Archived Newsletters

October 2000 Newsletter

Volume 29, Number 4

Articles

Copenhagen in New York: Harry Lustig and Brian B. Schwartz
Reseach and the Government Performance and Results Act: Beverly K. Hartline

Commentary

How Changes Happens: Thoughts on the Report of the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development: Priscilla Auchinclos

Letters

Global Warming Hysteria: Alexander A. Berezin
Association des Ecologists Pur le Nucleaire: Berol Robinson
Demarcation Between Science and Religion: Ronald I. Miller
Demarcation Between Science and Non-Science?: William E. Butler
There is No Demarcation!: Derek Walton

Fiction

Sunpower: the Benefits of Foresight, A 2025 Sustainable Energy Scenario: Aviva Brecher
Dark World: Ruth Howes

Reviews

Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: Paul Lawrence Rose reviewed by Leo Sartori
Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project: Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, reviewed by Joan Mason

Copenhagen in New York

Harry Lustig and Brian B. Schwartz

Near the beginning of his unreservedly enthusiastic review on April 12, 2000 of Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, the New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley asks: "…who would have ever thought it, that three dead, long-winded people talking about atomic physics would be such electrifying companions?"

The play reenacts the 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg, who was then in charge of the Nazi nuclear power program, to Niels Bohr, his mentor, and collaborator in creating quantum mechanics, complementarity, and the uncertainty principle, in German - occupied Denmark. The third "long-winded" character is Bohr’s wife Margrethe. "Reenacts" is not really the right word, for no one now alive appears to know what actually took place during the visit and Frayn does not pretend to solve the mystery.

We do know that something terrible happened between the two friends, which all but destroyed their relationship for the rest of their lives. Speculation about the intent of Heisenberg’s call has been rife among physicists and historians ever since the visit became known. Did Heisenberg want to warn Bohr and through him the Allies that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb and if so to what end? Was it to convey the impression that he was about to succeed and that the Allies should therefore make peace with Hitler, or was it say that he had given up on an impossible task and that therefore the other side shouldn’t try either? Did Heisenberg want to find out whether the Allies were actually working on an A - bomb? Or did he hope to convince Bohr to issue a joint declaration with him denouncing efforts to build a bomb and pledging not to work on it?

And inevitably historians and scientists have debated the corollary question: why did the Germans not achieve an atomic bomb and, indeed, why, as became known as a result of Samuel Goudsmit’s Alsos mission at the end of the War, were they, under Heisenberg, not even trying, but were working instead to build a nuclear reactor for the production of energy? Was it because of incompetence, or was Heisenberg dragging his feet or denying the feasibility because he didn’t want Hitler to have the bomb?

By replaying parts of the Copenhagen encounter three times with different variations, after the protagonists’ deaths (we aren’t told whether they met in heaven or hell), Frayn illuminates the questions, but does not resolve them. But he does much more: he delivers a mini-course in Quantum Mechanics for Poets, including fair explanations of the uncertainty principle and of complementarity, which he then - most physicists and philosophers of science would agree, gratuitously - applies to human behavior: we must always be uncertain what is in a person’s mind, and we all have complementary motives for our actions. Inevitably, the play raises important and difficult moral questions. One - which, it turned out, would understandably provoke some in the audience at our symposium - was who had more on his conscience: Heisenberg, whose work in nuclear physics during the War did not result in the death of a single human being, or Bohr, who at Los Alamos contributed to building the atomic bomb, which did kill thousands of people.

Both of us had read the play Copenhagen [1] with considerable interest, even excitement, and pleasure, and had heard from Eugen Merzbacher, who had seen the well-received production in London, that it worked. Nevertheless, we must admit to doubts, similar to those later enunciated by Mr. Brantley, that many people in the Broadway audience, other than a few academics, would come to or sit through what could be perceived as a seminar on physics, philosophy, and history. But one of us (B.B.S. ) was a reader for the Ensemble Studio Theater - an of-off Broadway group -which had been given a grant by the Sloan Foundation to promote plays and other artistic works with scientific and technological themes. Having learned that the Ensemble Studio Theatre was planning to invite Michael Frayn to speak about the play in New York before its official opening, Schwartz offered the facilities of the CUNY Graduate Center for the event and suggested that it be expanded into a symposium with additional participants. The other author of this article (H.L. ) would find himself in New York City in January and February and together we planned the program of the symposium and selected and obtained the speakers. Schwartz acted as the overall, busy producer of the day-long event, while Lustig compiled the biographical sketches of the speakers and of the protagonists and most of the forty-three physicists, from Born to von Weizsaecker, whose names are - not at all inappropriately - dropped in the play. The symposium was to, and did take place, on Monday, March 27, at the Graduate Center’s newly occupied, but not yet officially opened or completely ready building on New York’s Fifth Avenue (in the former home of the B. Altman’s department store). We also arranged that a preview performance of Copenhagen on the day before would be attended by most of the speakers and by physicists and other attendees at the symposium who had been invited by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics.

The symposium was to consist of three sessions. The evening session on Theatrical Perspectives, which we thought would attract the largest audience because of its popular appeal and the participation of Michael Frayn and the equally renowned director of the play, Michael Blakemore, would be the responsibility of the Ensemble Studio Theatre. We would organize a session on Science and one on History. In choosing the speakers, we aimed high, and our aim was good: all but one of those on our "A list" accepted with grace, even alacrity, including the ninety-three years old Hans Bethe, whom we had to track down at Cal Tech where he was a visiting professor from his home institution, Cornell. The merely eighty-nine years old John Wheeler had to travel only from Princeton. Both Bethe and Wheeler had of course known Bohr and Heisenberg before and after World War II

The Science Session, chaired by Jerome Friedman of MIT and Daniel Greenberger (CCNY), began with a talk which was intended to provide the audience with a basic understanding of some fundamentals of nuclear physics in general and fission in particular, and in the twenty minutes available to her, Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (University of Pennsylvania) discharged this assignment admirably. This was followed by an impeccable and exciting presentation by Eugen Merzbacher (University of North Carolina) of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and of the consequences for entangled states of the Copenhagen interpretation. Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna) described some of his group’s elegant experiments on entangled states, which shore up the Copenhagen interpretation. And Brian Greene(Columbia), claiming unconvincingly that his presentation was mainly to provide comic relief, presented contemporary alternatives (including that of parallel universes) to the Bohr interpretation.

The session on History was, for some, the highlight of the event, for it provided rather convincing answers to some of the questions that figure in the play and that are asked at the beginning of this report. Hans Bethe asserted unequivocally and convincingly, on the basis of his experience at Los Alamos, his interaction with the protagonists, and his study of the recently released tapes of conversations between Heisenberg, Otto Hahn and other German scientists who were interned in England , at the conclusion of World War II, that Heisenberg and his team did not work on the Atomic Bomb, because they were sure that it could not be built. Heisenberg reached this conclusion, because, unlike in the United States, there were no people with training or interest in chemical engineering in Germany to tell him that graphite would be a suitable moderator in the chain reaction if it could be made boron-free, and because he failed to calculate the critical mass in the belief that it required tons of enriched uranium [2].

Complementing this account, the physicist, science historian, and Heisenberg biographer David Cassidy (Hofstra University) argued effectively that Heisenberg’s actions and inactions should not be attributed primarily to moral motives [3]. His justification for staying on in Nazi Germany and heading up the atomic energy effort, that he only wanted to preserve German science for the time after the expected and hoped for downfall of Hitler, was not convincing to Cassidy. Even though Heisenberg was offered positions in the United States, and although some other German scholars, including his brother-in-law, the economist E. F. (Fritz) Schumacher [4] had emigrated out of disgust with Nazism, he had no intention of giving up his prestigious chair at the University of Leipzig.

Also in keeping with the view of a morally vulnerable Heisenberg, Gerald Holton (Harvard) presented the results of his research on the once close but, after 1933, deteriorating scientific and personal relationship between Heisenberg and Einstein [5]. Tantalizingly, Holton also reported on the existence of a letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, that was shown to him in 1985 by one of Bohr's sons, Erik. The letter resides in the Copenhagen archives. The release of the content in 2012 (fifty year's after Bohr's death) may finally answer the question "what happened in Copenhagen in 1941?"

In a departure from the other speakers, John Wheeler treated the audience to his personal impressions of the play’s protagonists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. While declaring his admiration for both of them, he admitted his discomfort, shared by many other American physicists, when Heisenberg reappeared in the United States after the War. At a party for Heisenberg, Wheeler made sure always to hold a drink in one hand and a notebook in the other, so as to be visibly unable to shake his hand. When Wheeler started to recount a visit to Auschwitz soon after the end of the War (perhaps to explain his antipathy to Heisenberg), he broke down and was unable to continue his talk. The history session was chaired by Frederick Seitz (Rockefeller University) , who also contributed remarks about the contribution, after his release from the Soviet Union, of the chemist Nikolaus Riehl, to the German effort to produce reactor-grade uranium [6], and by Spencer Weart of the AIP Center for History of Physics.

