APS News A P S N E W S - American Physical Society
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APS News A P S N E W S [Try the enhanced APS News-online: http://www.aps.org/apsnews] DECEMBER 1999 THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY VOLUME 8, NO. 11 Inside… NEWS To Advance and Diffuse the Knowledge of Physics .................................................... 2 Public affairs and the war years. FESTIVAL PROFILE .................................... 3 Exploring our fractal universe. New Faces at APS Headquarters ............. 3 Hicks is the new Associate Publisher; Otwell joins as an Education Programs Administrator. IN BRIEF ....................................................... 3 Townes wins Annunzio award; DHPP is now DPOLY; DNP Junior Investigator Program; Physics in Popular Culture. MEETING BRIEFS ....................................... 6 Fall section meeting summaries. Physics Nobel Laureates Support CTBT .... 6 The APS spoke out in support for the Compre- hensive Test Ban Treaty. Wavelength Division Multiplexing: An Optical Communication Revolution ....... 7 Donald Scifres on a new technology that en- ables fiber optic cables to carry many separate wavelength signals or channels simultaneously. Congressional Fellow Report ................... 7 Antonia Herzog reflect on her year as APS Congressional Fellow on the Hill. BELTWAY BRIEFS ....................................... 8 Goings on in Washington. New Microscope for Materials .................. 9 LBL researchers devise a new microwave probe. OPINION LETTERS ...................................................... 4 VIEWPOINT .................................................. 4 Irving Lerch on international collaborations: cost-effective or a give-away? Conceptualizing a New Degree ................ 5 Sheila Tobias on the professional masters degree. DEPARTMENTS ZERO GRAVITY ........................................... 5 The 1999 Ig Nobel prizes INSIDE THE BELTWAY ................................ 6 Sinking the Test Ban Treaty. ANNOUNCEMENTS ............................ 10-11 THE BACK PAGE ....................................... 12 Roger Highfield on the physics of Christmas. APS 100 years Celebrate a C e n t u r y of Physics M embers of the APS have elected William F. Brinkman, physical sciences research vice president at Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies, to be the Society’s next vice president. Brinkman’s term begins January 1, 2000, when he will succeed George Trilling (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), who will advance to become president- elect. Brinkman will become APS president in 2002. The 2000 president is James Langer (University of California, Santa Barbara). [Look for our annual interview with the incoming APS president in the January 2000 APS News.] In other election results, Curtis C. Callan of Princeton University was elected chair- elect of the APS Nominating Committee, which will be chaired by Michael S. Turner of the University of Chicago and Fermilab in 2000. The Nominating Committee se- lects the slate of candidates for vice president, general councillors, and its own chair-elect. The nomination committee choices are then voted on by the APS membership. Elected as new general councillors were Stuart Freedman (Univer- sity of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Margaret Murnane (University of Colorado), Philip Phillips (University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign), and Jin-Joo Song (Oklahoma State University). William Brinkman Elected APS Vice President VICE PRESIDENT WILLIAM F. BRINKMAN Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies Brinkman re- ceived his PhD in physics from the University of Mis- souri in 1965. He joined Bell Labora- tories in 1966 after spending one year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University. He moved to Sandia in 1984, but returned to Bell Laboratories in 1987 to become Executive Director of the Physics Research Division. In 1993, he became Physical Sci- ences Research Vice President, his current position. His responsibilities include the direction of research in physical sciences, optoelectronic and electronic devices, fi- ber optics and related areas. He has worked on theories of con- densed matter and his early work also involved the theory of spin fluctuations in metals and other highly correlated Fermi liquids. Subsequent theoretical work on liq- uid crystals and incommensurate systems are additional important contributions he made to the theoretical understanding of condensed matter. As manager of an in- dustrial research organization with a budget of $200M, he is strongly interested in im- proving technology conversion and improving the connection between re- search and products. Brinkman was the recipient of the 1994 George E. Pake Prize. In his candidate’s statement, Brinkman spoke of the growing diversity of the phys- ics community and the need for the Society to continue to embrace new groups with topical interests that range from applica- tions in computing and communications to medicine. As electronic publishing moves into the mainstream, the APS must find a way to recover the charges paid by libraries for paper versions of its journals, perhaps, says Brinkman, through institu- tional flat fees. He also spoke of the need for the APS to continue to be involved in public affairs that relate to the concerns of its members