- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
Renaissance Physicists
This duet of talks by two Nobelists, while cheering the consolidation of MIT’s Physics groups within the new Green Center for Physics, sees primarily gloomy prospects for science in coming decades.
There are “dark clouds on the horizon,” believes Robert Laughlin, as the post-World War 2 public funding of basic research dwindles. In its wake, commercial interests are gaining control over the production of knowledge, favoring chemistry, materials sciences and engineering disciplines. In a technical milieu, some of the people “have to have a wild childlike curiosity where they demand to understand everything,” and this “omnivorous” person is typically a physicist, says Laughlin. Omnivorous scientists are not valuable to industry, and often dangerous, since they make knowledge public rather than hiding (or patenting) it. But university students and their parents need such teachers, who provide an invaluable balance to the relentless forces in the world driving technical knowledge into corporate realms. The “era we’re in right now is an era of darkness in which the entire idea of public domain knowledge is being rejected by people very high up in society, and implemented in laws,” says Laughlin. So the young physicist must regard himself “as a revolutionary person… a troublemaker when it comes to the sequestration of knowledge.” Concludes Laughlin, “Our job is “to make sure the concept of reason, the science of reason, does not perish from the earth.”Learning from MIT
Pulling people together across scientific boundaries has proven valuable in the past, and is even more essential moving forward, believes Steven Weinberg. In his own years at MIT, scientists banded together to oppose the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile system, and formed the Union of Concerned Scientists to help guide government science policy. Today, there’s an urgent need for a unified scientific voice to speak out on key issues. He singles out for derision NASA’s single-minded pursuit of President Bush’s Moon-Mars mission, which has sidetracked, among other valuable work, climate change studies and MIT’s own cosmic ray observatory, after $1 billion-worth of construction costs. He calls for astronomers and astrophysicists to “speak up and challenge NASA on its childish judgments.” Weinberg also points to “many things that need to be done in this country, but that are not getting done for lack of funds: repairs of sagging bridges and tunnels, inspections of imported goods, FDA follow-ups on prescription drugs, education benefits for veterans, more basic science projects. These works consistently run up against arguments that funding them will somehow harm the economy. Weinberg believes we are ill served by those who insist that investing for the public good somehow damages the economy. “Perhaps it’s time for a Union of Concerned Economists,” he proposes.Related Videos
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- About the Speakers
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About the Speakers
Robert B. Laughlin PhD '79
Robert M. & Anne Bass Professor of Physics, Stanford University 1998 Nobel Laureate in Physics
Robert B. Laughlin earned a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT. He went to the Theory Group at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and then onto a research position at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His work on the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect, conducted at the Livermore Lab, led to his co-winning the Nobel Prize.
In 1984, he left for Stanford University. From 2004-2006, Laughlin served as President of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Laughlin has also won the E.O. Lawrence Award for Physics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics, among other honors.Steven Weinberg SM '67, ME '69, PhD '70
Jack S. Josey-Welch Foundation Chair in Science and Regental Professor;
Director, Theory Research Group, Department of Physics, The University of Texas, Austin 1979 Nobel Laureate in PhysicsSteven Weinberg is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. His research on elementary particles and cosmology has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he is "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today." He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society, as well as to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of over 300 articles on elementary particle physics. His books include Gravitation and Cosmology -- Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity(1972); The First Three Minutes (1977); and The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, 2003). Most recently he published Glory and Terror -- The Growing Nuclear Danger (2004).
He has served as consultant at the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, President of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and member of the Board of Editors of Daedalus,/u> magazine, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, the JASON group of defense consultants, and many other boards and committees. Educated at Cornell, Copenhagen, and Princeton, he also holds honorary doctoral degrees from sixteen other universities, including Chicago, Columbia, McGill, Padua, Salamanca, and Yale. He taught at Columbia, Berkeley, M.I.T., and Harvard, where he was Higgins Professor of Physics, before coming to Texas in 1982. - About the Host
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About the Host
Physics Department
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Renaissance Physicists
- Robert B. Laughlin PhD '79
Learning from MIT
- Steven Weinberg SM '67, ME '69, PhD '70
- October 5, 2007
- Running Time: 0:58:19
