the domestic auto industry important? Well, it's the largest segment in our manufacturing sector, accounting for one out of every seven jobs. It uses 40% of the machine tools, 20% of the semiconductors, 20% of the aluminum, 20% of the glass, 12% of the steel, and represents 10% of all consumer spending. So yes, it's important.

Second, you might ask if it's in trouble. Well, the Big Three lost over $7.5 billion in 1991 alone. A US parts supplier goes out of business in this country every 16 hours. And nearly 2/3 of our $66 billion merchandise trade deficit is due to the auto industry. So yes, it's in trouble.

Will we make a stand on cars? Is this industry expendable? Or will we let yet another industry go and then make a stand on computers?

Some say that it doesn't really matter if US car companies are replaced by foreign-owned companies. According to this line of thinking, we'll still have cars to buy, and they'll probably even be built by Americans right here in America, so no big deal, right?

Wrong. If foreign companies own the American car business, the higher-wage production jobs, the design, engineering and research jobs and high-technology materials jobs will end up overseas while Americans are allocated the low-wage jobs.

If you doubt this, just take a look at the tier structure in the Japanese auto industry in Japan and see where the high wage jobs are. They are at Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. Japanese automakers and their suppliers in the US economy support about 150,000 jobs in this country. Yet the total number of people actually involved in going from concept to customer for the volume of cars they produce here is roughly seven times that number. Where do you think those other million jobs are? Also, isn't it interesting that Japan employs twice as many people per vehicle produced in Japan as it does per vehicle produced in the US, even though the hours per car are about the same? It's clear to me that we can't afford to concede our domestic car industry to anybody.

Now that we won the Cold War, and it's behind us, we need to turn our attention to this new contest and win it as well. We have all the resources we need. We just need to reach a consensus that our top post-Cold War priority must be to reinvigorate our industrial base to assure the future economic security of our nation, for our sake and for our children's sake. Like previous national crises, we must now pull together the best minds in industry and government, this time to develop the manufacturing processes and product technologies that will allow American industry to take on all comers and win.

What if industry and government teamed together?

A year and a half ago, Don Runkle, GM Vice President of Advanced Engineering, posed a ``what if'' question to the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit. What if the auto industry could team together with our government labs and tackle the key high-risk technological challenges confronting us, challenges that have a broad societal impact? What he envisioned was a grand challenge along the lines of John F. Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon, a high-risk proposition requiring extraordinary cooperation between government and industry. Neither could have done it alone.

There were a lot of skeptics who thought Kennedy's vision was an impossible dream, yet on 20 July 1969 we not only put men on the moon, but they got out and took a stroll on it! And two years later, the first vehicle to roll across the moon's surface had a GM powertrain in it. I don't know about you, but I'm still in awe of what we managed to accomplish together, and I'm damn proud that it's an American flag up there and not someone else's. This time around, however, our goal is a lot closer to home. The next ``moonshot'' Don envisioned would not be to explore outer space, but to ensure our nation's future prosperity, right down here on terra firma.

Let's look back for a moment. America's manufacturing leadership and economic growth during the first half of the 20th Century was built mainly as a result of our educational system and our Yankee ingenuity and ability to implement and improve a chain of produce and process technologies that in some cases were originated by someone else. The automobile industry is a good example. Detroit didn't invent the early automobile; the Europeans did. What the US did was invent a mass production system that shattered the old ``craftsman'' paradigm. Through mass production, the US dominated the world economically, and provided over half of the world's manufactured goods and abundant high paying jobs for Americans.

However, in the past few decades, we've lost that focus while other countries have continued to apply innovative technologies and methods that move manufacturing beyond the mass production paradigm. To reinforce the point, Dr. Lester Thurow, Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, points to perhaps the three most successful new consumer products marketed during last decade and a half: the VCR and FAX invented by Americans, and the CD player invented by the Dutch. He reminds us that the main beneficiary of the billions of dollars in sales and the hundreds of thousands of jobs these products provide is neither the US nor the Dutch, but the Japanese.

What if the auto industry could team together with our government labs and tackle the key high-risk technological challenges confronting us?

The lesson is that today, people won't beat a path to your door just because you invented a better mousetrap. They beat a path to the door of the country that makes the mousetrap. Products can be copied and patents expire. Only by refocusing our efforts on process innovation will we be able to put our products on a higher technological plane that our competitors and keep them there. That's why I think President Bush's recently announced Manufacturing Technology Initiative is important. It's a welcome boost to the development of the manufacturing technologies required to move use beyond the mass production paradigm. American industry was beaten to the punch by "lean manufacturing." The MTI can help insure our leadership in the next paradigm.

I'm also an enthusiastic supporter of the National Technology Initiative. As I emphasized earlier, I think it's essential to the economic health of America for US industry, our federal labs, government agencies, and our universities to cooperate to improve our national competitiveness. Within the auto industry, we're already working with the government and each other to solve some critical technological issues that face our industry as a whole. GM is currently a partner in nine horizontal consortia, with more in the discussion stage.

Among these, the US Advanced Battery Consortium is perhaps the best model of how to put a consortium together. In forming the USABC, industry got its act together first. GM, Ford, and Chrysler defined the objectives, needs and philosophy for the proposed consortium, and discussed other potential partners. Then asked the government to join us and support the effort. As a result, the USABC was formed in four months as opposed to the 18 months it took us to put the Automotive Composites Consortium together, and the list of partners now includes the Department of Energy, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the electric utility industry, all of us working together to develop a key enabler for expanding the viability of electric vehicles, the battery. And by the way, for the skeptics of the USABC, the first contract lent by this consortium will be to a small business.

But consortia alone are not the complete answer. This is where the federal labs come in.

Taken as a whole, the federal labs are home to some of the brightest and most talented scientists, engineers and technicians in the world; people who like to work on challenging technical problems for the benefit of society. I know. I've met a lot of them, and I have the utmost respect for their capabilities and deep admiration of their accomplishments. The federal labs are also home to some of the most advanced equipment and facilities on Earth, including many unique instruments that no single company could afford.

By teaming together with industry to improve our national competitiveness and productivity, the federal labs can help end the days when a company went head-to-head alone against an entire country. By forming partnerships with federal labs and university research centers we can tackle the really tough problems that affect all Americans, problems that are too risky and expensive for any one company, or even an industry, to take on. Cooperation between industry and government can put American products on a higher plane.

To win at manufacturing in the 21st Century, US industry will have to be the best. The best at R&D, design and engineering, production, distribution, and recycling. To be the best, industry will need the aggressive help of the federal labs. Together we can set new standards of excellence and expand the envelope of technology.

The Warren Conference
This past January, GM hosted a three-day conference at our technical center in Warren, Michigan entitled ``Teaming for National Competitiveness.'' I was told that it was one of the largest gatherings ever of national lab personnel, and if you've ever been to Warren in January you know these people weren't there on vacation. We sponsored the conference to bring together the best minds in industry, government, and our universities to explore how we could develop the manufacturing processes and technologies that will give US manufacturers a world-wide competitive edge. The conference was remarkable.

The labs had been largely unaware of the impact of market considerations on the development of commercial products and processes. ``Teaming'' helped make them more aware of the challenges confronting not only our industry, but practically every other US manufacturing industry. At the same time, we gained a much better appreciation for the labs' capabilities and priorities. It was fascinating to see the learning that took place on both sides.