as physicists. “High on this list must be the health of our physics re- search enterprise. We must work to make physics attractive to students and to cre- ate interesting career paths for them,” wrote Brinkman. “Among other things, this requires working toward ensuring the nec- essary funds for our research.” I n October, the 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Gerardus ‘t Hooft of the University of Utrecht and Martinus Veltman, formerly of the University of Michigan and now retired, for their work toward deriving a unified framework for all the physical forces. Their efforts, part of a tradition going back to the 19th century, centers around the search for underlying similarities or symmetries among disparate phenomena, and the formulation of these relations in a complex but elegant mathematical language. A past example would be James Clerk Maxwell’s demonstration that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single electro-magnetic force. Naturally this unification enterprise has met with various obstacles along the way. In this century quantum mechanics was combined with special relativity, resulting in quantum field theory. This theory successfully explained many phenomena, such as how particles could be created or annihilated or how unstable particles decay, but it also seemed to predict, nonsensically, that the likelihood for certain interactions could be infinitely large. Richard Feynman, along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, tamed these infinities by redefining the mass and charge of the electron in a process called renormalization. Their theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED), is the most precise theory known, and it serves ‘t Hooft and Veltman Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics; Zewail Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry as a prototype for other gauge theories (theories which show how forces arise from underlying symmetries), such as the electroweak theory, which assimilates the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into a single model. But the electroweak model too was vulnerable to infinities and physicists were worried that the theory would be use- less. Then ‘t Hooft and Veltman overcame the difficulty through a renormalization comparable to Feynman’s. They suc- ceeded in renormalizing a non-Abelian gauge theory. Getting the non-Abelian electroweak model to work was a formi- dable theoretical problem. An essential ingredient in this scheme was the exist- ence of another particle, the Higgs boson, whose role is to confer mass upon many of the known particles. For example, in- teractions between the Higgs boson and the various force-carrying particles result in the W and Z bosons (carriers of the weak force) being massive (with masses of 80 and 91 GeV, respectively) but the photon (carrier of the electromagnetic force) re- maining massless. With Veltman’s and ‘t Hooft’s theo- retical machinery in hand, physicists could more reliably estimate the masses of the W and Z, as well as produce at least a crude guide as to the likely mass of the top quark. Happily, the W, Z, and top quark were subsequently created and detected in high energy collision experi- ments, and the Higgs boson is now itself an important quarry at places like Fermilab’s Tevatron and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ahmed H. Zewail of Caltech, for developing a technique that enables scientists to watch the extremely rapid middle stages of a chemical reac- tion. Relying on ultra-fast laser pulses, “femtosecond spectroscopy” can pro- vide snapshots far faster than any camera—it can capture the motions of atoms within molecules in the time scale of femtoseconds. An atom in a molecule typically per- forms a single vibration in just 10-100 femtoseconds, so this technique is fast enough to discern each and every step of any known chemical reaction. Shining pairs of femtosecond laser pulses on molecules (the first to initiate a reaction and the second to probe it) and study- ing what type of light they absorb yields information on the atoms’ positions within the molecules at every step of a chemi- cal reaction. With this technique, Zewail and his colleagues first studied (in the late 1980s) a 200-femtosecond disinte- gration of iodocyanide, observing the precise moment at which a chemical bond between iodine and carbon was about to break. Since then, femtochemistry has re- vealed a whole new class of intermediate chemical compounds that exist less than Continued on page 9 Continued on page 9 Seen here is a 2D stroboscopic history of the collision of four diatomic molecules, a tetratomic molecule, and an atom. The image is one of a series by Eric Heller currently on display at the American Center for Physics. See page 8 for more on the exhibit. Atomic Collisions
Transcript of APS News A P S N E W S - American Physical Society
APS NewsA P S N E W S[Try the enhanced APS News-online: http://www.aps.org/apsnews]
DECEMBER 1999 THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY VOLUME 8, NO. 11
Inside…NEWSTo Advance and Diffuse the Knowledgeof Physics .................................................... 2
Public affairs and the war years.FESTIVAL PROFILE .................................... 3
Exploring our fractal universe.New Faces at APS Headquarters ............. 3
Hicks is the new Associate Publisher; Otwell joinsas an Education Programs Administrator.
