American Physical Society Rethinking Policy on Climate Change

In 2007 the American Physical Society's national policy on climate change contained fairly strong language..."global warming is occurring", and we need to do something about it beginning now. Click on the image to read the full statement adopted in 2007.

In the summer of 2009, several APS physicists signed a petition recommending that the language be changed, softened. Here is the open letter to the Council of the APS. In a July, 2009 letter published in Nature, six physicists applauded the APS' decision to review its current climate statement by appointing a high level subcommittee "devoid of political or financial agendas," so a more accurate representation of the current scientific evidence is expressed. Essentially the petitioners want to make sure that at least physicists are not behaving as alarmists, and endorsing an untruthful position.
Meanwhile, on October 21, 2009, 18 large, American scientific societies and organizations, including the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, ~127,000 members) sent a letter to the US Senate using language at least as strong as the 2007 APS statement on climate. Essentially this letter from huge numbers of American scientists is saying to the US government that climate change is a big, current problem; let's do something about it, please come to us for advice and help. The APS did not sign this letter, they're still trying to work out whether climate change is an imminent threat. In November, 2009 the ad hoc committee reviewing the climate statement are expected to report back to the society with their findings. Let's hope that most American scientists end up on the same page with respect to climate by the end of the calendar year.

Lost, Harmonic Analysis, by Elias M. Stein

This appeared in the Swain Hall Library today. 諧波分析 It may belong to someone in M611 or M711; check your bags grad students, if you're missing your Harmonic Analysis, come by the library. It's behind the circ desk under the name "Lost".

New Books NOT on Display this Week

A couple of new books will not go on display today because people at other campuses or in other departments have already requested them. They include "Mathematical Methods in Physics: Partial Differential Equations, Fourier Series, and Special Functions (A.K. Peters), and "The Mathematical Mechanic" (Princeton University Press).

Thomas Friedman Makes a Lot of Sense

Have a look at yesterday's New York Times piece by Thomas Friedman. Have a Nice Day: It's about how solar parts factories (the facilities that make the parts comprising solar panels) aren't being deployed here in the United States. Other countries are acquiring them.

I'm looking forward to how this Op-Ed piece will prompt action by our government, our universities, and US companies. Good job Mr. Friedman, and a tip of my hat to the NYT for publishing this.

Excerpt:

"Not a single one [solar matls plant, cost $200 milllion each by the way] is in America.

Let’s see: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. I suggested a new company motto for Applied Materials’s solar business: “Invented here, sold there.”"

[note: this image is not from the NYT article, it's from a 3/19/08 Solid State Technology piece by Katherine Derbyshire titled What solar cells can learn from electronics, and the photo was supplied to them courtesy of the company Applied Materials.]

[10/8/09 update on Thomas Friedman] Um...let me back up a little bit on Thomas Friedman. I often like his ideas on energy and sustainability, but if you can find the YouTube of him on Charlie Rose, talking about the three bubbles of the 1990s, particularly the terrorism bubble, I don't know what the hell he's talking about. It doesn't make any sense to me. Find "Thomas Friedman sums up the Iraq war" - can someone tell me what I need to do in order to understand what he's trying to say?

Public Printer in the library not functioning tonight

Public printer is all jammed up and we won't be able to fix it until tomorrow morning. Printers are available in the basement of Swain East and in the Physics Forum down the hall at the west end of Swain.

Swain Hall Library trivia

Since the mid-20th century, the Swain Hall Library has been collecting physics, astronomy, mathematics, and computer science literature for this university. In the 1990s, the collection here peaked in terms of number of items with well over 100,000.
In the past 10 years we've removed many items and much has gone to storage, particularly the journal literature. Over all this time, did we ever catalog and put a work of fiction in Swain Hall? Yes, we did (maybe several, depending on how you view string theory), we definitely cataloged a single novel titled "Beyond the Planet Earth" by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist / engineer and the father of cosmonautics. Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский (9/17/1857 - 9/19/1935, check out his drawings at that cyrillic link). In honor of Tsiolkovsky's 152nd birthday in a couple days, we mention this early work of science fiction here in Swain Hall. In a nutshell, the book is about these six guys (a German, Frenchman, American, Englishman, Italian, and a Russian) who find themselves in a big castle in the Himalayas and they work together to create a vehicle to take them into space. At the top of the castle is a glass domed-in area.

To be honest, this is not a great novel. It's quite awkward in fact, but in some ways it's still an important book. Click on this image and you can read the dust jacket blurb. The English translation (what we have) came out in 1960, but the Russian was published in 1920. Right now this is an unlinked item record in IUCAT and it is being converted (NOTIS conversion from 11/2000)...the only way to find that we hold it would have been to browse in the Stacks for it. Anyway, it will be back in the stacks this fall.

Peterson's "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach"

Copies of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach arrived today in Swain Hall Library. It wasn't here earlier, and several people were asking about it last week; two copies will be available on Reserve for the semester.