We kicked off the conference by outlining the research hurdles facing American automakers in the context of six ``buckets'': energy, environment, safety, agile manufacturing, manufacturing validation, and ultrareliability -- categories that are vital for practically any manufacturing industry. The first three are product-related, and the latter three are generally process-related. American industry has to excel in all six if it's going to thrive in a global marketplace. About twenty of our top engineers and scientists then outlined the motivations and research hurdles in each area.

The first bucket, energy, encompasses a range of issues from energy-efficient manufacturing to fuel-efficient transportation and alternate fuels. The US auto industry is committed to making efficient cars and trucks. And to prove the point, it already has the most efficient vehicles in the world. GM alone has increased the fuel economy of its products by more than 130% since the mid-70s and now leads in 8 of 18 EPA vehicle classifications -- better than any manufacturer in the world, and better than Honda, Toyota and Nissan combined. But we can do better. Achieving higher efficiencies at affordable prices in this decade will require teamwork between industry, government, and our university R&D system to work in areas like lean-burn enabling technologies, light-weight materials, fuel cells, alternate fuels research, batteries, and turbines.

The environmental ``bucket'' serves as a focus on clean processes, products and practices. We at GM pioneered the catalytic emission control system that everyone in the world uses, even the Japanese. We led in getting the lead out of fuels and in using electronic engine management. We have the cleanest-running engines in the world, but we can always do better. Here we should be working together in areas like combustion modeling, emission reduction, CFC elimination, environmentally conscious manufacturing, recycling, waste stream separation, and environmental clean-up.

Safety is a big issue in any industry. The American auto industry is firmly committed to making safe cars and trucks. At GM we've developed energy-absorbing steering columns and instrument panels, safety belts, air bags, side-guard door beams, plastic laminated windows, and low-cost anti-lock brake systems. But we can't let up until there are no injuries. Here again, the federal labs and our universities can help us develop affordable technology that will permit American products to avoid accidents and prevent injuries; things like intelligent control for vehicles, accident sensors, and computer modeling to study safety and crash-worthiness, new materials characteristics, and trauma and toxicity on tissue.

Agile manufacturing is the next manufacturing paradigm. There are no facts about the future, and so this bucket covers those technologies essential to a flexible manufacturing process capable of producing a lot size of one. As a nation, we need to get off the mass-production paradigm because it doesn't produce wide varieties of products well. Flexibility is the key to competitiveness -- bringing a quality product forward quicker and for less cost. Specifically, we need to develop the knowledge, the rules and the enablers that allow our industrial base to be agile. There are about a dozen or so initiatives that make lean manufacturing work. The question is: what are the comparable initiatives for the agile enterprise? I think we need to being right now to work together on intelligent manufacturing; rapid prototyping, process modeling, simulation, control, and fixtureless manufacturing, for starters.

The US auto industry is committed to making efficient cars and trucks. -- it already has the most efficient vehicles in the world.

The fifth bucket involves the technologies necessary to validate manufacturing processes before going into production. In our business we have proving grounds to validate products before we put them into the hands of customers. However, we have no such thing to validate our processes. We go ahead and build a plant, then turn it on and see if it works, all in real time, with real money. We need the federal labs and our universities to help American industry develop the knowledge required to validate and optimize our plants and processes before we build them. This will involve things like plant floor simulations run on supercomputers, the development of decision analysis tools for validation systems at the machine level, and intelligent database support for machine and machine tool suppliers.

The final category is ultrareliability. This again is not just an auto industry issue. American industry has to utilize manufacturing processes that are capable of building competitive, reliable products. The national labs have a remarkable track record of success when it comes to ultrareliability. Given the kinds of weapons and nuclear devices they work with, their expertise in this category is a great personal comfort to me, I assure you. I can't quite remember the last time an atom bomb went off accidentally. Here we can work together on things like high temperature electronics packaging, advanced lubricants and coatings, ultra-precision manufacturing, intelligent laser weld processing, on-line nondestructive evaluation, inspection and testing, new materials characterization, and advanced ion implantation.

As you can see, these buckets apply to most industries. Every company wants efficient products, environmentally sensitive products, and safe products. The same companies want to manufacture these products in an agile environment, from validated plants that run reliably, producing products which have been validated prior to going to market.

Our conference also provided a forum for industry to discover the range of research capabilities in the federal labs. Over 2000 GM, Hughes and EDS employees, including our senior GM management, visited lab displays highlighting their areas of expertise. From GM's point of view, our technical people saw real hardware that could have real applicability to the auto industry. This was not a bunch of ivory tower scientists, but live engineers working on problems that use the same equations and formulas that we do. I think that both sides recognized terrific opportunities, and I also found a great respect on US industry, eager to weave their technological expertise into non-defense applications that will make a difference.

In my opinion, it would be a tragic mistake for our nation not to utilize the greatest force of scientific and technical talent ever assembled, people who provided our military with its dazzling edge, people who can help promote our economic security now that the Cold War is over. Our country used this arsenal to win the Cold War. Let's now use it to win the next contest: industrial competitiveness.

Accomplishments in Technological Transfer
What have we accomplished through our tech-transfer efforts so far, including the ``Teaming'' conference and the year-and-a-half of visits between GM engineers and federal lab scientists which led up to it? We how have nine horizontal consortia in place, with more in the discussion stage. We have ATP funding for R&D partnerships on two potentially very important projects that could benefit not only GM, but a broad base of other US manufacturers as well. We have half-a-dozen cooperative research and development agreements, with hundreds more in the discussion state. And we have established critical working relationships with many of the nation's top labs. We have pointed out the need and the opportunity for the federal labs to join with industry in ``moonshots'' to put American products and process on a higher plane. And we have demonstrated our commitment to the teaming process.

The good news is that we have formed some successful partnerships within the federal lab system, partnerships that will help make us more competitive and productive, partnerships that will help us create more higher-wage US jobs. And we're going to continue exploring opportunities for this kind of partnering.

The bad news is that the partnering process doesn't work as smoothly as it should, and that improving it will involve a reassessment of our national R&D priorities. For example, in the US about 80% of all R&D is focused on products and only 20% on processes, while other countries have placed a much greater emphasis on the science of manufacturing. As a result, they have become masters of reverse engineering and potent global competitors. We need to place more emphasis on process R&D.

Recommendations
Our national spending priorities must also change now that the Cold War is over. The 1991 federal R&D budget of $71 billion devoted little to manufacturing. 54% was allocated to national defense, 12% for space, and less than 1% for Department of Commerce manufacturing programs. The 1992 budget is only slightly better. We should devote at least 10-20% of federal R&D to manufacturing if we expect US industry to be a player in the 21st Century. Likewise, industry must dramatically increase its process of R&D spending.

If we're serious about enabling US industry to compete in a global marketplace, our government should consider the following suggestions:

Make the R&D tax credit permanent.
Set aside more funds for tech transfer activities at the federal labs.
Require federal labs to work with US industry as a condition of funding.
Provide greater flexibility, funding, and autonomy to the federal labs to deal with specific industrial partners on joint projects.
Simplify, speed up, and standardize the cooperative research and development agreement process for all labs.
Develop new cooperative R&D mechanisms for ``megaprojects.''
Review lab information classification procedures to promote easier access by US industry where possible.
Agencies such as DOE, EPA and DOT should actively facilitate national ``moonshots'' in areas such as energy efficiency, vehicle safety, and the environment. We're in it together, so let's work on it together.
Support the Department of Commerce Strategic Partners Initiative encouraging the formation of domestic vertical consortia.
Bolster financial support for university R&D to free our universities from dependence on foreign funding.