IN BRIEF ....................................................... 3Townes wins Annunzio award; DHPP is nowDPOLY; DNP Junior Investigator Program; Physicsin Popular Culture.
MEETING BRIEFS ....................................... 6Fall section meeting summaries.
Physics Nobel Laureates Support CTBT .... 6The APS spoke out in support for the Compre-hensive Test Ban Treaty.
Wavelength Division Multiplexing: AnOptical Communication Revolution ....... 7
Donald Scifres on a new technology that en-ables fiber optic cables to carry many separatewavelength signals or channels simultaneously.
Congressional Fellow Report ................... 7Antonia Herzog reflect on her year as APSCongressional Fellow on the Hill.
BELTWAY BRIEFS ....................................... 8Goings on in Washington.
New Microscope for Materials .................. 9LBL researchers devise a new microwave probe.
OPINIONLETTERS ...................................................... 4VIEWPOINT .................................................. 4
Irving Lerch on international collaborations:cost-effective or a give-away?
Conceptualizing a New Degree ................ 5Sheila Tobias on the professional masters degree.
DEPARTMENTSZERO GRAVITY ........................................... 5
The 1999 Ig Nobel prizesINSIDE THE BELTWAY ................................ 6
Sinking the Test Ban Treaty.ANNOUNCEMENTS ............................ 10-11THE BACK PAGE ....................................... 12
Roger Highfield on the physics of Christmas.
APS
100years
C e l e b r a t ea
C e n t u r yof
P h y s i c s
Members of the APS have electedWilliam F. Brinkman, physical
sciences research vice president at BellLaboratories/Lucent Technologies, to bethe Society’s next vice president.Brinkman’s term begins January 1, 2000,when he will succeed George Trilling(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory),who will advance to become president-elect. Brinkman will become APS presidentin 2002. The 2000 president is JamesLanger (University of California, SantaBarbara). [Look for our annual interviewwith the incoming APS president in theJanuary 2000 APS News.]
In other election results, Curtis C. Callanof Princeton University was elected chair-elect of the APS Nominating Committee,which will be chaired by Michael S. Turnerof the University of Chicago and Fermilabin 2000. The Nominating Committee se-lects the slate of candidates for vicepresident, general councillors, and its ownchair-elect. The nomination committeechoices are then voted on by the APSmembership. Elected as new generalcouncillors were Stuart Freedman (Univer-sity of California, Berkeley, LawrenceBerkeley National Laboratory), MargaretMurnane (University of Colorado), PhilipPhillips (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and Jin-Joo Song (OklahomaState University).
William Brinkman Elected APS Vice PresidentVICE PRESIDENTWILLIAM F. BRINKMANBell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies
Brinkman re-ceived his PhD inphysics from theUniversity of Mis-souri in 1965. Hejoined Bell Labora-tories in 1966 afterspending oneyear as an NSFPostdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University.He moved to Sandia in 1984, but returnedto Bell Laboratories in 1987 to becomeExecutive Director of the Physics ResearchDivision. In 1993, he became Physical Sci-ences Research Vice President, his currentposition. His responsibilities include thedirection of research in physical sciences,optoelectronic and electronic devices, fi-ber optics and related areas.
He has worked on theories of con-densed matter and his early work alsoinvolved the theory of spin fluctuations inmetals and other highly correlated Fermiliquids. Subsequent theoretical work on liq-uid crystals and incommensurate systemsare additional important contributions hemade to the theoretical understanding ofcondensed matter. As manager of an in-dustrial research organization with a budget
of $200M, he is strongly interested in im-proving technology conversion andimproving the connection between re-search and products. Brinkman was therecipient of the 1994 George E. Pake Prize.
In his candidate’s statement, Brinkmanspoke of the growing diversity of the phys-ics community and the need for the Societyto continue to embrace new groups withtopical interests that range from applica-tions in computing and communicationsto medicine. As electronic publishingmoves into the mainstream, the APS mustfind a way to recover the charges paid by
libraries for paper versions of its journals,perhaps, says Brinkman, through institu-tional flat fees. He also spoke of the needfor the APS to continue to be involved inpublic affairs that relate to the concerns ofits members as physicists. “High on thislist must be the health of our physics re-search enterprise. We must work to makephysics attractive to students and to cre-ate interesting career paths for them,”wrote Brinkman. “Among other things, thisrequires working toward ensuring the nec-essary funds for our research.”
In October, the 1999 Nobel Prize forPhysics was awarded to Gerardus
‘t Hooft of the University of Utrecht andMartinus Veltman, formerly of theUniversity of Michigan and now retired,for their work toward deriving a unifiedframework for all the physical forces.Their efforts, part of a tradition goingback to the 19th century, centers aroundthe search for underlying similarities orsymmetries among disparatephenomena, and the formulation of theserelations in a complex but elegantmathematical language. A past examplewould be James Clerk Maxwell’sdemonstration that electricity andmagnetism are two aspects of a singleelectro-magnetic force.
Naturally this unification enterprise hasmet with various obstacles along the way.In this century quantum mechanics wascombined with special relativity, resultingin quantum field theory. This theorysuccessfully explained many phenomena,such as how particles could be created orannihilated or how unstable particlesdecay, but it also seemed to predict,nonsensically, that the likelihood for certaininteractions could be infinitely large.
Richard Feynman, along with JulianSchwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, tamedthese infinities by redefining the massand charge of the electron in a processcalled renormalization. Their theory,quantum electrodynamics (QED), is themost precise theory known, and it serves
‘t Hooft and Veltman Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics;Zewail Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry
as a prototype for other gauge theories(theories which show how forces arisefrom underlying symmetries), such as theelectroweak theory, which assimilatesthe electromagnetic and weak nuclearforces into a single model.
But the electroweak model too wasvulnerable to infinities and physicists wereworried that the theory would be use-less. Then ‘t Hooft and Veltman overcamethe difficulty through a renormalizationcomparable to Feynman’s. They suc-ceeded in renormalizing a non-Abeliangauge theory. Getting the non-Abelianelectroweak model to work was a formi-dable theoretical problem. An essentialingredient in this scheme was the exist-ence of another particle, the Higgs boson,whose role is to confer mass upon manyof the known particles. For example, in-teractions between the Higgs boson andthe various force-carrying particles resultin the W and Z bosons (carriers of the weakforce) being massive (with masses of 80and 91 GeV, respectively) but the photon(carrier of the electromagnetic force) re-maining massless.
With Veltman’s and ‘t Hooft’s theo-retical machinery in hand, physicistscould more reliably estimate the massesof the W and Z, as well as produce atleast a crude guide as to the likely massof the top quark. Happily, the W, Z, andtop quark were subsequently created anddetected in high energy collision experi-ments, and the Higgs boson is now itself
an important quarry at places likeFermilab’s Tevatron and CERN’s LargeHadron Collider.
The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistrywas awarded to Ahmed H. Zewail ofCaltech, for developing a technique thatenables scientists to watch the extremelyrapid middle stages of a chemical reac-tion. Relying on ultra-fast laser pulses,“femtosecond spectroscopy” can pro-vide snapshots far faster than anycamera—it can capture the motions ofatoms within molecules in the time scaleof femtoseconds.
An atom in a molecule typically per-forms a single vibration in just 10-100femtoseconds, so this technique is fastenough to discern each and every stepof any known chemical reaction. Shiningpairs of femtosecond laser pulses onmolecules (the first to initiate a reactionand the second to probe it) and study-ing what type of light they absorb yieldsinformation on the atoms’ positions withinthe molecules at every step of a chemi-cal reaction. With this technique, Zewailand his colleagues first studied (in thelate 1980s) a 200-femtosecond disinte-gration of iodocyanide, observing theprecise moment at which a chemicalbond between iodine and carbon wasabout to break.
Since then, femtochemistry has re-vealed a whole new class of intermediatechemical compounds that exist less than
Continued on page 9
Continued on page 9
Seen here is a 2D stroboscopic history of the collision of four diatomic molecules, atetratomic molecule, and an atom. The image is one of a series by Eric Heller currently ondisplay at the American Center for Physics. See page 8 for more on the exhibit.
Atomic Collisions
APS News December 1999
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APS NewsCoden: ANWSEN ISSN: 1058-8132Series II, Vol. 8, No. 11 December 1999© 1999 The American Physical Society
Editor ................................ Barrett H. RipinAssociate Editor .......... Jennifer OuelletteDesign and Production ........ Alicia ChangCopy Editing .............. Danita Boonchaisri
APS News (ISSN: 1058-8132) is published 11X yearly,monthly, except the August/September issue, by the Ameri-can Physical Society, One Physics Ellipse, College Park,MD 20740-3844, (301) 209-3200. It contains news of theSociety and of its Divisions, Topical Groups, Sections andForums; advance information on meetings of the Society;and reports to the Society by its committees and taskforces, as well as opinions.
Letters to the editor are welcomed from the membership.Letters must be signed and should include an address anddaytime telephone number. The APS reserves the right toselect and to edit for length or clarity. All correspondenceregarding APS News should be directed to: Editor, APS News,One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20749-3844, E-mail:[email protected].
Subscriptions: APS News is an on-membership publication de-livered by Periodical Mail. Members residing abroad may receiveairfreight delivery for a fee of $20. Nonmembers: Subscriptionrates are: domestic $160; Canada, Mexico, Central and SouthAmerica, and Caribbean $180; Air Freight Europe, Asia, Africa andOceania $210.
Subscription orders, renewals and address changes shouldbe addressed as follows: For APS Members—Membership De-partment, The American Physical Society, One Physics Ellipse,College Park, MD 20740-3844, [email protected]. For Non-members—Circulation and Fulfillment Division, American Insti-tute of Physics, 500 Sunnyside Blvd., Woodbury, NY 11797. Allowat least 6 weeks advance notice. For address changes, please sendboth the old and new addresses, and, if possible, include a mailinglabel from a recent issue. Requests from subscribers for missingissues will be honored without charge only if received within 6months of the issue’s actual date of publication.
Periodical Postage Paid at College Park, MD and at additionalmailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to APS News,Membership Department, The American Physical Society, OnePhysics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844.