After the History Session, the speakers, organizers and sponsors of the symposium were treated by the Royal Danish Consulate to a dinner as might have been tendered by the Bohrs to their guests in the "House of Honor" they occupied on the grounds of the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen. One of us was surprised to discover that the young Danish journalist at his table knew as little about Bohr as his American contemporaries.

A bonus event on the morning of the symposium, for members of the APS, was the opening of the New York showing of the exhibit "To Advance & Diffuse the Knowledge of Physics: 100 Years of the American Physical Society". This historical exhibit was conceived and constructed for the APS’ centennial celebration, and had been shown, to much acclaim, in Atlanta and in the Washington area. After opening remarks by Jerry Friedman, APS’ President during the centennial year, the exhibit’s curator, Sara Schechner, conducted a guided tour of the exhibit. Although it covered the entire history of the APS and therefore, inevitably, much of physics in the 20th century, the connection with Copenhagen was much in evidence: one of the exhibits in the "journals section" was the authoritative 1939 paper by Bohr and Wheeler explaining fission, and both the contributions to the Second World War by physics and the War’s effect on physics were well documented

The Theatre Session, in the evening - for which the entire day’s events had been given the name Creating Copenhagen - lived up to its billing. Michael Frayn showed convincingly that he had steeped himself in the history of the period and had assimilated much of the physics. He also pointed out what in the play was dramatic invention and why it was introduced. (One of the inventions, the personality of Margrethe Bohr, clearly disturbed some members of the audience who had known her. Regal [she was known in Denmark as "Queen Margrethe"], highly competent, polite and the perfect hostess, her role in the play was that of an skeptical and even aggressive antagonist of Heisenberg. ) An even more impressive presentation of Frayn’s approach to writing the play can be found in his Postscript to Copenhagen, an essay originally prepared for the London production’s playscript edition and expanded for the New York production [1].

Michael Blakemore’s literate and incisive presentation of how he saw the play went a long way to explain why he recently won the year 2000 Tony Award for best director of a drama (our sense of honesty, or perhaps wonderment compels us to disclose that Blakemore won a second Tony for his direction of the musical Kiss Me, Kate), and why Copenhagen itself was designated as the best play. Blair Brown, the actress who plays Margrethe Bohr, was given the "best supporting actress" award. Many viewers felt that Philip Bosco (Niels Bohr) and especially Michael Crumpsty who portrays Werner Heisenberg also deserve major awards. Blair and Crumpsty attended part of the Science and all of the History Session of the symposium, and we would like to think that this helped them to give even more insightful performances than they would otherwise have done.

All of the many reviews of Copenhagen we saw, except two, including those in all the New York papers, the (unusual) reviews in out-of-town papers such as the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, and an essay by Thomas Powers (who has been the leading proponent of the theory that Heisenberg deliberately dragged his feet on building a bomb, because he didn’t want Hitler to get one ) in the New York Review of Books [7], were unreservedly enthusiastic. In addition to praising the performance and production, they take a highly favorable view of the content of the play and consider it the most important intellectual theatrical event in many decades. One critic, John Lahr in the New Yorker, found and deplored that Copenhagen lacks entertainment value, and we have to admit that it isn’t The Wizard of Oz. And Paul Lawrence Rose, Professor of Jewish Studies and European History at Pennsylvania State University, in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemned Copenhagen generally for its postmodernist sin of asserting that physics and history have "no more underlying truth than alchemy", and specifically for whitewashing Heisenberg and for coming close to asserting that there was no moral difference in the Second World War between Germany and the Allies [8].

Not only the play, but also the symposium received favorable reviews from the audience and from the press. And it was not only science publications such as Physics Today, APS News, and Chemical and Engineering News that gave it coverage. The physicist-turned- science -journalist, James Glanz, not only reviewed the event in the New York Times, but he and others gave it and with it the play considerable advance publicity. Thus the symposium may have made a contribution to the attentiveness, even eagerness with which Copenhagen was awaited and received. There was also television coverage, including interviews by CNN and Japanese Television with Hans Bethe and John Wheeler.

The effect on the large audience at the symposium was palpably more direct and significant. We had expected that the potential audience for the evening session with Frayn and Blakemore would exceed the 400 seat capacity of the auditorium and had therefore limited admission to those who had obtained (the free) tickets in advance. But as it turned out, the auditorium was also full for the Science session, and several hundred people had to be turned away from the History session, in spite of the fact that an overflow hall which showed the program on closed circuit television had been made available; it was quickly filled. All these people were exposed to and - we hope - learned a good deal of physics, its history, and its important role in human affairs, an enterprise which the APS, the AIP, and much of the physics community see as essential to pursue, if physics is to prosper, and in the pursuit of which they expended a great deal of effort and money. Not that the symposium came free; indeed its expenses were, in large measure, defrayed by APS, AIP, the CUNY Graduate Center, and by a generous New York based foundation.

The symposium [9] was a great day for physics. But it wouldn’t have been held had there been no Copenhagen, and Michael Frayn’s play is manifestly the more important and lasting event. As a recognition of his contributions to physics will the APS make Frayn a Fellow of the Society?

Footnotes

[1] Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, Methuen, London (1998). In the American edition, published by Anchor Books, New York (2000), the author made minor changes in the text of the play and expanded the Postscript on the basis of communications to him by physicists and historians and of further reading.

[2] Hans A. Bethe, The German Uranium Project, Physics Today 53, 34 - 36 (July 2000).

[3] David C. Cassidy, A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen, Physics Today 53, 28 - 32 (July 2000). See also Casssidy's biography of Heisenberg, Uncertainty: The Life and Times of Werner Heisenberg, W. H. Freeman, New York (1992). An excellent biography of Bohr, particularly for physicists, is Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times, Oxford University Press (1991).

[4] Schumacher (1911 - 1977) had a distinguished career in England in economics. Among other positions he was head of planning at the British Coal Board. At the same time he was an ardent environmentalist and achieved world-wide popular fame for his book Small is Beautiful.

[5] Gerald Holton, Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein, Physics Today 53, 38 - 42 (July 2000).

[6] Nikolaus Riehl and Frederick Seitz, Stalin's Captive: Nikolaus Riehl and the Soviet Race for the Bomb, American Chemical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation (1996).

[7] Thomas Powers, The Unanswered Question, The New York Review of Books (May 25, 2000). Powers' earlier views on why Heisenberg did not build an atomic bomb are given in his book Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb, A. A. Knopf, New York (1993)

[8] Paul Lawrence Rose, Frayn's "Copenhagen" Plays Well at History's Expense, The Chronicle of Higher Education, B 4 -6 (May 5, 2000). Rose's views on Heisenberg's role and behavior are expressed in more detail in his book Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture, University of California Press (1998).

[9] The Creating Copenhagen Symposium was video-recorded. The set of three tapes, in VCR format - one for each of the sessions - will be mailed to individuals who send a check for $30, made out to

The Graduate Center, to
Creating Copenhagen Tapes
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Room 8 309
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016.

The program of the Symposium and the biographical sketches of the speakers and of scientists mentioned in the play, can be found at http://web.gsuc.cuny.edu/ashp/nml/copenhagen

Harry Lustig has worked in theoretical nuclear physics. He is professor of physics emeritus and provost emeritus at the City College of the City University of New York, Treasurer Emeritus of the American Physical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico. :

304 Chula Vista Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501.

Brian Schwartz, a condensed matter physicist, has been a member of the faculty at MIT and served as Deputy Executive Secretary and as Education Officer of the American Physical Society. He is one of the founders of APS’ Forum on Physics and Society and is Vice President for Research and Sponsored Programs

Graduate Center of the City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Research and the Government Performance and Results Act

Beverly K. Hartline

Introduction
The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) was passed by Congress and signed into law in 1993. Its purpose is to promote accountability in government. It requires that agencies prepare and follow strategic plans, commit to measurable results in an annual performance plan, and measure and report on performance in an annual performance report. Fiscal Year 1999 was the first year of full implementation, and agencies have now completed one full cycle of planning, promising, measuring, and reporting.

Both Congress and the Administration supported GPRA, because they felt it would promote communication between the agencies and Congress, strengthen accountability for the use of Federal funds, reduce waste and inefficiency, and help guide the priorities and actions of agency managers and staff. With respect to its impact on Federally sponsored research, there were many concerns about its potential to damage the research enterprise. Since research results cannot be predicted in advance, how can agencies commit to specific outcomes? How can one even measure the performance of fundamental research? Will GPRA stifle innovation, long-term research, and ‘risky’ science? Will program overlaps that are productive be eliminated, under the mistaken impression that they comprise wasteful duplication? Finally, how much will GPRA’s reporting requirements further overload and distract the R&D system?

Because of these concerns, Congress, the Administration, and the scientific community put special attention on the application of GPRA to research, and several studies were conducted. In this talk, I discuss the conclusions of some of the studies and provide web references to government sites providing GPRA-related plans and reports for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). GPRA remains very much a work-in-progress, and continuing participation by the scientific community, including physicists, can help ensure that it benefits, rather than harms, American science.

Studies Guiding GPRA Application to Research

From 1994 to 1996, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) convened an interagency working group to consider how agencies could assess fundamental science. The group published its conclusions in the report, Assessing Fundamental Science. It found that the Federal agencies’ primary role is stewardship and portfolio management, rather that the direct conduct of research, that leadership across the frontiers of science is the overarching national goal for Federal research programs, and that one size won’t fit all for goal setting and performance measurement. The report presents nine principles to guide agencies in assessing fundamental research:

Begin with a clearly defined statement of program goals.
Develop criteria intended to sustain and advance the excellence and responsiveness of the research system.
Establish performance indicators that are useful to managers and encourage risk taking.
Avoid assessments that would be inordinately burdensome or costly or that would create incentives that are counter productive.
Incorporate merit review and peer evaluation of program performance.
Use multiple sources and types of evidence; for example, a mix of quantitative and qualitative indicators and narrative text.
Experiment in order to develop an effective set of assessment tools.
Produce assessment reports that will inform future policy development and subsequent refinement of program plans.
Communicate results to the public and elected representatives.

In the summer of 1997, while agencies were in the final phases of preparing their strategic plans and starting work on their performance plans for Fiscal Year 1999, Jack Gibbons, then Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, issued a guidance memorandum on GPRA to the heads of the 19 Federal agencies that sponsor research. Gibbons made seven major points in his memo. He told the agencies to treat R&D visibly and in a manner that promotes leadership through quality and innovation. He suggested that they should choose performance goals and measures that would be useful to guide the priorities and actions of agency staff and lead to clear and fair performance reports. The plans should communicate in a way non experts can appreciate and describe how the agency coordinated its research with other agencies and stakeholders. Finally he urged each agency to use the full flexibility of GPRA to tailor its implementation to its specific R&D mission. The act gives the OMB Director the authority to approve goals stated in an "alternative form" and to waive certain administrative requirements and controls. The alternative GPRA form is not quantitative but is based instead on descriptive statements of a minimally effective and successful program, and the NSF chose to use this approach for many of its measures.

In 1997 and 1998, both the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) conducted several studies and assessments of GPRA implementation in the agencies, focusing on the draft and final strategic and performance plans and the processes followed by the agencies to develop them. Various congressional committees held hearings, notably the House Science Committee.

Between 1997 and 1999 the National Research Council Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy conducted a study that resulted in the report, Evaluating Federal Research Programs. The purpose of the COSEPUP study was to (1) identify and analyze the most effective ways to assess the results of research, and (2) help the Federal government determine how agencies can better incorporate research activities into their GPRA plans. Some participants believed that research–including basic research–could be measured in a way that provides quantitative information on outcomes. Others disagreed, stating that there is no sensible way to respond to GPRA for basic research, given its long-range nature. COSEPUP concluded that useful outcomes of basic research cannot be measured directly on an annual basis because they are inherently too unpredictable. However, measures of the quality, relevance, and leadership position of research are possible, could be reported regularly via the judgements of appropriately selected peers, and could be the basis of meaningful application of GPRA to research. COSEPUP recommended, further, that agencies include in their strategic & performance plans the goal of maintaining adequate human resources in fields critical to their missions. With respect to research coordination among Federal agencies, COSEPUP proposed that the government establish a formal process to identify and coordinate areas of research supported by multiple agencies.

COSEPUP is starting its second GPRA study, which will involve case studies of the responses of about five Federal agency research programs to GPRA. The Panel will select case studies from a pool of 10 agencies at a meeting in June 2000.

GPRA Implementation
Fiscal year 1999 was the first full year of GPRA implementation. Strategic Plans were produced in 1997. Most agencies are now involved in the required 3-year revision. The performance plans for FY 1999 were submitted as part of the FY 1999 budget request, then revised after appropriations were finalized. By March 31, 2000, all agencies were to have submitted their reports on FY 1999 performance. The government-wide Budget Request for FY 2001, in fact, included a government-wide report on agency and program performance, and each agency has available through its web page its more detailed performance report. The reference list includes some of these web sites. If you are interested in some other agency’s strategic plan, performance plan, and performance reports, and cannot find the right link through the agency’s home page, check the web pages for the agency’s budget office or Chief Financial Officer.

References

1. Evaluating Federal Research Programs, COSEPUP, National Research Council, 1999, Website: www2.nas.edu/cosepup

2. Assessing Fundamental Science, National Science and Technology Council, 1996, website: www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/ostp/assess/start.cfm

3. Government-wide budget request for FY 2001, performance plan for 2001 and performance report for FY1999. Website: w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2001/pdf/budget.pdf

4. National Science Foundation performance plan and report. Website:

www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf0064, www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf0055

5. Department of Energy performance plan and report. Website: www.cfo.doe.gov/stratmgt/DOE1999AR.pdf

6. Government Accounting Office reports on GPRA implementation. Website: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/gpra/gpra.cfm

Beverly K. Hartline
Los Alamos National Laboratory
SSR Directorate, Mailstop A127
Los Alamos, NM 87545

How Change Happens: Thoughts on the Report of the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development

Priscilla Auchincloss

The Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development (CAWMSET) has recently released its final report and recommendations (see http://www. nsf. gov/od/cawmset). Established by Congress in October 1998, the charge of the Commission was to "research and recommend ways to improve the recruitment, retention, and representation of women, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities in science, engineering, and technology (SET) education and employment. "

The Commission convened six times over a period of a year, hearing expert testimony, reviewing existing reports, and commissioning new studies, on the barriers facing underrepresented groups as well as practices and strategies used to overcome these barriers. The 100-page report (with an accompanying 10-page brochure) organizes this comprehensive array of information to present and address issues at each stage along the professional pipeline -- " Precollege Education," " Access to Higher Education," and " Professional Life" -- as well as the overarching issues of " Public Image" and " National Accountability." It makes six major recommendations:

adoption by states of comprehensive high-quality standards in K-12 science and math education, including curricula, teacher qualifications, technological support, and physical infrastructure;
aggressive intervention efforts focused especially at junctures where high school and college students leave the SET pipeline;
expanded federal and state financial investment in support of underrepresented students and institutions serving significant minority populations;
increased accountability by public and private SET employers for the career development and advancement of their underrepresented employees;
coordination of efforts to transform the image of SET professionals; and
establishment of a public-private body to develop, coordinate, and oversee all these efforts.

At its July 2000 press briefing, the Commission emphasized the need to move beyond "announcing the need for change" to "making sure that change happens. " Its concluding recommendation and public statements made by Commission representatives show their sensitivity to the brief attention most federal reports receive in the press of Washington politics. The problem of the lack of diversity in science is not new, having been well documented since the early 1970’s (1). Strenuous arguments for improving the science education and technical training of women and minorities, in the national interest, have been made as recently as the late 1980’s. Similar arguments date back to the late 1800’s in support of the establishment of all-women’s colleges (2).

What is the prospect that CAWMSET will make a difference? There are grounds for optimism. CAWMSET’s recommendations come at a time when diversity has the possibility of new and positive cultural associations. The global scope and wealth of corporations, closely connected to the boom in information technology, means that if industry says "diversity is good for business", government and academia take note. Furthermore, we now have examples, such as the M.I.T. report released in March 1999 (3), of men leaders using their influence to advance the careers of women in academia and industry. This is also a time in which it is becoming possible to talk about race as a cultural reality -- like The New York Times’ lengthy series ending in July 2000, "How Race is Lived in America" -- even as race is disappearing as a meaningful scientific category.

True to its inaugurating mandate, the CAWMSET report pulls together the current themes regarding underrepresentation in science and engineering, identifying causal factors and supplying supporting data and analyses. The report provides examples of programs that are proving effective in remediating inequity and increasing diversity. This is an intelligent report, with input by a wide range of individuals and groups who have studied the issues, tracked the affected populations, and initiated change efforts. The report shows how much we already know about the facts, issues, causes, and even solutions regarding the lack of diversity in science and engineering, and the report is honest where gaps exist in our knowledge (for instance, regarding persons with disabilities). It makes a well-researched and vigorous petition to leaders at the highest levels to address the problem once and for all.

The report’s central argument is that U. S. is facing a huge skilled-labor shortage in science and technology and that the nation can best meet this need by developing the talent latent in its underrepresented populations. Indeed, the argument runs, the nation must do so; its technological and economic preeminence is at stake. The report states, "The lack of diversity in SET education and careers is an old dilemma, but economic necessity and workforce deficiencies bring a new urgency to the nation’s strategic need to achieve parity in its SET workforce." In building this argument, the report early on presents survey findings showing how business executives think diversity is good for business -- better use of talent, increased marketplace understanding, enhanced breadth of understanding in leadership positions, enhanced creativity, and increased quality of team problem-solving. The mobilizing potential of global economic competition and technology’s role in the market place clearly have not been lost on the Commission.

The report thus derives a new-sounding formula, merging moral imperatives with corporate priorities, to create "a national imperative" requiring the U. S. to undertake strategic moves, including the alteration of workforce demographics, to maintain global preeminence.

It is difficult to argue with this. Diversity is good for business, for higher education, and for that matter, for science. As a nation, we are ignoring, losing, and wasting talent among women, minorities, and the disabled, at immeasurable moral and social cost. And who can argue against prosperity, even if not everybody in America shares it? Certainly it makes sense, from both moral and long-term business perspectives, to draw our scientific and technological workforce from the domestic population, instead from abroad. If one wants a representative workforce -- and if one can no longer speak safely in terms of affirmative action -- why not align one’s cause with those of the most powerful players and go for a win-win strategy? Underrepresented groups get equity, businesses get technical workers and analysts, and the U. S. stays economically in the lead. And everyone gets the dividend of diversity. CAWMSET is clear that none of this is simple or easy. Reaching the goal of diversity as equitable representation requires commitment and accountability, and the report spells out what commitment and accountability look like, for government, industry, and academia.

But will the report make a difference? There are at least two ways to look at the question. First, the report (even without any follow-up) may serve as a blueprint for those already working on increasing the access of underrepresented groups to science and technology. As a common reference document, the report could lend coherence to widespread and highly various efforts and provide a rationale for focusing attention in areas of particular need. Second, the workforce argument — that talent in under-tapped populations is the answer to a national workforce shortage and global economic competition -- may prove convincing to some leaders, or useful to change agents who are trying to convince leaders. The question of whether the report will make a difference, however, is really the question of whether those leaders, who are predominantly male, white, and able-bodied, will assume ownership of the problem of inequity in their respective communities and direct the necessary human and financial resources toward solving it. And this leads to the question of how change actually happens.

One difficulty with the workforce argument is that the links in its logic depend on human reactions and responses, which do not always go the way those making the argument expect or want. Diversity is good for the science community, if all members of the community are equally enfranchised participants (4). That is, a diverse workforce, simply by nature of its diversity, cannot change entrenched cultural patterns of discrimination. Not everybody shares in America’s prosperity, some of which has come by not putting resources, for example, into repairing schools or developing teachers’ capacities in science. Moreover, even those who are relatively prosperous may still worry about maintaining their jobs and positions, and such anxiety has negative consequences for the career advancement of new groups coming through the SET pipeline. From any angle, the actual cultivation of qualified practitioners among underrepresented groups in science will be long, complex, and expensive. Faced with the choice between the growing domestic talent and importing foreign talent, the U. S. may decide that foreign-born diversity is just as good for business as the domestic kind, and cheaper, too.

Workforce shortages, as the physics community has learned, come and go and change. Diversity may be strategic in securing the nation’s competitive edge, but we need to keep the focus on equitable access to science and technology as the source of that diversity. The Commission’s report stands quite firmly, without the workforce argument, in documenting the present degree of inequity in education and professional life, as well as outlining the next steps to full equity. How one talks about diversity, in terms of economics or of equity, may bear on the potential of the argument to make a difference.

In the story of the March 1999 report acknowledging discrimination against women faculty in science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have a glimpse of how change happens. A group of women shared and quantified their experience of professional inequity, and men in a position to correct the situation decided to do so. While it is crucial to understand what this group of women experienced, how they came together, and how they made their case, it is also crucial to understand the role played by the particular men involved. What enabled them to take action, and what motivated them to do so? The enabling factors appear to include high levels of personal and professional security. Still, others with similar status might not take the same action. It undoubtedly takes confidence, and courage, to get out in front of one’s peers and take a visible, active moral or political stand. In addition, a high level of institutional security, in terms both of endowment and reputation, may provide essential back-up support. Regarding motivating factors as opposed to enabling ones, one cannot know for sure. One may be permitted to assume, however, that the men at MIT did not undertake corrective measures because they felt that women were the answer to the technology workforce problem. One would like to believe they acted to correct an unfair situation, of which they had previously been unaware (3, 5).

To get to diversity, we need to be able to talk honestly about how inequity is lived in America, to grasp the nature of racism and sexism at this point in time. Race and gender are fundamentally cultural categories used to define and maintain systems of unequally distributed social privilege, along lines of skin color or ethnicity and sex. Disability, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation play into other such systems. For change to happen, persons who benefit from their position in these systems need to become aware of the systems and mobilized to oppose or revise them. We need examples of persons and groups who have used their privilege and their credentials to correct inequity within their sphere of influence. We need to understand what personal or institutional conditions enabled them to act and if possible, what experience, logic, anxieties, or incentives ultimately motivated them.

Whether CAWMSET will lead to greater diversity in science and engineering depends, in the end, on who responds to it, and how. The CAWMSET report may energize people already working for change, and it may inspire new champions. It may give leaders greater confidence and courage to make decisions that support equity. To this reader, the workforce argument is momentarily compelling, but finally distracting. Workforce shortages, however rooted in social inequity, may disappear or be solved by other means. Moral issues don’t go away. The principle of equal opportunity is at the center of what the U. S. stands for, yet remains unrealized in our time. The lack of diversity in science and technology stems from this central moral dilemma. How do we as a nation achieve social justice in the context of ideals like economic free markets and scientific meritocracy? We may do better if we shift from thinking of equal opportunity as a state to be attained at some point in our nation’s future, to understanding equality as an ever-unfolding principle that will continue to challenge human creativity, including scientific and technological ingenuity, in every era. The question is, to whom does the challenge fall?

Priscilla Auchincloss
Research Associate in Physics and Sr. Lecturer
University of Rochester

Notes

1. See also the concise AIP report, Women in Physics, 2000, recently released and available at http://www.aip.org/statistics.

2. See David Noble, A World Without Women (Oxford, 1992). Noble's final chapter deals with women's entry into science through the establishment of colleges for women. He draws heavily on Margaret Rossiter's authoritative work, Women Scientists in America, Vol. 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. (Johns Hopkins, 1982).

3. "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT: How a Committee on Women Faculty came to be established by the Dean of the School of Science, what the Committee and the Dean learned and accomplished, and recommendations for the future," Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999. The report can be found at http://www.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html.

4. Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton, 1990). See Chapter 4, where Longino includes "equality of intellectual authority" among key conditions for effective criticism in science.

5. The cause of women in science has had few well-known male champions (Leibniz was one), but many supportive fathers, husbands, brothers, and colleagues. See Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? (Harvard, 1989). In Chapter 5, she describes Leibniz's role regarding the petition by Maria Winkelmann to become academy astronomer in Berlin, in 1710.

Global Warming Hysteria

Art Hobson most probably overstates the case with his assertion that essentially all knowledgeable scientists buy the idea that we have a human-caused global warming (Letters, P&S, 29(2), April 2000). In fact, many don't. Most of the sources Hobson quotes are items of political propaganda, not of science, and there is quite a difference between the two (see, e.g. , Freeman J. Dyson, "The Science and Politics of Climate", American Physical Society News, Vol. 8(5), May 1999, page 12). It is worth to recall that before the global warming hysteria kicked in, the predominate scare-mongering was of up-coming New Ice Age, not of warming. When a sudden change of decorations occurred (in 1977), many former Ice Age apocaliptics promptly jumped into the global warming bandwagon. Cat knows where the ham is. The central point here is not what is "really" coming on us (freezing, frying, or some other nightmare) but that public alarmism of any kind handsomely pays off, politically and economically. And those who pay, they order the music. For example, in a Realpolitik of the present-day academic life it is much easier to get a research grant if it pretends to say something about the control of the so called green-house emissions. I know, I just got one.

Alexander A. Berezin
Department of Engineering Physics
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8S 4L7

Association des Ecologists Pour le Nucleaire

As a member of the Forum, I would like to introduce the readers of the Newsletter to the recently organized Association of Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy (EFN). EFN is a totally independent non-profit environmentalist organization based in France devoted to presenting complete and honest information on energy and the environment, to promoting the benefits of the peaceful application of nuclear energy for a cleaner world and to uniting people in favor of clean nuclear energy. Beginning in 1996, EFN grew up around Bruno Comby, a graduate of the elite Ecole Polytechnique with an advanced degree in nuclear engineering and author of the French best-seller "Le Nucleaire Avenir de l'Ecology ?" (about to appear in English as "Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy"). He appeared in a number of TV debates in which he faced the Executive Director of Greenpeace and representatives of other anti-nuclear organizations. The publication of the book and his first interviews led to threats, anonymous telephone calls, insults and other indirect attacks by anti-nuclear groups and individuals. In reaction a number of prominent French scientists joined together to defend Comby's point of view ; they created the Association des Ecologists Pour le Nucleaire (AEPN), EFN in English, to promote nuclear energy for a better and cleaner planet. It is EFN's view that the environmentalists' opposition to nuclear energy is the greatest misunderstanding and mistake of the 20th century. One need hardly explain to the members of the P & S Forum that well managed nuclear energy is safe and very clean; it does not dump polluting gases into the atmosphere, it uses relatively little construction materiel compared to solar electric and wind energy (per kWh capacity), it produces a very small volume of waste as compared to coal and oil (and that waste is almost totally confined) and it does not contribute to the greenhouse effect (for it emits no carbon dioxide). True environmentalists should therefore be in favor of nuclear energy, and the purpose of EFN is to inform the public of its environmental benefits. EFN's members now constitute a world-wide cross-section of people who are concerned for the future of the planet and who want to keep it clean and protect nature by substituting nuclear and renewable energies in place of coal, oil and gas. EFN circulates a petition which has to date over 3500 signatures. There are Sympathizing Members, Active Members and Benefactors; as well as a Scientific Committee and an Honorific Committee. Visit the web-site : WWW.ECOLO.ORG or write in English or French to EFN@ECOLO.ORG.

Berol Robinson
1, rue du General Gouraud, F-92190 MEUDON, France
Telephone: 01 46 26 02 05(from France) 331 46 26 02 05(from elsewhere)
101 556.1577@compuserve.com

Demarcation Between Science and Religion?

The writer of the commentary, "Science Education and Religion — Science Conversations" in the July 2000 issue of Physics and Society is to be commended for a very thoughtful and collegial statement of how science and religion (especially Christianity) should conduct dialogue. I also agree with his statement of personal belief, and would add to it the old adage that "the Bible is not a science text, and science has nothing to say about the spiritual world. " Therefore, the two should be complementary, not antagonistic.

Further, I would caution writers who are arguing the "science side" of various science-religion debates, such as Adrian Melott, against becoming too strident in their criticism of Christian or other theistic points of view. While I doubt any physicists adhere to creation cosmologies that require a short lifetime for the universe and other tenets inconsistent with experimental measurements, many (probably most) physicists are themselves Christians. Certainly, those scientists who reject the need for or possibility of a Creator God do not speak for the entire scientific community or for the American Physical Society.

Ronald I. Miller, (256) 313-7179
Defense Intelligence Agency
Missile and Space Intelligence Center
ATTN: MSD-4, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama 35898-5500

Demarcation Between Science and Non-science?

I wanted to start off saying that I really enjoyed P&S, Vol.29, #3. Most of the time when I get physics publications I am only interested in reading one or two articles and then I throw it out. This issue was so full of interesting articles, commentary and letters that I practically read it cover to cover. I did have one minor disagreement with one of the letters: "Science and Creationism" by Derek Walton. In his letter he said that there is not a rigorous method to distinguish science and non-science and quoted something by Larry Laudan. I have not heard of Larry Laudan or seen his method for showing this; however I disagree on an instinctual level with this position and would require proof of this indistinguishability. It seems to me that the difference is summed up quite nicely in a quote I heard once (although I cannot remember from where) "Acceptance without proof is the fundamental precept of western Religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental precept of western Science. " This seems to me to be a good basis for a rigorous demarcation between science and non-science. One could examine the number of assumptions used within a theory and compare with the amount of evidence in support (or contrary) to each assumption. This could provide a sort of chi-squared test of the scientific feasibility of any proposed theory. Something more rigorous than Occam's razor yet not as mathematically feasible as a standard chi-squared test. The initial difficulty in describing the difference between science and non-science is much akin to the initial difficulty in describing the difference between a sleeping live person and a recently dead person. At first it's so obvious that one cannot put the difference into words, there just is one; however upon further investigation it is obvious that there are subtle but easily verified differences.

William E. Butler
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Bausch and Lomb Hall 206, University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627-0171

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. "

Jules Henri Poincare

There Is No Demarcation!

by Dr. Walton

The comment in my letter was based on an article, "The demise of the demarcation problem" in vol.76 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by R.S.Cohen and L.Laudan, to which I refer the reader.

Dr. Butler seems to be claiming that science is distinguished by it's methodology. However as Laudan points out this is complicated by lack of agreement on what that methodology is. This makes it very difficult to fault purveyors of scientifically questionable points of view, e.g. creationists, parapsychologists, etc. . To make matters worse questionable science can often be found in well-accepted scentific areas: e.g. some aspects of palaeomagnetism in geophysics, some scientific dating techniques in archaeology.

I would like to end with this quote from Laudan's article

"Through certain vagaries of history, we have managed to conflate two quite distinct questions: What makes a belief well-founded (or heuristically fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? The first set of questions is philosophically interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question is both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past, intractable. If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science' and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases that do emotive work for us. "

Derek Walton
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
McMaster University

Sunpower: the Benefits of Foresight

A 2025 Sustainable Energy Scenario

Dr. Aviva Brecher

Ed. Note: This rosy 2035 scenario is based on the assumption that today’s research and technology options for renewable energy generation, conservation and storage will be widely implemented over the next decades. Successful adoption of new energy technologies requires also stricter energy efficiency standards and tax incentives to favor "green" technologies and materials. Web resources linked to the Climate Change Information Network and US Joint Implementation program (IUEP) at http://www.ji.org and the DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) National Center for PhotoVoltaics at http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv illustrate state of art US photo-voltaic (PV) and solar energy power generators, and show the diverse international uses of solar power. The technology options mentioned below are being deployed all over the world TODAY!

A Summer Day in Techachapi Pass, Death Valley-2035
Death Valley is lovely at this time of year in our sci-tech retirement community, Evergreen. There are about 50 of us, retired scientists and engineers here, who live in a sustainable community in the Tehachapi Pass areaNow in my mid-eighties, I sleep lightly: At 5 am I woke to the whirr of the solar concentrator mirrors, as they started tracking the Sun; then, the whisper of cool fresh air came on in response to the climate control thermostat. . On this June morning, I rose early to enjoy the rosy glow of sunrise over the desert piped into my quarters. The birds in the greenery above my see-through ceiling came to life.

We live underground, in a warren of interconnected tunnels and caverns of the many abandoned gold and silver mines scattered over Death Valley, which we have stabilized, reinforced with plastic fiber composites and connected with a forest of light-pipes to the surface. This helps us stay cool in the summer and warm during the cold nights year-round. With this energy-efficient architecture we can get plenty of sunlight, though the light is filtered by the fiberoptics piping it into every corner of our living quarters. Scanning vidicams light up our walls with ever-changing views of mountain peaks and desert valleys, so National Park scenery is scrolling along the corridors and walls no matter where we are during the day.

I love my life here because I chose it when I joined Evergreen upon retiring from my power engineer job about the turn of the millennium. At that time, there were several renewable alternative energy production units being tried out here, including geothermal steam, solar-electric and wind-power demos. Here was the largest wind energy field in the world in the late 90’s, producing 650 MW of power for the booming Nevada and California energy markets

Walking into my bathroom I enter a cylindrical spray-shower using recycled brackish water, also used for our hydroponic farming. The brackish deep water and channelled winter flash floods of Death Valley are budgeted and husbanded for myriad uses. Even our native blind pupfish found here in underground caverns thrive on it: our large fish-farming operation supplies protein for several neighboring communities. We can always supplement our reservoir with water pumped through underground feeders from Lake Mead or Salt Lake Desalinated, but we are pretty much self -sufficient.

I put on my light home-weaved hemp summer garb. The hardy hemp has become our high carbon and high fiber crop of choice: we use the stem fibers for clothing, carpets and baskets. Hemp leaves are harvested by Vegas Mega-Pharm, a pharmaceutical conglomerate that replaced the gambling casinos and nuclear waste storage as the cash industry of Nevada. These days, the Yucca Mountain nucwaste repository harbors a thermal co-generation plant, producing steam for our winter heating and for turbines powering the myriad regional small industries.

I switch on my tele-wall, where diffuse-light panels are now scrolling today's news headlines and Evergreen’s planned events. I just picked a few fresh strawberries for my osteoporosis-control hi-calcium breakfast mix. They grow uptop, in our hydroponic fruit-and-veggies farm, putting our recycled wastewater to good use. Ken, the agrotech in our complex, was already working and marking the patches ripe for today's picking, to shield tomorrow's crop from early risers like me. No more coffee either: our chicory-roast mix is better for the environment. The hi-protein soy and quinona bread is already baking and toasting in our solar-powered oven outside in the plaza. There is little milk these days, since energy wasteful and environmentally damaging cows and pasturelands are long since gone in the West. Our decarbonized economy nurtures only bio-efficient feed cycles for poultry and fish farming.

I walk over with my strawberries and cereal mix to join my friends, Ruth and Ellen, for breakfast. They too are aging "baby boomer" scientists, who joined the Evergreen coop-community in the early days of the new millennium. We spent a lot of time then coaching local industry start-ups free of charge, supplementing at nearby schools traditional teaching with our hands-on laboratory of social unit reinvention. We are still both dreamers and doers, active in daily communal work and electronic lobbying for the Gray Panthers, now the most powerful lobby in both the State and the Union Congress.

We chat, relax and plan our days together in supportive friendship, looking forward to the upcoming annual visits from our grandchildren, about to be let out of school for the summer break. We plan to run a science camp for our young relatives at Evergreen; and also teach desert survival and closed-cycle industrial arts. It's a short summer break, since schools now go on year round. No wonder, since there is so much more to learn these days!

I dial-up on the tele-wall viewer the live-link for Furnace Creek Ranch, the solar furnace industrial plant where my son is the chief engineer. With its miles of Photo-Voltaic arrays and mirrors, this solar energy plant powers half of Nevada. It also stores surplus electric energy in its Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) unit, to distribute by an underground High Temperature Superconducting wire grid to cluster- communities California, Nevada, Utah or Arizona. The solar furnace will be melting glass today for the road maintenance crews: glass top surfacing has replaced over the past 3 decades all petroleum- based pitch pavements after the end-of-century oil crisis. Next week the plant is scheduled to process thermoset fiber-composites for vehicles and modular housing. I know he is busy programming and checking out the concentrator, so I take no chances: I send an e-mail reminding him that he and the family are to come over for dinner tonight.

After breakfast, I will work on the "fun-experiments" for the summer’s science camp, designed to both engage and teach the children applied science principles. As I walk over to the teaching labs, I muse on the striking changes in the way we live and learn in America now in contrast to the early years. Much has happened since defederalization: the Union was transformed from a strong federation to individualistic, competing States. Within each State, regional compacts were established and a myriad small, but self-sufficient communities like ours sprang up. The decentralization and fragmentation of federal and State governments gave way to local governance, enabled by the diffusion of technical knowledge and by a strong infrastructure.

This rapid change was precipitated by the deregulation of the energy industry, which forced utilities to compete for local markets and to diversify. They quickly replaced the antiquated fossil power plants with a broad range of renewables: from wind turbines in the plains and on mountain tops, to geothermal power around volcanic belts and faultlines, from tidal energy along the ocean shores to hydropower in the Rockies, from solar houses in the old Sunbelt to saline solar ponds in Utah. The interlinked sets of compact generators trade on demand and enabled each region now to optimally exploit its own energy niche. Here in Death Valley, the mountaintops are sporting wind-turbine farms. Desalination plants irrigate the thirsty California farming filds and orchards.

Both Nevada and California are tapping into geothermal fields for power generation: steam is piped through thermally insulated tubing to both industry and homes, or used to store the energy chemically. Sun-belt States are now fully powered by solar energy, using direct-conversion PV technology. The PV arrays shine on the ground level roofs and above the roof gardens of ground-insulated sunken houses, which heat water, produce power for efficient diffuse wall- lighting, and can store energy for off-peak use. Stand-alone fuel cells are also widely used to power hospitals, plants and public buildings, using municipal wastes as primary fuels.

Not far from here, the Great Salt Lake has been converted to a saline pond for solar to chemical energy conversion and storage. The Badlands are now green-lands due to the major climate changes from greenhouse gases (GHG), which led to large-scale planting to remove and fixate excess carbon. Its true that global warming has caused so much upheaval these last decades, but it also brought decisive action and improved understanding of how to manage the downside and exploit the upside.

True, the global climate is still changing, but we can foresee and prepare for regional trends. Indeed, our local weather is unpredictable, but our superfast teraflop optical computers can handle better the complexity of 3-dimensional climate models. We have learned to test and deploy new energy technologies on a small scale first, to understand and improve them before large-scale applications reveal unforeseen and damaging environmental and ecological impacts. Scientists and engineers increasingly pay for our research as we benefit from new and profitable technologies; we no longer depend on government tax funding, which dried up gradually in the new millennium. So, let’s face this brave new world of our own making!

I look beyond the Ranch Creek Concentrator plant and recall vividly what happened around our Death Valley: in the early twenties, mining was abandoned for construction. Sands were processed into pure silicon chips, strong ceramics and amorphous glass, doped glass semiconductors and durable PV's. All these can now be made at low temperatures. The prefabricated homes are now assembled from panels with embedded fiberoptic cable and wall-panel lighting electronics. The "smart panels" are assembled into a module, which can self-regulate temperature, lighting and ventilation.

At night, we no longer see the blinding, wasteful lights of Las Vegas that yesteryear could be seen from the International Space Station. This is the silver lining of the oil crisis, which hit America. We can now see the stars lighting the night-sky again. At Evergreen and across the continent the astronomers have recaptured the night skies for research. When we go out at night, we can wear night-goggles that allow us to see clearly people, animals and objects based on infrared signature from stored, residual, or body heat.

The noisy cars and trucks that once gridlocked our megacities roads and interstate highways are also good for my story telling to summer science campers. Even the automated people movers do not have lights to pollute the night-skies, but use instead infrared detectors and deter animals from encroaching on guideways with electromagnetic and subsonic pulses. We now ship freight in underground piping, slurried with CO2 gas. The iron-rich hulks of cars, trucks and diesel trains have long since been recycled. Noisy and polluting gasoline-powered engines have all been replaced by next generation clean and efficient powertrains and propulsion fuels: silent electric motors whirr on each wheel, fuel cells get refueled at the central stations. In Nevada and at Evergreen, the small shuttle cars sport PV-covered-roofs to provide auxiliary power. All workplaces and community centers provide fast and energy-efficient radio-frequency (RF) charging stations. Long distance highway travel is all but gone. . .In Alaska, they still use dogsleds in remote corners, but power-sleds use oxygenated fuels and lightcraft use compressed natural gas. Reformer plants and hydrogen cycle generators, which convert ocean water into hydrogen fuel and fertilizers chemicals, have sprung up along both the East and West coasts.

Oregon and Washington have long since burned out the old forests and now sequester carbon with new crops, which produce vegetable oils, pulp and fiber for energy fuels and a host of new furniture pressed pulp products. New England has really diversified its energy base to hydropower, wind and CNG: each home has a whirring wind turbine and solar panels on the roof. Canada’s Sable Island natural gas fields fuel New England's convoy-trucks, but most vehicles for freight are turn-of-millenium hybrids, and the new urban commuter station cars use fuel cells. Cars are made these days from cold-rolled recycled metal or from light cast or preformed composites, but there are few who can afford them. The paratransit intelli-van service is on-call round-the-clock in the countryside, while urban megaplexes sport silent linear-motor cars on elevated guideways, fetching people to and from work in resurrected urban centers.

Later on today, the California-Nevada maglev train will drop our grandchildren from Las Vegas. From the terminal a programmed shuttle-bus will deliver them to Evergreen, riding on shiny, white glass-topped highways that do not absorb and store heat nor require frequent use of toxic tars. The UV shield should protect them from the sun damage, and the video-games built into the seats will keep them entertained. I wonder what their future will be like, since the technology we have developed in the last century would have never been applied without the great oil crisisof the 2010s. Oh, well, we can always count on the next energy scare to break the apathy and energy complacency we have faced in cycles for the past century and plan for the next generation of energy technologies.

Dr. Aviva Brecher
Senior Scientist
US DOT Volpe National Transportation Systems Center
55 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02142
617-494-3470

Dark World

Ruth Howes

We're physicists. Numbers tell us stories. We recognize the human implications of numbers in tables. This crude sketch of the life of a typical American family applies a bit of imagination to the facts underlying the hard numbers.

On an early February morning in 2030, Darrow, Pennsylvania lay quiet under a thin blanket of snow. Charles Smith shivered as he crossed the family room on his way to the kitchen. A warm, wet January had suddenly given way to subzero February temperatures and unusual draught.

Television pundits attributed the strange weather to global warming. At least the U.S. had been spared the famines that swept Asia when monsoon patterns changed. Local crop failures in the midwest were balanced by bumper crops in the Dakotas and Canada. These days, nobody except The Old Farmers Almanac claimed to predict the weather accurately.

Stepping carefully around his sleeping children, Smith turned up the heat. The family mostly lived in the kitchen during the winter cold to reduce crippling oil bills for heating. Using only one room reduced expenses for electricity. In warmer weather, the family expanded back into three bedrooms and the living and dining rooms.

While Smith started breakfast, his wife and two children gradually assembled near the kitchen stove. Patricia who was 17 had bitterly protested the fur lining in her new bathrobe, but Smith noted that she huddled into it looking warm. Furs might be cruel to animals, but artificial fabrics based on petroleum products were too expensive for everyday use. The family carefully preserved their metal cookware and stoneware dishes since plastic was so expensive that it was used mainly for decorative objects. Smith almost laughed out loud when he read a report from the 1990s about landfills crowded with plastics and even artificial diapers that were covered in plastic sheets.

As usual, Patricia begged to use her hair dryer, an energy guzzler if there ever was one. Her friend Sally used hers every day. Sally's mother worked as a housekeeper for one of the OPEC industrial managers, and her family lived in company housing with free energy. As the cost of energy increased, OPEC dumped its petroleum profits into American industries. Their managers lived very well compared to the American employees.

Smith wished that somebody had thought carefully about energy at the start of the twenty-first century. The coal plants that sustained the national electrical power grid were devouring the U.S. coal supply. The country had decided not to deplete its coal as the U.S. had depleted its petroleum and natural gas. Electric power prices were kept high until new energy sources could be brought on line.

In the first years of the 21st century, Congress saved money to meet the growing demands of Social Security by cutting research on renewable energy sources. Nuclear fission and fusion programs were canceled in 2009 because of massive public protests against them. Ten years ago, the Department of Energy restarted the research, but the decade without funds had killed the programs. Bright scientists turned to other, more lucrative fields. The U.S. still led the world in developing special effects for movies, but the country trailed Europe and Asia in energy research.

The Smith family settled quietly to eat their breakfast. Smith was grateful that their relatively rural environment guaranteed a supply of fresh milk and eggs for the children. Periodic fuel shortages meant sudden cut offs of fresh food in cities. Both Los Angeles and New York had had major riots in December when the inner city poor demanded a supply of basic foods. Even in rural areas, meat was prohibitively expensive because diesel fuel, agricultural chemicals and fertilizer had become very costly. Smith thought the low fat diet that most Americans currently consumed was healthier for them than the meat rich food of their parents' generation. Still, it would be nice to have a real steak on special occasions.

The family washed quickly, conserving hot water. They bathed only on Saturday nights which saved enormous quantities of water. Patricia complained, but all her friends did the same. Bundled in furs, the family set out for work and school. Fortunately the children could walk. Many students in rural areas had become boarding students, returning home only on weekends to save expensive gasoline. Fourteen year old Chuck knew his basketball team did not have enough gasoline to go to the state tournament although the team had worked hard for its winning season.

Mary, Smith's wife, walked to the local clinic where she worked as a nurse. The clinic did not have a resident physician, and few people could afford the gasoline to travel the ten miles to the next town which had both a hospital and a doctor. Mary's clinic was linked to the hospital and its staff through the world wide web so she could refer questions to experts when she needed help. For cases requiring hospitalization, the clinic had a special supply of gasoline paid for by the town taxes.

The fuel had to be used very carefully if it were to last through the year. National gasoline supplies were so limited that the hospital could not obtain extra fuel at any price. All government supplies were dedicated to the military. Even though the U.S. no longer stationed soldiers abroad and training exercises had been cut to the bone, planes still had to be fueled, and tanks needed oil and gasoline to run. National security came first.

Charles worked for a subsidiary of OPEC Industries which provided transportation for its employees. He walked to the bus stop, and as usual, admired the expensive energy efficient van developed and produced by the French. It got nearly 150 miles per gallon when it was fully loaded.

The American automobile industry had made huge inefficient luxury cars and massive SUVs until its demise in 2015 during the petroleum crisis caused by the Triangular War. Israel, Iraq and Iran had battled over Saudi Arabia effectively decimating their own populations with chemical weapons and also cutting off the flow of oil from the Middle East. Oil supplies had recovered faster than the devastated nations because of the fast action of the OPEC cartel. In spite of such industrial casualties as the automobile industry, the U.S. had rapidly returned to business as usual, lulled into false security by cheap and plentiful oil for energy. A few industries had switched to domestic natural gas, and the exponential increase in consumption quickly depleted what had seemed to be a large supply.

The van travelled as fast as it could while dodging the ever-present pot holes. Road repairs cost petroleum. Climbing to the ridge, it passed a series of elegant summer homes now boarded up for the winter. Most of the homes belonged to wealthy Japanese who had adopted this rural corner of Pennsylvania because they liked the cool hills in the summer and the wildlife that still lived there. They bought up American farms as increasing energy prices drove family farmers off the land. Beside Smith in the van, George Jones coughed painfully. Asthma had increased to epidemic proportions during the winter cold exacerbated by the ever-present dust from the nearby power plant which burned low-grade coal.

Smith worked as a supervisor. He had not been able to travel to a university or afford to live near one. Instead he had taken courses delivered over the web. By hard work and doing every problem in his text books, he had managed to pass the examinations for his engineer's license. He felt lucky to have the steady work, and the salary that went with it. High school classmates who lacked his determined work ethic found themselves migrating from factory to factory as labor demands shifted.

An optimist, Smith realized that Congress had finally recognized that the U.S. faced severe problems with its energy supplies. Bills to construct mass transport systems and to tap the energy of nuclear fission had passed seven years earlier, and the public works projects had begun to make life easier. Genetically engineered crops fought insects and weeds without the need for petroleum-based fertilizers and insecticides. Smith felt confident that the America of 2050 would regain the industrial leadership and quality of life of the late twentieth century.

With a final glance at the country side, shining in the morning Sun, Smith turned into the factory to begin his shift.

Ruth Howes
Dept. of Physics and Astonomy
Ball State university, Muncie, IN 47306

Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: a Study in German Culture

By Paul Laurence Rose, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, ISBN 0-520-21077-8

More than 50 years after the end of World War II, controversy continues to swirl around Werner Heisenberg and his role in the German nuclear project. The project was a failure: the Germans made no serious effort to develop an atomic bomb and even their attempt to build a nuclear reactor did not succeed, although by the war’s end they were very close. The controversy involves two questions, one technical and the other moral: how well did Heisenberg understand the physics of a nuclear explosion, and what was his attitude toward working on a project that could create an atomic bomb for Hitler? The books under review shed new light on both questions.

Heisenberg was not a Nazi but he considered himself a patriotic German and declined repeated invitations to flee to the West. He readily accepted the call to lead the German nuclear project even though, as he claimed in a 1965 interview, the possibility of making atomic bombs "created a horrible situation for all physicists, especially for us Germans…because the idea of putting an atomic bomb in Hitler’s hand was horrible [1]."

The German project at first progressed at about the same pace as that of the Western Allies. By early 1942, however, Heisenberg had decided that making a bomb within the short time frame imposed by the Nazi leadership would be impossible. "We were happily able to give the authorities an absolutely honest account of the latest development, and yet feel certain that no serious attempt to construct atomic bombs would be made in Germany," he explained [2]. He was spared the moral dilemma of deciding what to do if the bomb seemed achievable. His account might, to be sure, be self-serving. If he had tried his best to build a bomb for the Nazis and just failed, he would hardly have admitted it publicly after the war. But the physics community, with a few exceptions, generally accepted his explanation.

At the end of the war Heisenberg and nine other German scientists were interned at Farm Hall in Britain, where their conversations were secretly recorded. British authorities declassified those conversations only in 1992; the raw transcripts were published under the title Operation Epsilon. A new edition with commentary and additional background material by Jeremy Bernstein was published in 1996. Bernstein’s contributions add immeasurably to the value of the book, which is required reading for anyone seriously interested in the subject.

The most fascinating parts of the Farm Hall transcripts are the conversations that took place just after the Hiroshima bombing was announced. The Germans at first speculated that the weapon was not a true atomic bomb. After confirming that it was, they tried to figure out how the bomb had been made and conducted a post mortem on their own project, including some recriminations and apportioning of blame.

The transcripts contain a wealth of information about Heisenberg’s understanding of bomb physics. They show that he understood the difference between a reactor and a bomb and that he did realize that fast neutrons are essential for an explosion. But they also reveal some serious misconceptions. Heisenberg apparently believed that several tons of pure 235U are needed to make a bomb. He made the astonishing disclosure that he had never calculated the critical mass. "Quite honestly I have never worked it out, as I never believed one could get pure 235," he told Otto Hahn. He thereupon performed a crude calculation, based on a random-walk argument, which contains a basic error and yields a critical mass of one ton, far greater than the correct value of about 50 kg[3]. A week later, he presented a more sophisticated derivation, which yields a much lower critical mass. Bernstein gives a lucid analysis of the entire episode.

Confusion persists over Heisenberg’s ideas concerning the critical mass. When Hahn reminded him that he "used to say that one needed 50 kg of 235 in order to do anything," Heisenberg replied equivocally: "I wouldn’t like to commit myself for the moment." When asked at a 1942 briefing for Army officials how big an atomic bomb would have to be in order to destroy London, Heisenberg replied "as big as a pineapple." And a February 1942 German Army report, whose authorship is unknown but which Mark Walker attributes to Heisenberg, contains the statement that "10-100 kg of material" might be sufficient for a bomb.

What is one to make of all this? My best guess is that, although Heisenberg never made a detailed calculation of the critical mass, he believed all along that it is very large. His Farm Hall calculation sounds like a reenactment of one previously performed, not like something concocted on the spur of the moment. If he had on some earlier occasion calculated a much smaller critical mass, he would have remembered it. The smaller numbers cited might refer to the amount of uranium that must fission in order to produce an appreciable weapon yield, a quantity quite different from the critical mass. Another possibility is that the smaller figures refer to plutonium rather than uranium.

During the days that followed, the German scientists discussed the reasons for the failure of their own project as well as the morality of making a bomb. Those discussions formed the genesis of the "Lesart" (German for "version") which attributes moral superiority to the Germans. Carl von Weizsacker put it most directly: "History will record that …the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war." The Lesart was promoted by a number of writers, notably the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk[4].

Thomas Powers went even farther, asserting that "Heisenberg did not simply withhold himself, stand aside, and let the project die. He killed it [5]." Powers’ evidence is flimsy and his assessment is not widely shared by scholars. Heisenberg himself never publicly claimed to have sabotaged the project [6].

The Lesart is a fatuous argument. When the German scientists initiated their project it was not at all clear that making a bomb would prove to be impossible. The Germans were aware, moreover, that a reactor produces plutonium, which can be used as fuel for a nuclear explosive; hence reactor research cannot be characterized as being purely peaceful. Finally, as the Farm Hall transcripts reveal, several of the German scientists regretted that they had failed to make a bomb. Only Hahn and Max von Laue are unequivocally repelled by atomic weapons. Heisenberg is circumspect on the subject.

Sam Goudsmit, the leader of the mission that followed the invading armies in 1945 to investigate the status of the Nazi bomb program, was incensed at the arrogance of the Lesart. I knew Goudsmit quite well (as did Bernstein) and can attest to the depth of his feelings. He was convinced that the German scientists were willing participants in the Nazi project, whose failure he attributed to scientific blunders and the repressive Nazi administrative system. Goudsmit expressed these views forcefully in his book Alsos, published just after the war, as well as in several magazine articles. There followed an acrimonious exchange of letters between himself and Heisenberg; the two had been close friends before the war.

The historian Paul Lawrence Rose is Goudsmit’s spiritual heir. His book contends that Heisenberg’s account of the German project is consistently and intentionally misleading, an attempt to cover up his scientific blunders and to protect his reputation. Rose uses the Farm Hall transcripts skillfully to support his argument. His book is meticulously documented and makes a strong case, although his argument seems somewhat overstated. Rose’s antipathy toward Heisenberg is apparent from the first page; his book reads more like a polemic than a scholarly work. He is scathingly critical of practically everyone who has written on the subject. A more objective approach would have made his argument more credible. His book is nonetheless a valuable contribution to the debate and deserves careful study. Ultimately, each reader must be the judge of Heisenberg’s true feelings.

1. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg’s War: the Secret History of the German Bomb, Alfred A Knopf, 1993, p. 584.

2. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 180.

3. Heisenberg’s calculation in fact leads to an even greater critical mass–about 13 tons. His value 1 ton was a numerical error.

4. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958.

5. Powers, op cit, p. 479.

6. In Biography of an Idea, Ruth Nanda Anshen quotes Heisenberg as writing to her in 1970 that "Dr. Hahn, Dr. von Laue, and I falsified the mathematics in order to avoid development of the bomb by German science." No such letter appears in Heisenberg’s files and Nanshen’s own copy is inexplicably missing; both Hahn and Laue were dead by that time. The story does not ring true: the only mathematics that might have been falsified would have been a calculation of the critical mass, which, as noted above, Heisenberg never performed. Hahn was not a theorist and understood very little about the chain reaction, and Laue had no connection with the nuclear project. Paul Rose is nonetheless convinced that the letter is genuine.

Leo Sartori
144 Porter St., Granby, MA 01033

Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project

by Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, Temple University Press 1999, 280 pp, 44 b&w photos, $34.50, ISBN 1 56639 719 7

At Cambridge in the 1940s physicist friends went away to a mysterious project "in a compound in the western American desert, where once inside, you weren’t allowed out." Sidgwick in Oxford was even less discreet, remarking in his Chemistry lectures that the publication of work on uranium had suddenly stopped with the war, and "students of mine say they’re out in the desert in America making a bomb out of it."

There was less tongue-wagging within the Manhattan project, where uranium was "tube alloy" and plutonium was "product." As the project competed for scientists and engineers with radar and the armed services, many women worked with men in the laboratories and test sites: at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, separating uranium isotopes for the reactor to produce plutonium, at Hanford, Washington, where nuclear reactors to make plutonium were built, and at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was designed and constructed. Non-technical wives at Los Alamos were persuaded into scientific, engineering and computing work with offers of domestic help and nursery schools.

The women’s contribution is now commemorated by two distinguished women physicists, Professor Ruth H. Howes, Ball State University, and Caroline L. Herzenberg, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois. Half a century is a long time for retrieving personal memories. A research program was mounted to track the women among the 130,000 people on the project, through family and old girl networks: The authors and Ellen Weaver, who contributes a Foreword, are involved in AWIS, the Association for Women in Science. Appendix 1 lists 365 women on the project, many of them pioneer students of mathematics or physics at their colleges and universities; 119 were technicians or lab assistants.

The authors commemorate the "founding mothers", women pioneers in nuclear science: Ida Tacke Noddack, Marie Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie, and Marguerite Perey are well known. Lise Meitner coined the term nuclear fission, and should have shared the Nobel prize with Hahn. Chien-Shiung Wu’s experiments confirmed Yang and Lee’s hypothesis of parity violation, for which they (but not she) became Nobelists. Maria Goeppert-Mayer finally achieved a professorship after she shared the 1963 Nobel prize for the shell structure of the nucleus.

Lise Meitner, although unhappy in Stockholm, refused to go to the United States during the War, and would have nothing to with the bomb. Rotblat withdrew from the Manhattan project when it was clear that the Nazis were not developing nuclear weapons, working on rockets instead. But many of the scientists associated with these devastating weapons--Einstein, Fermi, Szilard, Teller, Wigner--were refugees from Europe, where nuclear physics had come of age. Knowing the dangers of Nazism they expected the bomb to save lives.

Successive chapters commemorate the physicists, chemists, mathematicians and calculators, biological and medical scientists, technicians, truck drivers, switchboard operators, secretaries and clerks. The categories are deceptive: many so-called secretaries carried major administrative responsibilities. General Leslie Groves, who headed the project, selected first one and then another highly competent executive officer, who was then assigned to other urgent duties. "Consequently", he recorded in 1962, "I ... relied instead upon my chief secretary, who became my chief administrative assistant. With her exceptional talents, and her exceptional capacity for and willingness to work, Mrs O’Leary more than fulfilled my highest expectations." We hope, but doubt, that her pay was commensurate with her responsibilities. Jean O’Leary was barely 30, recently widowed with a small daughter, when she was assigned to Groves. The General was described as being rough on secretaries, showing a complete lack of consideration for his subordinates" feelings, almost never dispensing praise!

At Hanford wives were asked if they could cook. If they said yes, they were trained in analytical chemistry. If they could sew, they were taken on to count radiation, a tedious operation, done by stop-watch, clearly appropriate to women needleworkers! Later, of course, counting was automated. An architecture graduate became draftsman for Little Boy, the uranium-gun bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Many did work that could not be published, and their achievements were not recognised.

Some women were trained in mathematics, some others told "there is no place in higher math for women." Many women "computers" worked on simulations of the detonation of uranium by implosion, a process too fast to be measured. At first they used primitive desk calculators "needing nearly infinite patience"--clearly women’s work. In 1943 IBM brought out punched card machines, Feynman declared a race, and the machines won.

During the thirties Depression only women’s colleges offered faculty positions to women. On the project the glass ceiling held firm, despite personnel shortages. Nepotism rules prevented a husband and wife working in the same division. Women were hired to fill gaps and to save money--they were not paid or promoted in proportion to their value and their efforts. Leaders and managers were men, younger men supervised older women with more experience. No women were team leaders, but Charlotte Serber, whose husband worked with Oppenheimer, was scientific librarian.

Safety was meant to be strict. A notice in the Met (metallurgical) Lab said "Have you had your hands counted today?" Of course, there were many horror stories: of shampooing plutonium from people’s head(s), of a woman who worked on Fermi’s pile until two days before she gave birth.

The authors’ Prologue acknowledges mixed feelings: "When the work began, most of the women naturally focused on the urgent need to produce a weapon that would end the war. After Hiroshima, they saw their work ... as a major contribution to the victory ... Many were nonetheless shocked by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and went on to play active roles in the struggle for civilian control of nuclear power and the disarmament movement that followed the war..." There is no sign of a female Strangelove, but the book could usefully mention Pugwash.

Dr Joan Mason,
12 Hills Avenue
Cambridge CB1 7XA, U.K.

Physics and Society is the non-peer-reviewed quarterly newsletter of the Forum on Physics and Society, a division of the American Physical Society. It presents letters, commentary, book reviews and articles on the relations of physics and the physics community to government and society. It also carries news of the Forum and provides a medium for Forum members to exchange ideas. Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum. Contributed articles (up to 2500 words, technicalities are encouraged), letters (500 words), commentary (1000 words), reviews (1000 words) and brief news articles are welcome. Send them to the relevant editor by e-mail (preferred) or regular mail.

Editor: Al Saperstein, Physics Department, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, (313) 577-2733/ fax (313) 577-3932, ams@physics.wayne.edu. Articles Editor: Betsy Pugel, Loomis Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urban IL 61801, pugel@uiuc.edu. News Editor: Marc Sher, Physics Department, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg VA 23187, (757) 221-3538, sher@physics.wm.edu and Phil Goldstone, Los Alamos National Lab, pgoldstone@lanl.gov. Reviews Editor: Art Hobson, Physics Department, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, (501) 575-5918/fax (501) 575-4580, ahobson@comp.uark.edu. Electronic Media Editor: Marc Sher. Layout(for paper issues): Alicia Chang. Web manager for APS: Joanne Fincham

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