And finally, we should consider revisiting our anti-trust laws. They were written in a different time and are probably now out of date. We need to make it easier for competitors to work together on cooperative R&D, as is done by our offshore competitors. It's about time we listened to people like Dr. Edward Deming, who advises us that: "When the focus of cooperation between competitors is to provide better service to customers, everyone comes out ahead," and that "competition based on the premise of a zero-sum game will destroy a healthy system."

The global challenges our industries face are huge, bigger than any one organization, and even any one institution. It's clear that a ``business as usual'' approach will continue producing losing results. Is it really in the best US interests to require each auto manufacturer to allocate scarce R&D dollars and talent to scramble independently to address some of the common hurdles facing us, instead of working together cooperatively to surmount them? I don't think so. What's important here is answering the question: What share of the global automotive market does the US want to get?

Don Runkel is General Motors Vice President for Advanced Engineering; Rich Marczewski is GM Manager. Rich Marczewski presented this paper to the APS session.

Symposium on the Role of the National Labs in Fostering Competitiveness

Los Alamos National Laboratory and Technology Transfer
Terry D. Bearce

From its beginnings in 1943, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has traditionally used science and technology to find creative but practical solutions to complex problems. LANL is operated by the University of California (UC), under contract to the Department of Energy (DOE). We are a government owned, contractor operated facility, and a federally-funded research and development center. At LANL, our mission is to apply science and engineering capabilities to problems of national security. Recently our mission has been broadened to include technology transfer to ensure that our scientific and technical solutions are available to the marketplace.

We are, in staff and technical capabilities, one of the worldUs largest multidisciplinary, multiprogram labs. We conduct extensive research in energy, nuclear safeguards and security, biomedical science, conventional defense technologies, space science, computational science, environmental protection and cleanup, materials science, and other basic sciences. Since 1980, by a series of laws and executive orders, the resources of the federal labs have been made increasingly available to private industry via technology transfer efforts. LANL uses a variety of technology-transfer methods including lab visits, cooperative research, licensing, contract research, user facility access, personnel exchanges, consulting, publications, and workshops, seminars and briefings. We also use unique approaches, such as our negotiating teams, to ensure that transfer of our developed technology takes place in an open and competitive manner. I will discuss the overall process and some of the mechanisms that we use at LANL to transfer lab-developed technology.

Recently our mission has been broadened to include technology transfer to ensure that our scientific and technical solutions are available to the marketplace.

Authority. In order to ensure the full use of the lab's R&D results and capabilities, technology transfer at Los Alamos is a mission area covered under the prime contract between UC and DOE. Technology transfer as a lab mission is an implementation of the National Competitiveness Technology Transfer Act of 1989, and is consistent with the policy, principles, and purposes of the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980, and of Chapter 38 of the Patent Laws, Section 152 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, Section 9 of the Federal Non-Nuclear Act of 1974, and Executive Order 12591 of 10 April 1987. LANL conducts technology-transfer activities with the clear intent of providing benefit from federal research to US industrial competitiveness.

At LANL, technology transfer is focused in the Industrial Partnership Center (IPC). The IPC is currently under development and will have satellite centers to concentrate on specific multidisciplinary research and development efforts that cross the lab's organizational boundaries. The IPC will incorporate most of our current outreach activities and will be the focal point for LANL technology outreach and initial interaction with the commercial sector. The Industrial Agreements Office (IAO) portion of the IPC will conduct the business negotiations of technology transfer agreements and provide technology transfer guidance, training, and education to potential industrial or business partners as well as to lab personnel regarding the business aspects of technology transfer. The IAO group also provides the overall technology transfer business and administrative support, and coordinates the legal, financial and contracting functions attendant to technology transfer at LANL.

Fairness of opportunity. LANL procedures and measures ensure widespread availability of technologies suited for transfer. Technology transfer activities are undertaken in an open, fair and competitive manner.

The Lanl Technology-transfer Process
The process includes the following:

Identification of technology for transfer. Normally, the process starts with identification of a technology that is ready for transfer or that is determined to have potential commercial use. This identification may come from the developers, line management, or program management. Business and industry may also identify LANL developed technology that has commercial or industrial potential. Programmatic initiatives driven by DOE, or other federal research activities at LANL, and internally driven research to support our technology base are additional ways to identify technologies for transfer. These same initiatives can be used to develop new technology development that may have transfer potential.

LANL negotiating team. When a technology is identified as ready for transfer, a negotiating team is established. This team is composed of an individual from the IAO, the developers or inventors, representatives from line management, a representative from LANL's legal office and, representation from the lab's contracting and financial offices. Primarily, this negotiating team selects the company or companies that the technology is to be transferred to and advises the legal and business negotiators on technical issues during the negotiation process. Other federal agency funding sources can supply input to the negotiating team through LANL and the developers/inventors.

Public announcement. A public announcement of the technology available for transfer is made in the Commerce Business Daily (CBD), soliciting interest from the commercial sector. The CBD announcement may be augmented by direct mailing to industries, businesses, and companies engaged in the technology area. Potential CBD responders are given a reasonable time to respond. Other public announcement methods include, for example, the lab's participation in the R&D 100 Award system, trade publication articles, and news media articles.

Technical exchange. Responders to the public announcements are requested to sign a proprietary information agreement, which may be unilateral (proprietary information provided by one side only) or bilateral. LANL can protect company proprietary information for up to five years. Following this, we provide prospective industrial partners additional technical details on the technology available for transfer so that they can make an informed business decision as to whether or not they want to continue the technology transfer process. This technical exchange may take several forms, including seminars, conferences, publications, telephone discussions, technical staff member discussions, etc.

Technology development plans. Once the technical exchange is well under way or near completion, a technology development plan is developed. Under licensing activity, LANL requires that the company/business submit a plan, variously called a marketing plan, a business plan, or a development plan. LANL prepares a solicitation-type package that includes evaluation criteria and type of agreement anticipated, along with other terms and conditions expected to be a part of the final negotiated document. This information is based on previous discussions and the public announcement. The interested parties are given an opportunity to respond with their plan which details how the company plans to use, develop, market, and support the technology. This is a fairly extensive document, and is reviewed and evaluated by the negotiating team to identify the company that we will initiate formal negotiations with for the technology transfer. Whatever form the technology development plan takes, it identifies the technical work to be accomplished, and can identify the business aspects in significant detail.

Technology transfer mechanisms. Once the company is identified by the negotiating team, technology transfer mechanism discussions and negotiations begin.

Some Mechanisms for Technology Transfer
Technology transfer can be accomplished by the following mechanisms:

Technical visits. In a general sense, technical visits, publications, and workshops/seminars/briefings are informal transfer mechanisms, although they may be part of a formal agreement.

Personnel exchanges are conducted as part of a formal agreement such as cooperative research agreements and may be unilateral or bilateral.

User facilities are designated by DOE and are established at LANL to ensure widespread participation by the scientific community in specific areas of research. User facilities are also accessible to commercial and industrial users through agreement with DOE. The contractual agreement in this case is between DOE and the company.

Contract research is based on an agreement with the company and DOE for the company to completely fund the technology development. This type of research must meet several criteria, including non-competition with industry and non-interference with other research activity at LANL. This contractual agreement is also between DOE and the company.

Consulting provides access to key lab technical individuals, and can be part of a licensing or cooperative research activity. Consulting agreements are a LANL line management approval function.

Licensing can occur as the result of technology developments from other technology transfer mechanisms or can occur based on a LANL developed technology which is mature enough to have commercial viability without further lab development activity. The full range of licensing activity is undertaken at LANL and is a negotiated process conducted by the IAO, with support from the negotiation team. The actual licensing agreement is a contractual agreement between the University of California and the involved company.

Cooperative research is accomplished under a negotiated process that includes initial DOE approval of the work to be conducted, a negotiated contractual agreement between LANL and the commercial entity; and overall approval by DOE.

Technology transfer issues, such as conflict of interest, US preference, and small business consideration, are specifically addressed by detailed University of California, DOE, and LANL policies and procedures, and are covered in the contract between the University of California and DOE. National Security issues are specifically covered under appropriate security regulations.

LANL conducts technology transfer activities with the clear intent of providing benefit from federal research to US industrial competitiveness. In the interest of enhancing US industrial competitiveness, LANL, in its licensing and assignments of intellectual property, gives preference to domestic business and industry so as to enhance US economic and technological benefits.

The author is with the Industrial Agreements Office at LANL

Forum Elections

We print, here, the backgrounds and statements of the candidates for this year's Forum elections. Ballots will be mailed to Forum members.

Benoit F. Morel, Vice-Chair
Professor of Physics and Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University. Belongs to the International Peace and Security Program at Carnegie Mellon. PhD in theoretical physics, University of Geneva, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and at Caltech, Science fellow at Stanford. Current research is on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and military modernization in the context of budget cuts.

Statement: The Forum is unique in that it provides the physics community with an arena to debate policy issues freely among scientists. It has proven its usefulness in the context of international security and arms control, and more recently in global warming and climate change. Still the Forum could and should have a more prominent place and impact. Global warming, for example is an area where scientific facts are scarce, and their interpretation controversial within the scientific community. The Forum could plan an important role as a meeting point between scientists anxious to discuss the policy implications of the uncertainties of the evidences, away from the political scene. In my view one of the Forum's first priorities should be to broaden its scope and occupy a larger place in the scientific community.

An important function of the Forum is to interest the scientific community in policy questions. It has consistently tried to inspire a more active attitude from scientists. To a large extent it has been successful, but still there is room for improvement. I think the priority of the Forum should be to interest the widest possible community of scientists (not necessarily physicists only) to participate and debate.

A way to achieve that is for the Forum to strengthen its role as a catalyst by more actively initiating studies and seeking the participation of a wider range of scientists. The idea is not to replicate what the National Academy of Science is trying to accomplish. Instead of being an opportunity for acknowledged luminaries to enlighten mankind on the deep problems of the world, the Forum's studies could give the opportunity for diverse informed points of view to confront one another on difficult and controversial problems like the policy implications of the uncertainties of global warming.

Alvin M. Saperstein, Vice-Chair
Professor of Physics, member and former Chair of Executive Board of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, initiated and directed co-major program in Environmental Studies, reviewed and ran a university research participation program for inner-city and suburban high school students, all at Wayne State University. Research in theoretical nuclear physics led to election as fellow of APS and AAAS. Visiting Professor at University College (London), Open University (UK), SIPRI (Stockholm), and Fulbright Fellowship at PRIO (Oslo). Long term Forum member, previously served on its executive committee, and currently initiating a Forum-sponsored study on job and career prospects for physicists. Current interests: chaos theory and its applications to modeling the international security system; interrelations between science, technology and public policy as manifested in arms control and energy/environment issues; revamping and rejuvenating the teaching of elementary physics, its applications and implications to science and non-science students.

Statement: The Forum has long been successful at catalyzing and sustaining physicists' interests in the scientific/technological basis of weapons systems and international arms races. It has helped some physicists to create careers out of studies in these areas while others have been enabled to make useful contributions to society while continuing in their more traditional scientific careers. The end of the Cold War does not eliminate the need for our continued interest in such international security studies, but strongly suggests that we also pursue studies in its end effects, such as the "reconversion" of technical industry to civil purposes and the associated need for new productive jobs and career paths for young and reconverting physicists. Working together, older and younger members of our profession should be developing the qualitative and quantitative basis upon which useful advice about physics careers and the roles of physicists in society can be grounded.

The Forum should also be exploring physics studies and other activities useful in heading off possible drifts toward future conflicts. For example, energy and environmental problems are major areas usefully served by physicists' methods of thinking and measuring. Our mandate as the link between physicists and society implies that we should be working with other groups of physicists to stimulate and carry out improvements in the teaching of introductory science. Too many well-motivated and well-prepared students are being turned off from potential science/technical careers because of existing introductory courses, courses which are also failing to prepare the general student for his/her role as a citizen in our increasingly competitive, technological world.

There are many "shoulds" appropriate for the Forum, and no one year or set of Forum officers can hope to see significant progress, or even involvement, in all of them. Also, I don't believe the officers should set priorities based upon individually-held pre-conceived abstract principles. Progress and accomplishment will stem from the focused effort and interests of the Forum membership. As a Forum officer, I would strive to keep all of the "shoulds" before the eyes of its membership, catalyze and encourage the development of interests, and support those membership efforts which seem likely to result in useful activities or products.

Norman Chonacky, Executive Committee
Research Associate, University of Puget Sound. Board of Directors, Explore-Maine, an organization for public science education; founder of and consultant for Science Advent, an organization for bringing science and technology innovations to business and education; Chair of AAPT Committee on Computers in Physics Education. Recent activities include: research in applied optics, atmospheric physics, and medical physics; research and development in telecomputing for physics professional development, in collaborative learning techniques, and in microcomputer-based laboratory instrumentation for curricular and public science education; direction of high school student participation in research on instrumentation, materials, and techniques for demonstrating radiative global warming phenomena via interactive exhibits for the general public.

Statement: The Forum has provided opportunities at working together for academic, laboratory, and organizational physics to develop their own sensibilities about the societal aspects of science while creating important and useful scientific information about key issues in the public interest. I refer to recent, excellent studies that the Forum has sponsored and published. The Forum has also provided arenas for physicists to discuss and debate such issues at scientific meetings and conferences. I refer to the recent excellent Global Warming Conference and various sponsored sessions at APS/AAPT meetings. But in addition to continuing these worthwhile activities, the Forum is capable of doing more. In particular, I will pro-actively seek ideas for new activities from members, identify members whose qualifications would be useful for new activities that the board approves, and extend the scope of such activities into interdisciplinary areas by recruiting non-physicists to participate. I am also anxious to see how the Forum can use telecomputing to create electronic forums for enlarging and quickening the discussion of societal aspects of science, as a supplement to our current, excellent newsletter.

Michael V. Hynes, Executive Committee
Program Manager, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS in Management from MIT in 1991, Sloan Fellow at MIT, Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory during 1980-1983, Weizmann Fellow at MIT during 1978-1980, PhD in physics from MIT in 1978. Author of numerous publications in nuclear physics and currently working on strategic planning issues at Los Alamos involved with the reconfiguration of the nuclear weapons complex.

Statement: The Forum has a long tradition of contributions to the national effort towards nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. With the recent successes in international nuclear disarmament and the fall of the Soviet Union the long-sought advent of a comprehensive test ban or a vastly expanded limited test ban could be a reality before the end of the decade. Already the existing legislation has scheduled a halt to testing by 1997. The Nonproliferation Treaty is due for renewal in 1995 and an expanded debate on the role of the nuclear deterrent in US strategy and more generally on the national and international role of the US nuclear expertise can be expected.