APS COUNCIL 1999PresidentJerome Friedman*, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPresident-ElectJames S. Langer*, University of California, Santa BarbaraVice-PresidentGeorge H. Trilling*, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Executive OfficerJudy R. Franz*, University of Alabama, Huntsville (on leave)TreasurerThomas McIlrath*, University of Maryland (emeritus)Editor-in-ChiefMartin Blume*, Brookhaven National LaboratoryPast-PresidentAndrew M. Sessler*, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
General CouncillorsDaniel Auerbach, Beverly Berger, Philip Bucksbaum, L. CraigDavis, S. James Gates*, Donald Hamann*, Leon Lederman,Cynthia McIntyre, Roberto Peccei, Paul Peercy*, Helen Quinn,Susan Seestrom*, James Trefil, Virginia Trimble*, RonaldWalsworth, Sau Lan Wu
Chair, Nominating CommitteeDaniel Kleppner
Chair, Panel on Public AffairsDenis McWhan
Division and Forum CouncillorsSteven Holt (Astrophysics), Eric Heller*, Harold Metcalf(Atomic, Molecular and Optical), Robert Callender (Biologi-cal), Stephen Leone (Chemical), E. Dan Dahlberg, DavidAspnes*, Arthur Hebard, Zachary Fisk* (Condensed Matter),Warren Pickett (Computational), Jerry Gollub (Fluid Dy-namics), James Wynne (Forum on Education), Gloria Lubkin(Forum on History of Physics), Matt Richter (Forum on Indus-trial & Applied Physics), Myriam Sarachik (Forum on Inter-
national Physics), Dietrich Schroeer (Forum on Physics andSocie ty) , Andrew Lovinger (High Polymer) , Danie lGrischkowsky (Laser Science), Howard Birnbaum (Materi-als), John Schiffer, John D. Walecka (Nuclear), Robert Cohn,Sally Dawson (Particles and Fields), Robert Siemann (Phys-ics of Beams), Richard Hazeltine, William Kruer (Plasma)*Members of APS Executive Board
ADVISORSSectional RepresentativesGeorge Rawitscher, New England; William Standish, NewYork; Perry P. Yaney, Ohio; Joseph Hamilton, Southeastern;Stephen Baker, Texas
Representatives from Other SocietiesThomas O’Kuma, AAPT; Marc Brodsky, AIP
International AdviorsGareth Roberts, Insitute of Physics, A.M. Bradshaw,German Physical Society, Pedro Hernandez Tejeda,Mexican Physical Society, Michael Steinitz, CanadianPhysical Society
Staff RepresentativesBarrett Ripin, Associate Executive Officer; Irving Lerch, Di-rector of International Affairs; Ramon Lopez, Director ofEducation and Outreach; Robert L. Park, Director, PublicInformation; Michael Lubell, Director, Public Affairs; StanleyBrown, Administrative Editor; Charles Muller, Director,Editoral Office Services, Michael Stephens, Controller andAssistant Treasurer
To Advance & Diffusethe Knowledge of Physics
100 Years of the American Physical SocietyExcerpts from an exhibit displayed at the APS Centennial Meeting.
Curator : Sara Schechner, Gnomon ResearchExhibit Director : Barrett Ripin
With contributions by Harry Lustig, R. Mark Wilson, and others.
Public AffairsUntil recently, the American Physical Societyprided itself on its aloofness from matters ofpublic policy. It saw itself as an organizationdevoted exclusively to the affairs of pure science.The archival record tells another story, and one ofwhich the Society might equally be proud.
Time and again the Society entered the field ofpolitics — with petitions to Congress, telegrams tonews agencies, and well-placed letters — in orderto defend the scientific integrity, freedom, andloyalty of its members. During the war years, theAPS was responsive to the needs of nationalsecurity without losing sight of the long-termgoals of international cooperation.
Science without BordersIn November 1945—three monthsafter the end of the war—the APSCouncil voted to treat German andJapanese members the same as otherforeign members. Gifts of wartime andpostwar issues of the Physical Review andReviews of Modern Physics were sent toGerman and Japanese universities in 1948.
Such actions led McCarthyites to view manyphysicists with suspicion during the ColdWar. Former APS presidents EdwardCondon and Robert Oppenheimer wereamong those blacklisted.
Seeking Truth without Regard to PoliticsIn 1900, APS encouraged the U.S.Congress to set up the NationalBureau of Standards. In 1953, APSagain came to the Bureau’s supportwhen its director, Allen V. