October 2022 Newsletter

Editor's Comments

Oriol T. Valls, the current Physics and Society Newsletter Editor, is a Condensed Matter theorist at the University of Minnesota.

Robert Jaffe is the latest recipient of the Forum’s Burton award. The award in his case was for his lifetime involvenet in Physics and Society issues. I am therefore extremely pleased to publish in this issue a long and informative article by Bob explaining how one can manage to navigate between research in Physics and the civic responsibilities that we have as scientists.We have also a very interesting and timely article by Charlotte Selton on nuclear threat reduction. In the last few months, the credible threat of nuclear war has clearly increased in a very alarming way.

I have a rather large amount of correspondence related to Ma’s article on progress in fusion, which appeared in April and I hope to have a follow up article on this question in the next issue. My comments about arXiv also produced feedback, but up to now not for publication (and some quite unprintable even by my liberal standards). Controversy is good, light and truth emerge from arguments. My only restriction is that “ad hominem” arguments are not acceptable. I hope to get reasoned and balance contributions on this subject for forthcoming publication.

The contents of this newsletter are largely reader driven. Please send your contributions and your suggestions. All topics related to Physics and Society, very broadly understood, are welcome. No pertinent controversial subject needs to be avoided. Content is not peer reviewed and opinions given are the author’s only, not necessarily mine, nor the Forum’s nor, a fortiori, the APS’s either. Letters to the Editor for publication are also welcome. Everything goes to me except Book Reviews which should be sent directly to the new book reviews editor Quinn Campagna (qcampagn@go.olemiss.edu). Art Hobson is retiring at the age of 87 after many years of faithful service to this newsletter. My debt to him, not only for his contributions as Book Reviews Editor, but for general advice on how to run things is huge.

Oriol T. Valls
University of Minnesota

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Forum News

New Book Reviews Editor

I am pleased to announce that, starting with this issue, we have a new Book Reviews Editor:

Quinn Campagna. Quinn is a third year graduate student at the University of Mississippi. Several of his reviews have already been published in past issues of this newsletter.

Quinn received his B.S. in physics from the College of William & Mary in 2020, and his M.S. in physics from the University of Mississippi in 2022. He is currently working on his PhD, as part of the Belle II experiment (see https://www.belle2.org).

He is also involved in several outreach projects aimed at bringing physics to the general public. This and his previous experience as a reviewer make him a very valuable addition to the editorial team and a worthy successor to the hard-to-replace Art Hobson. It has been a great pleasure to work with Art, who was already in charge of Book Reviews when I became Editor of this newsletter.

As reviews editor Quinn is planning to highlight books that make us think about our role as physicists in the wider world.

Suggestions for books to review, and correspondence relating to reviews should be sent to him directly, at qcampagn@go.olemiss.edu

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Articles

No Simple Trajectory:Navigating between Research in Theoretical Physics and the Civic Responsibility of a Scientist

Robert L. Jaffe

I was honored to receive the Burton Award and to be asked to speak at the APS meeting last April. As is clear from the citation

“For bringing a physics perspective into policy discussions in academia and government over the last half- century, from the development of the Stanford Workshops on Social and Political Is- sues to influential work on policy and education regarding critical elements, energy, and climate.”

the award was more like a “lifetime achievement award” than a recognition of a single event or creation. I never have been able to decide once and for all whether to immerse myself entirely in theoretical physics research or to engage with policy, education, and social activism around physics; my career re- flects this vacillation. The award and the title of the session in which my talk was placed1 encourage me to look back at this eccentric trajectory and try to distill some lessons to pass on to others, which I’ll try to summarize in this article.

Two episodes that bookend my career are the SWOPSI pro- gram at the outset and the creation of the course and textbook “The Physics of Energy” at the end. I’ll focus on these and also briefly mention some other projects in between. From SWOPSI I’d like to extract the lesson that young scientists can have an outsized impact when they embrace agency2 and act respon- sibly rather than seeing themselves as victims and waiting for others to address their concerns – something worth remem- bering during this time of crisis. The Physics of Energy provides some evidence that a theoretical physicist may remain use- ful after middle age. A theme that all these efforts share in common is independence — they began outside traditional administrative structures and bore fruit by dint of the effort and commitment of a small number of people.

1968

I received my first degree in physics in the summer of 1968, when violent protests were erupting in America and around the world. It was a time – not unlike the present – when I and many young students could not ignore the upheaval taking place around us. Princeton’s graduation took place on the 11th of June, just five days after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Other events during the spring of 1968 were equally or even more disturbing: Martin Luther King was as- sassinated early in April, igniting protests in many American cities; the Tet offensive in January 1968 destroyed the myth that America was winning the Vietnam War; the so-called Prague Spring was unfolding across Eastern Europe, while violent pro- tests were taking place in Paris and other European capitals; and close by at Columbia University hundreds of protesters and police were injured in repeated clashes. I felt compelled to address these events in the speech I had been asked to give at Princeton’s graduation. A quote from my speech captures the mood of the time[1, 2],

“Over all our years here has hung the specter of an unpopular and seemingly endless war, one which many of us also feel to be unjust. Alongside this conflict has risen another, sprung from the struggle of the blacks of our country to obtain equality and to find dignity. We have watched and found that we cannot wait for others to confront these issues ... We must go beyond institutional rearrangement and reform; we must ... effect profound changes inside the hearts and minds of the American people. We cannot alienate ourselves in our frustration and our discontent from the majority of Americans with whom we must communicate if we are to improve the country.”

Many of my classmates, myself included, were question- ing the careers that their education had aimed them toward.

Yet — despite the chaos outside, 1968 was a brilliant time for particle physics. Quarks and QCD were starting to emerge from the fog of the strong interactions and Weinberg had just published the work that would soon unravel the enigma of the weak interactions. The revolution known as the Standard Model was about to begin. In fact, in the summer of 1968, at the 14th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Vienna, an MIT-SLAC collaboration reported new data (Figure 1) showing the first evidence of “Bjorken scaling”, which we now understand to be tantamount to the discovery of physical quarks. What a time to be a young particle theorist heading to Stanford for graduate school!

Figure 1: Early data from the MIT-SLAC experiment showing evidence for Bjorken scaling

STANFORD AND SWOPSI

When I arrived at Stanford, I joined a group of scientists – mostly physicists – who saw the crises of 1968 as a call to become involved in the world of policy and politics. A key figure and inspiration in our group was Marty Perl,3 who was collaborating with other physicists in what was known “March 4th Movement”[3] – a project started by a group of scientists and engineers on the East Coast who were planning a day of activism focused on the Vietnam war. Incidentally the March 4th movement led more or less directly to both the formation of the APS Forum on Physics and Society and the creation of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Our group at Stanford was particularly focused on ways to continue activities beyond the single day of March 4, 1969.

Figure 2: The three students who started SWOPSI in photographs from that time.

What came out of that effort were the Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues, known affectionately as SWOPSI.SWOPSI was created and led by three Stanford students, under- graduate Joyce Kobayashi and two SLAC graduate students, Joel Primack and myself.4 Its aim was to actively engage Stanford students in study and action on urgent social and political issues, often centered around science. SWOPSI created and sponsored between 10 and 20 for-credit workshops at Stanford each term, well into the 1980s. The cover of the SWOPSI catalog from winter quarter 1971-72 conveys something of the spirit of those times (Figure 3).

It was a novel format: students were expected to go be- yond classroom study and take constructive action in the world outside the University. SWOPSI workshops published and advocated: From the publications such as the influential “Handbook on Air Pollution in the SF Bay Area” and “Ride On: The Stanford Guide to Public Transportation in the Bay Area”, to student trips to Sacramento to testify on legislation affecting logging of coastal redwoods in San Mateo County.

SWOPSI was created without the knowledge of Stanford University, by repurposing, or one might say subverting, a policy that allowed faculty to sponsor half-credit seminars on any topic whatsoever. SWOPSI organizers gamed this opportunity by enlisting sympathetic professors to sponsor workshops that they led or more often were led by their postdoctoral fellows or advanced graduate students. The first time that the Stanford Administration heard of SWOPSI was literally on Registration Day for the Fall Quarter in 1969, when the first SWOPSI “cata- logues” announcing a dozen for-credit workshops for that term were handed out from bridge tables at Registration. A sense of the breadth of the program is illustrated by the list of workshop topics from Winter Quarter 1970-71 (Figure 3). Notice how many of the workshop topics remain relevant 50 years later.

What lessons for today might one draw the SWOPSI project? First, agency – we saw an opportunity and acted. We regardedourselves as actors not victims. We did not ask Stanford to set up SWOPSI – after all, Stanford’s administration was in no mood to listen to students in those days anyway. Second, SWOPSI rose from the ground up, driven by individuals’ commitment, not from the top down, out of a committee’s recommendation or an administrator’s decision. Nevertheless, third, we sought and found powerful allies.5 In addition to Marty Perl, support came from Sid Drell who tolerated his students taking the time away from thesis research, from SLAC Director, Pief Panofsky, who allowed us access to SLAC resources, including govern- ment owned Xerox machines at SLAC where we copied literally thousands of announcements and catalogues, from statisti- cian Lincoln Moses, then Stanford’s Dean of Graduate Studies, who encouraged and mentored Joyce in particular, and from a few young faculty such as Dave Abernethy, who helped us with essential funding at the very beginning.6 Finally, several young scientists, who led workshops were nudged by SWOPSI along trajectories that led to lifelong careers at the interface of science and society. Examples include Frank Von Hippel, who led a workshop on Science Advice for Congress and the Public and went on to a distinguished career in public interest science that included founding and for many years leading Princeton’s Program on Science & Global Security, and Ned Groth, who led a very successful workshop on Air Pollution in the Bay Area. Ned is a life-long environmentalist and consumer advocate, for many years Senior Scientist at the Consumers Union.[4] And, of course, Joel and I brought the experience of SWOPSI to long careers at the interface of physics and society.

By 1972 SWOPSI was in the hands of other students. Throughout the birth of SWOPSI, Joel and I had remained deeply immersed in particle physics. (One should never underestimate the energy of graduate students!) We were participants in the quark revolution that had begun with SLAC’s deep inelastic electron scattering experiments and was rapidly replacing the old S-matrix paradigm of the strong interactions with a field theory of quarks and gluons. As I finished my degree in 1972, the pieces of QCD had been assembled; but quarks had never been seen and the paradox of quark confinement was on my mind: How could quarks interact relatively weakly with protons, but never be observed in isolation? Ken Johnson, who had thought deeply about this puzzle, was at SLAC on sabbatical from MIT. Inspired by Ken, Viki Weisskopf, and Francis Low, in 1972 I headed to MIT as a postdoc. I soon became part of a wonderful collaboration including Ken, Charles Thorn, Alan Chodos, and Viki, creating a model of confined quarks that became known as the MIT Bag Model,[5] which fascinated me for more than a decade, and led to several advances in particle theory.

Figure 3: Left: Cover of the SWOPSI catalog winter 1971-72; Right: SWOPSI Workshops winter quarter 1979-71

FLUCTUATIONS AT MIT

MIT’s physics department and the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) were home to many distinguished physicists of the postwar generation who applied their physics expertise in the wider arena of science and society — Viki Weisskopf, Phil Morrison, Herman Feshbach, Millie Dresselhaus, Henry Kendall, Bernie Feld, and Aron Bernstein, to name only a few. Although I was deeply immersed in research (and teaching), their examples rekindled an urge to look beyond the narrow confines of academic physics. I led Institute committees on undergraduate education and faculty policy, I rewrote MIT’s Academic Calendar, served as Chair of the MIT Faculty, and was Director of the CTP all rather natural extensions of aca- demic life. Other undertakings were more “outside the box”: I co-organized “Symposium@MIT”, carried letters and university applications for Refusniks back and forth to the USSR, led a team investigating whether strange matter or black holes cre- ated at RHIC could destroy the world, chaired Brookhaven’s Science and Technology Steering Committee, led an APS study on “energy critical elements”, and helped to launch the Lahore University of Management Science’s School of Science and Engineering. Before turning to the change of direction that took place in the last decade of my career, let me elaborate on three of the projects mentioned in above.

“Symposium @ MIT” – The idea emerged after a faculty dinner arranged by Nan Friedander, then MIT’s Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, who hoped to stimulate the creation of an ambitious inter-school Institute within MIT. Dean Friedlander’s Institute never materialized, but the dinner was so delightful that a few of us decided to turn the dinners themselves into a program to enhance connections among MIT’s five disparate schools. Cynthia Wolff, a literary critic, and I led a founding cadre that included chemist Bob Silbey,historian Tom Kuhn, and engineer Sanjoy Mitter. Our model was the Greek symposia7: a group of about 20 faculty met monthly to enjoy good food and drink, preceded by significant reading assignments and followed by an hour’s seminar and discussion acrossthe boundaries of schools and disciplines. In addition to the five already mentioned, symposium leaders included economist Oliver Hart, historians Pauline Maier and Ken Manning, violist Markus Thompson, chemical engineer Jimmy Wei, and material scientistLinn Hobbs, among many others (see Figure 4). A grass- roots effort, we sought and received financial support from MIT’s Provost Joel Moses. Symposium@MIT cre- ated lasting bonds among MIT’s faculty community. Founded in 1987, it was much loved, and survived for nearly two decades.
A group of young scientists and engineers from Pakistan, including a former CTP graduate student, approached me in 2004 with a dream to create a new, secular, open, privately funded School of Science and Engineering (SSE) modeled on US research universi- ties at the distinguished Lahore University of Manage- ment Science (LUMS). After many trips to Pakistan and many years service chairing an International Advisory Committee, the dream has come to frui- tion. Inspired and funded by one of the world’s great philanthropists, Syed Babar Ali[6], the SSE at LUMS is now a thriving institution. Its graduates have gone on to advanced degrees and jobs around the world as well as in Pakistan; SSE graduates and faculty research are grappling with some of the most difficult problems facing Pakistan. Several other MIT faculty — electri- cal engineer John Kassakian, systems analyst Dick Larson, and architect Jim Wescoat — dedicated many years to this effort, unsolicited and uncompensated. One shortcoming of our grassroots approach was that we never were able to convince MIT’s administration to officially adopt this collaboration, which would have provided support for student and faculty exchanges.
Encouraged by the efforts of my MIT colleagues Her- man Feshbach and Ernie Moniz, in 2007 I agreed to be a candidate for the APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA), was elected, and went on to chair POPA in 2014. Early in my term, motivated by my developing interest in energy technologies (see below), I proposed and led a study of “Energy Critical Elements”. With the support of Francis Slakey and in collaboration with the Mate- rial Research Society, mining engineer Jon Price and I led an interdisciplinary group of chemists, material scientists, economic geologists, and industrial ecolo- gists in a study that produced its report in 2011, just as the first “Rare Earth Supply Crisis” was catching the attention of Congress and the public. It was a timelyand influential study. During my term as Chair POPA confronted the problem of revising the problematic 2007 APS statement on climate change, a struggle too complex to describe here.

It would be disingenuous to pretend that these attempts to mix physics research with service to the broader world did not require compromises on both the intensity of my research and the impact of those activities. But I was pulled in both directions and found the resulting stochastic trajectory enlivening. And given the title of the session at the April APS meeting where I spoke, I expect that this is what the audience wanted to hear about.

Figure 4: A record of Symposium@MIT meetings from its first two years.

THE PHYSICS OF ENERGY

By the early years of this century, I had dedicated over thirty years to research in particle physics. Confined quark dynamics, deep inelastic processes, QCD spin physics, mul- tiquark hadrons, Casimir effects — subjects I had had the chance to contribute to over those years — were thriving in the hands of younger physicists. I had just completed six years as director of the Center for Theoretical Physics, and was nearly 60 years old, restless, and looking for a new project. The news was full of controversy about energy and climate issues, often ignoring basic physics; it was infuriating. I started daydream- ing about energy education, specifically about a new course on the fundamentals of energy physics, available to all MIT undergraduates, providing them with a basic understanding of energy sources, uses, and systems. Since all MIT students must complete a year of university level calculus and a year of calculus-based physics, usually in their first year, it would be possible to construct a fairly rigorous course that would nevertheless be accessible to all undergraduate students. Happily, one of my colleagues, Washington (Wati) Taylor, who works on quantum gravity, was musing along similar lines. We tossed around ideas and decided to go ahead. Like SWOPSIforty year earlier, we didn’t ask permission from a committee or an administrator, we just went ahead with our plans. UnlikeSWOPSI, of course, we had little to risk: we had tenure and were well known in our department and our field. Nevertheless, theproject was entirely on our shoulders; it would only succeed with our commitment and effort. Fortunately, neither Wati nor I give up easily. Also, we were fortunate to have friends in influential positions.

Ernie Moniz, whom I had known since graduate school, had recently been named founding director of MIT’s Energy Initiative (MITEI). MITEI was developing an interdepartmental degree in energy studies, and we discovered that our proposedcourse fit its plans as a fundamental science requirement. Marc Kastner, then head of the physics department, was supportive, as were subsequent department heads Ed Bertschinger and Peter Fisher.

As we began to plan the course, we looked for an appropri- ate textbook that would have made our project much simpler. We found many texts at the infrared end of the spectrum of difficulty, designed for students with no previous exposure to university physics or mathematics. At the other, ultraviolet, end of the spectrum were many texts for specialized advanced courses such as heat transfer, nuclear reactor design, or solar photovoltaics. We envisioned a course that would lie in the middle of the pedagogical spectrum; it would be strongly physics-centric; a survey that nevertheless would build from fundamentals, and designed to be broadly accessible to science and engineering majors after a year of university physics and calculus (see Figure 5). At MIT that includes all undergradu- ates, and at other universities all hard science and engineering majors, and perhaps others.

One key point for us was to limit the course to the science, avoiding economics, policy, and in particular, advocacy. Of course, we realized from the outset that economic, political, and regulatory issues are at the heart of the current energy/climate crisis. Probably they present thornier problems than presented by science and technology. However, we had strong reasons to stick to the science. First, a solid, unbiased, under- standing of the basic science is a precondition for productive economic and policy debates. Second, economic, political, and social factors change so fast that our book would have been quickly obsolete. And finally, we wanted to attract students of all political persuasions, not just those who agree with our point of view on political or economic questions.

When we failed to find a book at the right level obeying all these preconditions, we began to generate lecture notes, and as often happens, this led finally to a textbook of our own —The Physics of Energy — published in 2018, more than a decade after we first conceived of the project. The goal of the book is to frame the current climate/energy crisis in terms of fundamental physics, enabling students to have their own perspective on the prospects and problems of all the energy sources, uses, and systems that they will encounter. The book covers a lot of ground, from V = IR to grid stability, from the First Law to the Shockley-Queisser bound on photodiode efficiency, from Schr ̈odinger’s equation to nuclear reactor dynamics and theeffects of radioactivity on living organisms. Writing the book was a great learning experience for me; it certainly deepened my admiration for the great engineering paradigms, for example those that undergird the analysis and design of energy conversion systems.

In closing, I would say that mine has been both a frustrat- ing and a gratifying career: I’m not sure I would recommend it to you unless you are in love with physics and yet deeply dis- tracted by the sorry state of the world. If you are, then perhaps you will find a similar path during the present time of crisis.

Figure 5: A collage of figures from The Physics of Energy to illustrate its breadth and academic level
ENDNOTES
1 The session was titled “Physics Education Can Spark Unusual and Creative Careers Outside of Academia” and for me the most interesting talk was Julia Ruth’s “The Gravity of Leaving Science for the Circus”!

2 Webster’s: “. . . the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power...”

3 Marty, who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the tauon, was quite involved in science based political advocacy; about that time, he and a few others started SESPA — Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action, which was very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and beyond.

4 I owe a tremendous debt to Joel and Joyce for the energy and creativity they brought to SWOPSI.

5 Our more radical friends said we were co-opted by powerful figures, though we thought the opposite.

6 Dave remained closely associated with SWOPSI for many years and organized a 20th anniversary celebration in the early 1990s.

7 In ancient Greek συμπoσιoν, literally ”drink together”

REFERENCES

[1] For more on this year at Princeton, see C. Connell, “Princeton Spring” in The Princeton Alumni Weekly, July 16, 2008, accessed online here.
[2] The speech itself can be found online at this location.
[3] For an East Coast perspective on the March 4, 1969 antiwar activities, see A. Chodos, “The Lessons of March 4” in Inside Higher Ed, March 4, 2019, accessed online at this location.
[4] For more about SWOPSI, see J. Primack and F. von Hippel, “Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena” (Basic Books, New York, 1974). Further references at a website maintained by L. Altenberg, accessed online at https://dynamics.org/SWOPSI/
[5] A. Chodos, R. L. Jaffe, K. Johnson, C. B. Thorn, and V. F. Weisskopf, A New Extended Model of Hadrons, Phys. Rev. D9, 3471 (1974).
[6] See S. Tavernise, “One Pakistani Institution Places His Faith in Another”, New York Times, December 19, 2009, page A6.

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Mobilizing Physicists for Nuclear Arms Control Advocacy

By Charlotte Selton, Zia Mian, Stewart Prager

The Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction was launched two years ago at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security to inform the US physical science commu- nity about the dangers of nuclear arms and build a national network of scientist-advocates for nuclear arms control and disarmament policies. An article in APS News in 2020 an- nounced the start of this work. Since then, with support from the American Physical Society and the Carnegie Corporation, the Coalition has arranged more than 100 talks to physicists on nuclear weapons and recruited nearly 1000 members at a very challenging time for nuclear arms control and disarma- ment. Here we share some early lessons from this first-in-a- generation effort at re-engaging the scientific community and coalition-building for advocacy on nuclear weapons issues.
GRASSROOTS ACTION AND ADVOCACY

The Coalition has grown through a grassroots approach, based on scientist-to-scientist conversations. We have gone where physicists are, not expecting them to find us.

Members of the Coalition’s team of 12 presenters have visited physics departments at universities and some national laboratories around the country, giving colloquia on the current global dangers from nuclear weapons, followed by discussions and requests for physicists to join us.

This team has given talks in 43 states and the District of Columbia, reaching more than 4,000 scientists and students. The Coalition has also found new members through a public webinar series and at professional conferences, such as the American Physical Society’s meetings.

A key Coalition goal is advocacy. Scientists are understand- ably reluctant to speak beyond their field of expertise. The work of most physicists today is far from nuclear weapons, and many doubt they have sufficient background to speak on nuclear policy questions. Through discussions, physicists come to understand that research-level expertise on nuclear weapons or nuclear policy is not a prerequisite for advocacy.

The information disseminated on current nuclear dangers has succeeded in motivating physicists’ advocacy, and these voices, especially as constituents, can carry special weight with lawmakers. Coalition members have sent hundreds of letters to Congress and have met with Senate and House of- fices. In the first two years, the focus has been on extending the US-Russian New START agreement capping the number of strategic nuclear weapons, preventing the Trump Administra- tion from resuming nuclear testing, and supporting a shift in US policy to no-first-use of nuclear weapons.

GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES

More than half of the almost 1000 Coalition members are early-career scientists, including students, postdocs, and assistant professors. Many young scientists and students have limited knowledge of nuclear weapons, and the current status of the danger. For example, they often do not realize that current US policy is not one of no-first-use, that the President has sole authority over the use of US nuclear weapons, or that worldwide, nearly 2,000 warheads are on alert status, ready to launch in minutes.

Young scientists are therefore often interested and alarmed when informed of the threat and potential conse- quences of nuclear war. For younger members, in addition to the existential threat of nuclear weapons, there is a strong interest in the potential global environmental impacts of nuclear war and the humanitarian impacts of nuclear-weapon testing especially on minority and colonized peoples. When it comes to advocacy, however, undergraduate and graduate students take action at consistently lower rates than older Coalition members.

To support deeper engagement from young scientists and to enhance diversity in the field, the Coalition has launched a Next Generation Fellowship for graduate students, post docs, and early-career faculty. This program pairs Fellows with men- tors on research and writing projects, funds relevant profes- sional development opportunities, and grows their nuclear policy, advocacy, and science communication skills.

The Fellowship has had several early successes. Among other accomplishments, three of the 2021 Fellows received awards from the American Physical Society for their advocacy work. Two fellows have also published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. One contributed an article on Brazil joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and another co-authored a critical review of the skewed information on nuclear weapons risks and policies presented to US Air Force Global Strike Command, and a related rebuttal to a critic.

POLITICS MATTER

When the Coalition was launched, President Trump was in the White House. President Trump pursued new weapons, explored resuming explosive nuclear testing, and proved hostile toward arms control. His unsettling actions helped motivate interest from our audiences in US nuclear posture, including sole authority and no-first-use, and spurred engage- ment. Before the 2020 election, about 10% of the audience at a colloquium typically joined the Coalition. After Biden was elected, the fraction of the audience at our talks that joined the Coalition fell slightly.

The political moment matters also in other ways. When war broke out in Ukraine, and President Putin threatened the use of nuclear weapons, the main challenge was no longer convincing the audience that nuclear weapons are a threat worthy of action. The new need was to demonstrate that the nuclear threat can be impacted by public action. Where ap- propriate, Coalition speakers began to emphasize the role of citizen activism and present-day opportunities.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Now that the Coalition has been established and is op- erational in the US physics community, it aims to continue to grow its membership by reaching out to and recruiting physical scientists more broadly, including those in engineering. It also is reaching out to the global physics community. One recent Coalition colloquium was at the CERN international laboratory for particle physics in Switzerland.

Later this year, the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction will launch a new partnership with the Washington-based Arms Control Association and begin collaborating with the Union of Concerned Scientists and possibly other non- governmental organizations where missions align. Looking ahead, the Coalition plans to keep building its membership and making it more diverse, deepening its edu- cational work, and strengthening its policy engagement and impact. Focusing especially on next-generation scientists, it will seek opportunities to organize and educate, and pursue new advocacy topics to make our world safe from nuclear war. We welcome any interested physicist to join the Coalition, or seek information from any of the co-authors of this article.”

Charlotte Selton is the organizer of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction and a Senior Associate with the Office of Government Affairs at the American Physical Society.

Zia Mian is co-director of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-founder of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear ThreatReduction.

Stewart Prager is professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, an affiliated faculty member in the Program on Science and Global Security, and a co-founder of the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction.

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Reviews

The World As We Knew It

Edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen (Catapult, 2022), ISBN 9781646220304

The scientific consensus surrounding human driven climate change is indisputable. The urbanization and moderniza- tion of human civilization that marks the Anthropocene era has come at a cost that is paid by us all, with debts still to be collected over the coming generations. Yet many of those impacts are happening fast enough to be apparent over the course of one person’s lifespan.

The editors of “The World As We Knew It” asked their con- tributors to share a personal story of how they had experienced the effects of a changing climate. With the project beginning in the year or so prior to the 2020 COVID pandemic, the writing and editing spans the time before, during and after that year. The resulting essays contained within are surprisingly varied and take the narrative in unexpected directions.

The contributors come from all walks of life. While some are scientists from a variety of fields, others are authors, journalists, and professors who share a common concern for the planet. Each essayist contributes to a vivid and unique tapestry demonstrating how they, their families, and friends have been impacted.

Several of the essays revolve around the personal impacts from memorable storms like Hurricane Sandy or Katrina--both likely aggravated by the warming effects of climate change. Rather than focusing on the science behind the storms, the essays paint pictures of dread and loss. They recount stories of not being able to get in touch with loved ones, and of displace- ment, loss of life, and loss of innocence.

Other essays take a subtler approach to climate change that is often overlooked by the general population. Our warm- ing climate is changing patterns and breeding grounds for many creatures, some of which, like ticks and mosquitos, are vectors for a variety of illnesses. Lyme disease is spread- ing to parts of the world where it was previously unknown. Personally, I am used to hearing about Lyme disease living in the Southern US, but just this year the government issued wide-spread warnings for states outside of the disease’s typical range. For diseases that are sometimes poorly understood by the medical profession, we face a variety of emerging medical crises stemming from these new, or spreading, disease vectors. This echoes the global pandemic that impacted all of us over the last couple of years.

Another essay that stood out to me centers on the fact that throughout history the exploration of Earth has been an almost exclusively male-dominated field. While some of that misogyny has abated in recent years, the impacts are still felt in surprising ways. Being some of the last land mass explored by humans, our presence in Antarctica mirrors the machismo of the past and the desire to conquer and tame the natural world. That desire is still reflected in the way scientific stud- ies are conducted there--perhaps to the detriment of a fuller understanding of our impact on the climate and the world.

Other essays echo the same thoughts and look more gen- erally at the human desire to tame the natural world around them by building structures or taming nature. What happens to the old gods of an ancient river, still worshiped by local in- digenous tribes, when the call for human progress demands the damming of that wild river to create another source of hydroelectric powe?. As so often happens, progress moves on and the river is dammed, but the human stories and experi- ences are irrevocably lost.

Many younger individuals today have struggled with the idea of having children, as evidenced by falling birth rates around the world. Some cite the dread of leaving behind a horrible legacy for their children. As one essayist points out, this is a legacy that observant parents will likely start to see before they exit this world, knowing full well that their chil- dren will face the brunt of the consequences stemming from years of inaction.

Concerned scientists often struggle with a problem of pub- lic perception. Despite overwhelming evidence and the con- sensus of the scientific community, facts do little to convince the public at large. In the so-called “post-truth” era, politicians, media personalities, and the general public are more likely than ever to create their own facts and narrative, regardless of any basis in reality. Yet even in the decades before these recent trends, the idea of the Anthropocene tends to be too big for the human psyche to fully comprehend, often even among those that agree with climate scientists. It is far too easy to become overwhelmed with hopelessness at the enormity of the issue. As one essayist posits, “What is the era of the human, the Anthropocene, if not an era where our telescopes are sharper than ever, but we choose not to see?”

Collections of essays such as this one can bridge that gap by reframing the narrative in terms of personal loss and im- pact. An artfully written personal narrative has the potential to be more impactful than the most compelling and rigorous scientific data, chart, or graph. A well-crafted story can be more compelling than the most dire warning from the IPCC. Perhaps the best way to compel ordinary citizens to a deeper understanding of our impact on the Earth will come from simple human stories.

Reading “The World As We Knew It” feels familiar. I often found myself stopping to reflect on similar conversations that I’ve had with my wife, friends, and family members. In a way, it is comforting to know that others have had the same thoughts and concerns, as well as the occasional feelings of impending dread mixed with hopefulness concerning our impact on the world. Everyone needs to read this book, then share it with a friend or family member, followed by a long chat.

Brian Geislinger
Garden State Community College
bgeislinger@gadsdenstate.edu

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The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are The Future Of Exploration

Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2022). ISBN 9780M674257726 (hardcover), $26.

My youth was during the time of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo; the space program prompted my interest in as- tronomy and physics. At that age, however, I had no concept that the space race was primarily about Cold War bragging rights, nor did I have the maturity to question the rationaliza- tions of spin-off technologies or to ask whether the benefits of manned spaceflight were worth the expense and risks. These are precisely the questions that Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees take a hard look at in The End of Astronauts.

Goldsmith is a well-known science writer, and Rees a dis- tinguished cosmologist and Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. In this brief, very readable book they develop the thesis that, beyond some Near-Earth-Orbit (NEO) operations, improvements in Artificial Intelligence and robotics are such that crewed flights, particularly those imagined for Mars, are unnecessary and would be expensive and dangerous. Their ar- guments, which I found compelling, are well-developed and the reader gets a grand tour of human accomplishments in space.

After a Preface which offers a brief history of rocketry and space flight, Chapter 1 considers why humans engage in manned space exploration. Answers to this usually appeal to emotion, but the reality is usually supremacy and exploitation. Nowadays, most people have comparatively little interest in space flights, perhaps even thinking of it as an adventure for wealthy entrepreneurs and celebrities. Goldsmith and Rees point out that even a NASA website offering reasons for crewed Mars missions lists no benefits that could not be accomplished by robotic exploration; they also discuss a National Academy of Sciences survey which revealed that no single rationale seemed to justify human spaceflight.

Chapter 2 sets the stage for the rest of the book, outlin- ing areas of current and possible future human space activity which are taken up in subsequent chapters: NEO, habitats on the Moon, missions to Mars, asteroid mining, and permanent habitats. Discussion of the distance scales and energy costs involved in escaping gravitational wells sets the physics background.

NEO missions (Chapter 3) are where most of our experi- ence has been accumulated. Some 600 humans have now orbited Earth, but the authors contend that much of what goes on in NEO, including specialized manufacturing processes, could be done robotically. NEO activities are now increasingly focusing on commercial missions, with players like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson bringing the funding. Astro- nauts on the International Space Station have gathered much information on the effects of long-term space flight on humans, the motivation being to prepare for lunar habitats or Mars missions. The list of negative effects is daunting: Psychologi- cal impacts of confinement, weightlessness-induced nausea,vertigo, bone and muscle-mass loss, sleep deprivation, and blood clots. Exposure to solar wind, cosmic rays, and coronal mass ejections can be shielded against to some extent. To be fair, life on Earth is also not without its dangers, but it is the environment we have evolved in. An ever-growing danger is collisions with space debris.

Chapter 4 takes us to the Moon. There are many good reasons for lunar exploration. These include information on the history of the solar system, as a site for bases to support longer journeys, as a possible source of materials such as water (to drink and as a source of oxygen for rocket fuel), rocks for shielding or to be flung into space for construction of colonies, helium-3 for fusion fuel, and metals as targets of solar-powered mining operations. Rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts speak in favor of the superiority of humans in identifying interest- ing samples, but advances in AI will steadily diminish these advantages. That there is water in the Moon’s south polar region is clear, but how much or how readily accessible it is are unknown; probes are set to explore this in the near future.

Chapter 5 takes us to Mars. At present, a trained human could work faster and be a better investigator than Persever- ance and Ingenuity-type probes, but the hazards and logistics of getting there are much more complex than a lunar mission. Visions of large habitats and terraforming remain fiction, and we should question the morality of doing such things to an- other environment. I found the discussion of asteroid mining in Chapter 6 to be more plausible and useful than dreams of Martian colonies. Chapter 7 speculates on O’Neill-type mul- tigenerational space colonies. On a solar-system scale at least there is plenty of solar energy to be had plus raw materials in the Moon and asteroids. Such colonies would be interesting social experiments: Each would be a largely isolated culture, evolving in its own way.

Chapter 8 examines the costs of a potential crewed Mars mission. Something on the order of $200 billion is proposed, a figure some 50 times that of a current robot mission. To put this in perspective, the current annual NASA budget is about $23 billion, and the multinational Artemis lunar program has been estimated at $85 billion, but future delays and overruns are likely inevitable. Mars will be a pricey proposition.

Finally, Chapter 9 touches on what may prove the trickiest issue of all: The legal aspects of space exploitation. The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty was primarily concerned with avoiding space-based nuclear weapons; in contrast, the 2015 US Space Act is much more oriented to promoting commercial develop- ment. Space will be a new Wild West.

In closing, Goldsmith and Rees remark that human explo- ration of space has occupied less than one of the 45 million centuries that our planet has existed; our efforts are in their infancy. Eschewing far-future predictions, they posit that over the next couple decades we will see astronauts return to the Moon but that Mars, asteroids, and planetary moons will remain targets for robotic missions.

I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone interested in human space activity. But I was left wondering as to the intended audience. Space agencies seek exposure and budgets, and perhaps the answer is policy-makers who need clear-headed analyses independent of agency boosterism.

Cameron Reed
Department of Physics (Emeritus)
Alma College, Alma, MI
reed@alma.edu

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