With the departure of the threat of massive nuclear destruction a renewed concern over the rise of nuclear capabilities in other nations has come to the fore. What will the nations of the Former Soviet Union do with their nuclear capability and expertise? What are we to do with our own? All of these issues and the manifold that surrounds them need an active public debate to which the Forum can contribute through its traditional role as an unbiased arbiter of objective technical analysis.

As a member of the executive committee I would work toward re-enunciating the Forum's leadership role in the public debate on nonproliferation and toward establishing the Forum as a leader in the debate on the future of the US Nuclear Weapons Complex.

Tina Kaarsberg, Executive Committee
Member, APS Panel on Public Affairs starting 1993. APS Congressional Science Fellow in the Office of Senator Pete Domenici in 1992. APS Liaison Physicist in the Office of Public Affairs, 1990-1991. Public Policy interests: science funding priorities, interdisciplinary research such as materials/manufacturing and global climate change, defense conversion, technology transfer, international research and technology cooperation and environmental technologies. Research physicist, University of California at Los Angeles, 1988-1990. Research in experimental high energy particle physics. PhD from SUNY at Stony Brook, 1988. Since coming to Washington in Fall of 1990, she has written, spoken, and organized events around the role of physicists and their research. For example, she and Robert Park co-authored "Scientists Must Face the Unpleasant Task of Setting Priorities," in the February 1991 Chronicle of Higher Education. As a Congressional Fellow she drafted a bill to involve the DOE laboratories in adapting environmental technologies for developing and transitional countries consistent with the US commitments at the June UN Conference on Environment and Development.

Statement: I joined the Forum because I believe physicists can contribute to solving many societal problems ranging from economic competitiveness to global environmental degradation. But such problems are sufficiently complex that physicists alone cannot solve them. The Forum, however, tended to focus on those societal problems, such as arms control, for which physicists are uniquely qualified. I would like to expand the Forum's scope. I believe this expansion is also necessary as the importance of "national security," in which physicists were preeminent, shrinks. Policy makers are asking all researchers, even those doing basic research, to justify their funding. They want science to help increase exports, to protect our environment and to cure cancer and AIDS and do all of this cost-effectively. Where do physicists fit in? We in the Forum need to talk more to each other and to scientists in other disciplines to contribute to this discussion. I have worked closely with the APS Public Policy Committees, with the APS Washington Office, and with other scientific societies, and this experience would aid me in better coordinating Forum activities with other APS and other scientific society activities. We need a timely "Forum" to democratically discuss urgent issues. I would like to survey the membership and try new formats at Society meetings--such as the "Town Hall" meetings now seen in the election campaigns. I strongly support current Forum efforts to set up an electronic bulletin board for Forum members. The result of such efforts would be that the Forum will provide better input to traditional scientific advisory committees and the policy community in Washington and worldwide.

Robert Lempert, Executive Committee
Staff scientist, RAND, Santa Monica, California. PhD from Harvard in 1986. Current research includes examining long-term implications of near-term policy responses to climate change; assessing the role of national labs in developing new energy technologies for developing countries; and simulation gaming of transitions to sustainable waste management. Member of RAND's Critical Technologies Institute, providing analytic support on technology policy to the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy. Previous work on smart conventional weapons technology, stealth technology and cost-effectiveness of strategic defenses. Term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Statement: Physicists have a proud tradition of contributing to the debate over societal problems involving science and technology. But this tradition has centered on nuclear weapons and the Cold War. Our challenge is to re-invent the way we think about physics and society.

The Forum can play an important role in facilitating this change. I would stress three themes. First, the Forum needs to continue expanding its range of issues. Recent studies and workshops on smart conventional weapons, climate change, energy, and education are a good start. The revolution in telecommunications and the increasing importance of innovation for maintaining high wage jobs have also become central issues in today's world. The Forum should not avoid examining basic issues affecting physicists, such as the level and purpose of federal funding and the relation between university and industry research.

Second, in addressing these issues the Forum needs to make its discussions more useful to the policy community by focusing on questions of process, in addition to questions of fact. For instance, the current uncertainties about climate change are huge. Policy-makers need answers to difficult questions such as: how is our knowledge likely to increase in a decade? How badly might we by surprised by impacts which are much worse than we currently imagine? Institutional issues are also important. For example, it is increasingly clear that scientists should play a more central role in shaping US foreign policy so that it better deals with issues such as competitiveness, environmental protection, the telecommunications revolution, and defense. How can this best be done? These questions are more subjective than questions of fact, but the input of physicists is vital if they are to be answered well. To enrich our thinking, the Forum should expand its contacts outside the physics community. We should sponsor articles and speakers from other academic disciplines, from the policy research community, and from policy-makers themselves.

Third, the Forum needs to raise the visibility of its activities within the APS and in the outside community. Several promising activities are already underway. Additionally, we might develop a database of members' areas of expertise in order to have a quick response capability for fast-breaking issues. We might also examine physics and society issues facing state or local governments. Compared to the federal government, these bodies have little good scientific information and would be particularly grateful for some help.

The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age

Michael B. Stoff, Jonathan F. Fanton, and R. Hal Williams, editors. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1991.

As superpower tensions decrease, the era of nuclear confrontation is ending. Nuclear weapons continue to abound, though, and it is impossible to imagine a world without them. The early days of the atomic era are vitally relevant history. The Manhattan Project gives us in one place many of the critical documents that bring this history to life.

Here is a photocopy of Einstein's famous letter to President Roosevelt and some of the correspondence that led to the Manhattan Project. In a 1943 telegram from FDR to "Former Naval Person" (FDR's name for Winston Churchill), he asks Churchill to get Britain involved with the "Tube Alloy" project. On 26 October 1943 FDR reports that he has personally intervened to stop an effort at unionizing the RadLab at UC.

The debates on targeting are powerful. On 12 April 1945 FDR died. Harry Truman soon learned of the Manhattan Project. We can read minutes of targeting meetings and see the kinds of considerations that entered the discussions. The Franck Report (11 June 1945) recommends against using the bomb against people and shows clear awareness of the importance of nuclear weapons for long-range national policy. These recommendations from scientists stand in stark contrast with those of political and military figures, who were conclusively influenced by casualty data from the war in the Pacific and from the Normandy invasion.

It is fascinating to read these formerly classified documents and to try to imagine being there, as mortals struggled with superhuman issues. It is humanizing to find typos in a memo signed by FDR. Does this sort of thing still happen in our world of spell-checkers? [Editor's note: Yes!] The awkwardness of language somehow helps to capture the mood when Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote a memorandum to President Truman on 11 September 1945: "I think it [the bomb] really caps the climax of the race between man's growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control--his moral power."

The Manhattan Project is a superb complement to Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986). The Manhattan Project gives us the documents themselves. They add a lot!

Paul Craig

Department of Applied Science University of California Davis, CA 95616

The Los Alamos Primer

Robert Serber, University of California Press, 1992, 98 pagesRobert Serber, University of California Press, 1992, 98 pages

"The Los Alamos Primer and the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of early 1940 [reprinted in this volume] carry a greater freight of historic import than perhaps any document in the history of technology." So writes Richard Rhodes in his introduction to this definitive, extensively annotated reprint of the five bomb-physics lectures given in April 1943 by Robert Serber for new arrivals at Los Alamos.

The Primer opens bluntly: "The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast neutron chain in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission." The "Primer" has long been an underground classic. Though declassified in 1965, it has not been widely available. This edition is an essential part of the library of anyone interested in Manhattan Project history. It is far more than a reprint. The original was typed; the new edition is typeset, with extensive comments by Serber interspersed.

Oppenheimer made it clear at the outset that within the closed Los Alamos community communications would be open. Serber's goal was to get the new arrivals up to speed fast. With time at a premium, the lectures had to be brief. Edward Condon took notes, which were discussed with Serber and made rapidly available to the community. Serber's "back of the envelope" calculations remain invaluable for teaching bomb and bomb effect physics. What better way to explain why Fat Man and Little Boy looked so different than with the original lectures on gun-type and implosion-type critical mass assembly.

Some of Serber's comments, such as his explanation of exponential notation, are educational and designed to help the naive reader. Others are comparisons of Primer numbers with current values. An example is the number of neutrons produced per fission andthe fission cross sections for U-235 and Pu-239. Both were way off, but compensating errors caused the quantities of interest, which involved product terms, to be quite accurate. Some of the notation is unique. An equation on the first page reads:

"1 kg of 25 = 20,000 tons of TNT"Serber explains that U-235 was known as "25," U-238 was "28," and Pu-239 was "49." The 4 comes from the atomic number 94 and the 9 from 239. The word "plutonium" was unknown at LosAlamos in those days.

The primer uses the verb form "to fish." Serber explains that "'to fish' didn't stick. Today we say 'to fission,' but we kept -- the pronunciation: it's 'fishin'', not 'fizj-un.'" [He doesn't explain why nuclear engineers so often say"nuc-ular"].

Serber's comments include lots of anecdotes about life in those glory days, including new ones about the many personalities who so influenced physics from then to now.

The Frisch-Peierls memorandum was the document that showed the British that a fission bomb might work. Soon after it reached Henry Tizard in March 1940, the British government told Franklin Roosevelt of the importance of the concept, which "catalyzed the decision" of FDR to fund the Manhattan Project.

"The Los Alamos Primer" is under 100 pages and a more exciting read than Sherlock Holmes!

Paul CraigDepartment of Applied Science University of California Davis, CA 95616

Meeting announcement: Engineering and Applied Science Societies Collaboration in K-12

The third meeting of Engineering and Applied Science societies committee members and activists in K-12 affairs will take place in Washington, DC on 15-17 January 1993 at the 8th Annual NASTA meeting. Sessions will cover:

learning from current K-12 activities of other societies;
presentations on outstanding successes in preparing teaching materials, courses, and curricula; and
reports from ECSEL (Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership) on:
engineering and applied science courses for the non-scientist engineer population
role of STS in engineering education

The meeting is a must for all academic and industrial engineers and scientists entering the area of K-12 teaching--to add information to their enthusiasm. The Annual STS conference brings together the most experienced reformers of both K-12 and college level education; introducing S/T to the non-professional community. For information and submission of abstracts, write or call NASTA, 133 Willard Building, University Park, PA 168-2, phone 814-865-9951; fax 814-865-3047.

Join the Forum! Receive Physics and Society!

Physics and Society, the quarterly of the Forum on Physics and Society, a division of the American Physical Society, is distributed free to Forum members and libraries. Nonmembers may receive it by writing to the editor; voluntary contributions of $10 per year are most welcome, payable to the APS/Forum. We hope that libraries will archive Physics and Society . Forum members should request that their libraries do this!

APS members can join the Forum and receive Physics and Society by mailing the following information to the editor (see page 2 for address)!

The Hydrogen Energy Economy

In the months since suggesting the Forum study on the hydrogen energy economy (October 1992), I have begun a more detailed study myself. This is essentially a progress report. The field has grown to where a six-month part-time study by a single individual is not enough to cover it adequately, though some preliminary conclusions appear reasonably firm.

Briefly, there is essentially universal agreement that hydrogen is an environmentally benign, versatile, renewable, transportable and storable fuel, probably unique and indispensable for the vast energy storage needed to permit solar, wind, and other renewables to contribute significantly to the world energy economy and ultimately to break our dependence on fossil fuels. There is widespread agreement that transition to the hydrogen economy is inevitable, but a large range in estimated times for the transition to come about. The optimistic time scale is decades, pessimists (realists?) implicitly estimate large fractions of a century or more. My own feeling is that decades could suffice if the hydrogen economy becomes a national priority. Industry might swing it alone in a few extra decades. The transition would be costly, and I believe this is the major hurdle. Other impediments, technical and scientific, should be surmountable with determined techno-scientific effort. This would probably be expensive and protracted, but small in cost compared with that of constructing the needed infrastructure.

There is widespread agreement that transition to the hydrogen economy is inevitable, but a large range in estimated times for the transition

Thousands of papers have been published by research workers the world over, many in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, others in standard journals or journals devoted to solar, or other alternative energy sources, in conference proceedings, specialized monographs and various texts. The range, quality and diversity are enormous. Physics, engineering, economics, photobiology, photoelectrochemistry, industry and government programs are some of the major headings and each splits into many sub-headings. Activity is international, extensive, diversified, often sophisticated and ingenious, sometimes naive and repetitious (like R&D in general!), generally laboratory-scale or theoretical and rarely coming near, even in theory, to realistic pilot-plant scale. I do not believe cost alone should be blamed for the limited practical progress to date. To it should be added tradition, inertia, inability of specialists to appreciate alien areas, lack of communication between fields which developed independently but which need to be combined in this effort, the natural reluctance of an enterprise to invest prematurely in areas lacking proven markets, the inability of such markets to develop without supporting infrastructure, and the difficulty of developing such infrastructures if the markets to support them do not yet exist. This list can be lengthened. But society has been able to get off dead center in similar situations in the past (e.g., development of nuclear energy, the TV industry and the computer revolution, earlier the rise of the automotive, petrochemical, and electrical industries, and still earlier the steel and chemical industries and the industrial revolution itself).

How can we get the transition to the hydrogen economy started? In cases of rapid transition, like atomic bombs/nuclear energy there have been strong pushes and pulls, respectively the need to win World War II and to provide what was at first thought to be cheap, clean, almost inexhaustible energy. Large federal funding was decisive. In the case at hand push and pull are fragmented, the funding climate hostile, and lower cost alternatives still available in most cases (a very important cost factor). One is tempted to conclude that the transition will be evolutionary, doomed to slowness until both pushes and pulls become unified forces, and the differential cost between hydrogen and its fossil competitors is reduced to where it is no longer a powerful obstacle. I believe, however, that significant synergies can reduce hydrogen cost, increasing the pull of proliferating applications while the push of pollution abatement, petrochemical shortages, global warming worries, etc. and their consequent costs (including those of energy security, foreign exchange problems, etc.) is sure to increase. Current niche applications for hydrogen will increase in number as costs go down, and quantitative increase in demand will lead to economies of scale in hydrogen production. This auto-catalytic cost reduction, one hopes, will culminate in hydrogen becoming a major fuel and increasing important chemical feedstock.

The search for significant synergies thus assumes major importance. Fortunately they seem to be real and to involve such major segments of the economy that the vast cost would be both justifiable and supportable, hopefully on a pay-as-you-go basis. Many synergies can be studied, funded in different ways, and implemented in independent parallel efforts on widely differing time scales. They range from here-and-now to pie-in-the-sky scenarios, from those capable of supporting themselves almost from the start to those involving very long range investment. With proper planning these last could perhaps be significantly, if not totally, supported by the self-supporters. Bold imagination and creative vision will surely be needed in many segments of a gigantic long-range enterprise, comparable to, if not exceeding, what occurred in nuclear energy or the computer revolution.

A synergetic Example
Consider the following example of a synergetic scenario. Electric utilities, say in the Great Lakes--St. Lawrence Seaway region, in response to public concerns, wish to change over from fossil fuels to renewable primary energy sources (with nuclear energy a default possibility). Suppose solar energy is deemed impractical because of excessive cloud cover, bad weather, cost of real estate, first cost of photovoltaic cells, intermittent sunshine, maintenance, etc., so wind power is considered. Suppose wind power generator manufacturers can provide reliable 25 KW units on a cost-effective basis, and that the utility wants 750 MW. This would requite 30,000 units, and what do we do when the wind isn't blowing? So we consider lining both sides of the St. Lawrence Seaway with wind generators, perhaps with additional units on islands, on stilts, or floating, generating hydrogen whenever there is more wind-power available than needed, using hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing and to meet peak demands.

The utility concludes the cost will be very high, braces itself for battles with rate-determining bodies and decides to wait and see what public opinion, the political climate, tax policies etc. will be when the brownouts get worse.

Meanwhile the fertilizer and liquid hydrogen industries are feeling uncomfortable because they get their hydrogen from stripping methane, thereby generating CO2, a greenhouse gas. They also see the possibility of short supplies of CH4 because it is needed for home heating, for natural-gas-powered autos, buses, etc., and because CH4 is a much cleaner fuel than coal, oil or biomass. They consider a joint effort to find a clean (say electrolytic) source of H2, and find the electric utility receptive to the idea of making it a threesome. They invite Seaway people to their brain-storming sessions and find there is interest in lengthening the shipping season and the hope is expressed that wind power might warm the water enough to make the ice crackable by ordinary ships for a few extra months, and perhaps by ice-breakers throughout the winter. The utility likes that very much as Niagara Falls then wouldn't freeze up and hydropower would be available all year long. Back-of-the envelope calculations suggest it might actually pay to keep the water flowing!

So we consider lining the St. Lawrence seaway with wind generators, generating hydrogen when there is more wind than needed, using fuel cells to generate electricity when the wind isn't blowing.

Enthusiasm spreads, and local utilities along the Seaway, as well as individual land-owners and farmers, ask why they can't put up their own wind-machines and feed into the grid whatever power they can spare whenever they can spare it. Local, federal and Canadian governments all see how attractive the possibility is, and work to expedite the enterprise. The suggestion is made that the icebreaker should be nuclear powered so that its cooling water can help keep the Seaway open, and its reactor can operate at full power the year-round to generate even more hydrogen. A US-Canada Seaway Consortium is formed, the US takes the Savannah out of mothballs to serve as the first ice-breaker (after some minor modifications), Quebec Hydropower becomes a member of the consortium as does a new Bay of Fundy Tidal Power Authority. The structure of the Seaway Consortium is kept open and flexible, so that the number of affiliated wind machines, mostly owned by individuals, soon exceeds 105.

The price of power and hydrogen go down, niche applications grow (H2-powered airplanes is one of the first, with inroads soon made on trains, ships, and buses) and break-throughs in solar-cell cost and efficiency soon result in solar panels festooning all wind machine towers. This in turn via economics in scale revolutionizes housing, where solar "power roofs" power fuel-cell-driven family cars. The coal mines take on new life, for cheap H2 catalytically converts coal to CH4 which becomes the basis of the new petrochemical industry of organic and nitrogen-organic compounds (the last more than doubling the size of the ammonia industry). The oil industry, down-sizes but invests in coal and hydrogen. This, plus new chemicals and materials based on oil, keeps even small oil companies viable.

The US and Canada become integrated into power and H2, and soon Mexico joins in. Hydrogen becomes an important export. Central and South American join the consortium, Europe and China set up their own, North Africa joins Europe and the grid soon spreads over the rest of Africa. The European and Chinese consortia also grow, meet in Russia and join, Indian, South-East Asia, Australia, and Oceania join them, and the Old and New World consortia later join across the polar regions. Pollution, global warming, etc. become dim memories, Mother Earth regains her health and everybody lives happily forever after.

How's that for a rosy scenario? The most fantastic part is not scientific or technical. It is that people will do what is in the best interest of all rather than virtually eating each other alive!

Another Scenario
There are many other nice scenarios (I omit all nasty ones). For example, one could create islands, maybe floating, of modular construction and indefinitely extendible. We could start out, perhaps, with a nuclear reactor producing hydrogen by electrolysis, and other things (such as NH3) could follow. Multiple flash distillation of hot reactor coolant would be a source of fresh water for a thirsty world (ditto H2 fuel-cell "ash") and the brine would be a source of chemicals and deuterium. The NIMBY effect would be eliminated. The island would process its own waste and either store it or convert it into vitreous ceramic used for underwater structures. It could grow to be a center for farming the sea, for providing nesting sites for sea birds (constructed for convenient guano harvesting), and egg-laying sites for sea-turtles. One can add modules as desired for geophysical studies, mining sea resources, biological, ecological, astronomical, atmospheric, oceanographic and other studies. Wind/solar power modules could be added on indefinitely. The islands could become self-sufficient and great places to live, provide independence of land in the sense that they wouldn't drown if polar ice melts on account of global warming, could become foci of international friendship, and ultimately lead to a means of supporting a large part of our exploding world population. This "Project Noah" obviously is long-range and a good theme for science fiction. But the ocean is pretty much the last terrestrial frontier, both more attractive and more accessible for habitation than space. Though now fanciful, this scenario can be as real as we want to make it.

Make up your own further scenarios! Though it is premature to say the hydrogen energy economy will solve all our problems, it looks too good for the idea to be left gathering dust.

Jerome Rothstein

Emeritus Professor Department of Computer & Information Science The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 43210-1277

The Objectivity Crisis

(Congressman George E. Brown, Jr., chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He is one of science's best and most knowledgeable friends in Congress. He has recently written a "Guest Comment" essay for the American Journal of Physics (AJP) (September 1992, 779-781), and a "Policy Forum" essay for Science (9 October 1992, 200-201), giving his views on basic research, the future of science, the role of science in human culture, and the national and global quality of life. Here are excerpts from Congressman Brown's AJP article, published with permission from AJP and Congressman Brown's office. -Editor)

If we look at the world as a whole, it is not at all clear that advances in science and technology have translated into sustainable advances in quality of life for the majority of the human race. Considering all the benefits that have accrued to industrialized society over the past 50 years because of science - and the benefits are innumerable - it is still difficult to draw a correlation between scientific and technological capability on the one hand, and quality of life on the other. If you consider criteria such as infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy rates, equality of opportunity for all citizens, and hours spent in front of a television, the US ranks considerably lower than many nations that are less technologically "advanced," and less economically "prosperous" than we are.

There is insufficient effort on the part of the scientific community or their policy-making advocates to visualize what a "better world" would look like. Rather, we have developed an uncritical faith that wherever science leads us is where we want to go. The oft-stated assumption is that more research will lead to more benefits.

It is not at all clear that advances in science and technology have translated into sustainable advances in quality of life for the majority of the human race

Certainly the concept of unfettered research leading to unanticipated benefits for society is illusory. Research choices made by even the most "unfettered" of scientists are contextual. Most basic researchers work within our system of academic science, which is organized around traditional disciplines and pressure to publish, and is structured so as to encourage specialization and discourage radical approaches or interdisciplinary initiatives.
More significant, and more troubling, is that we have elevated science
to a position of predominance over other types of cognition and experience; that we have, unconsciously and ironically, imbued science with more value than other types of understanding which are overtly and explicitly value based. The Czech philosopher and playwright (and Former President) Vaclav Havel has called this the "crisis of objectivity," because we have subjugated our subjective humanity
"our sense of justice, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion and faith"
to a process (scientific research) that not only cannot help us distinguish between good and bad, but strongly asserts that its results are, and should be, value free.
To the extent that we view the reduction of human suffering as a problem to be addressed by more technology, we are distracting ourselves from the real, subjective problems that face humanity. There has never in human history been a long-term technological fix; there have merely been bridges to the next level of stress and crisis. We will only change this progression when we understand that our problems are those of human or cultural behavior, not inadequate machines.

We have subjugated our subjective humanity to a process (scientific research) that not only cannot help us distinguish between good and bad, but strongly asserts that its results are value free.

The promise of science - a miracle cure - serves the politicians, who are always looking for patent medicine to sell to the public, and it serves scientists, who understandably seek to preserve their special position in our culture. But it may not serve society as advertised. Indeed, the promise of science may be at the root of our problems.
The claims that we make for social benefits through more research must be rigorously tested. What kinds of research do we really need? What lines of research offer the greatest probability of improving the quality of life of humankind throughout the world?
We must adopt specific goals that define an overall context for research: zero population growth, less waste, less consumption of nonrenewable resources, less armed conflict, less dependence on material goods as a metric of wealth or success.
My personal view, subjective in the extreme, is that the ultimate enrichment of the human spirit comes from our ability to expand our realm of experience and knowledge. Scientists must seek to share the privilege of their enrichment with others, not by promising more, faster, stronger machines, but by sharing what they know and how they feel. This demands a renewed commitment to education as the ultimate mechanism for individual empowerment, and a critical prerequisite for social justice. This is a commitment that all scientists can make, in their own backyards, starting now.

Editorial: Redefining Physics

My friend Greg burst into my office the other day shaking his head and asking "What are physicists good for, Hobson? Why would anybody want to hire one? What is special about physics?" He complained that PhD programs prepare graduates who do things that only physicists care about, graduates who settle into other departments where they prepare other students to do the same thing. How can we change this barely self-perpetuating closed system? Even relatively small reforms, such as the Introductory University Physics Project's recommendations for bringing introductory physics into the twentieth century (let alone the twenty-first!), are difficult. The system has great inertia.

Greg is a successful quantum optics experimentalist. He loves physics. He is one of our department's best teachers. Despite having every reason to feel good about the future of physics, he doesn't. He is not an isolated case. Judging from recent surveys conducted by Leon Lederman and others, evidence of low morale in the entire scientific community has been building steadily lately. ]

The malaise is all around us. Despite my department's strong research program, we have trouble keeping up enrollments, and finding enough good English-speaking graduate students to fill our teaching assistantships. The superconducting super collider, perhaps symbolic of physics research, was nearly derailed by Congress. The National Science Foundation is backing out of basic research and into market-directed research and education. High school physics enrollments remain stuck at 20%. The American Physical Society finds it hard to hold together even a single yearly general meeting. Leon Lederman writes of "Science: the end of the frontier?"

Another friend and colleague opines that in a few more years physics will be, like ancient Latin and Greek, a dead language. The uses of physics will never die, for they are profitable. But true physics, "natural philosophy," the search for natural truth and understanding, is ill, perhaps mortally.

We can name a lot of reasons for this: the end of the cold war, world competition, the economy, industrial belt-tightening, Congressional belt-tightening, and so forth. But these don't go to the philosophical center of the problem. It isn't easy to see the center, but we all need to search for it and suggest solutions. Physics hangs in the balance. Indeed the "endless frontier" of science hangs in the balance, for physics is at the cutting edge of a malaise that extends to other sciences.

Somewhere near the center lie such ancient sins as ego, narrow-mindedness, and self-centeredness.

An editorial in Science (6 March 1992) proclaims "It is the conviction of scientists that more basic research will profit not only the globe, but also the specific countries in which it is carried out. The former is essentially obvious." In light of the science-related problems that exist today, beginning with overpopulation, I'm not even certain that scientists still agree that this is obvious. And it is clear that many thoughtful non-scientists seriously doubt that the marginal effect of more basic research is beneficial. The hubris of the quoted statement is common among scientists. It reflects an egotistical failure to listen and take seriously other non-scientific points of view.

Just as science has walled itself off from the world at large, so each science, each academic department, and even each specialty within physics (quantum optics, for instance), has walled itself off from each other. We have become, literally, narrow-minded. It is a problem inherent in science. Around the time of Galileo, scientists discovered the advantages of specialization. We have found such rewards in "analysis," in studying the individual pieces of the puzzle, that we have forgotten what the pieces are pieces of. We study the pieces themselves, without cultural context, without social context, without history, often even without scientific context, and our pieces become irrelevant to the public and sometimes, if we ask ourselves honestly what it all means, to ourselves.

At the end of a 12-year "me first" epoch, it is not surprising that universities, physicists, and the physics profession, have tried to get from physics what they could for themselves. But the self-centeredness of physics, and science, begin much earlier, probably right after World War II when universities discovered the benefits, to themselves, of research. Prestige, and out-of-state tax dollars, came from research. Unsurprisingly, physicists and physics followed the trend. Teaching and public service were out, pure research was in. The pull of defense and other dollars opened wider the split represented by the official division of the university physics community into a research association and a teaching association an unwholesome kind of specialization in which teachers remain satisfied with rusting lectures that are stuck in the Newtonian era and mired in gadgets and trivial details, while researchers seem not to notice that non-physicists neither care about nor understand their research projects. There was, and is, an attitude that the physics profession should put their energies, and other people's money, into fundamental questions of physics simply because, like Mount Everest, they are there. But many other things are "there" too, and they are things the rest of humankind cares more about: overpopulation, for example.

Congressman George Brown, Chair of the House science and technology committee and one of science's best friends in Congress, has recently written on these matters. Excerpts from one of his articles are reprinted above. His strong words are worthy of our attention.

Science is changing, because the world is changing. US physics is catching the front end of these changes, as they affect science. It is not easy to see what the issues really are, but it is clear that the questions must be approached on a deeper level than "How much money can we get for basic research?" or "How can we convince the public that they need the SSC?" We might ask, instead: What is basic research really good for globally, what kinds of basic research are good for that purpose, and how can we measurably confirm that prediction? And: Is humankind likely to need the information likely to come from the SSC anytime soon, or could we as well wait and let a future generation discover this information?

The answers are even murkier than the questions. It would help if physicists were more interested in the physics outside their own specialty, if APS and AAPT were united in a single organization, if physicists focused more on teaching and on non-scientists, if physicists were more sensitive to large cultural trends, and if physicists took societal questions seriously as part of their professional lives. But it is easier to suggest such answers than to carry them out. For example, university physicists who focus more on teaching do so at a cost in pay and prestige, because that is the way we have set up the system. That dilemma illustrates the problem. And such dilemmas are what caused Greg to burst into my office the other day.

Art Hobson

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January 1993 Newsletter

In This Issue

Physics and Cancer

Global Warming, Further Comments

Space Station as Space Launcher

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Symposium on the Role of the National Labs in Fostering Competitiveness

Forum Elections

The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age

The Los Alamos Primer

Meeting announcement: Engineering and Applied Science Societies Collaboration in K-12

The Hydrogen Energy Economy

The Objectivity Crisis

Editorial: Redefining Physics

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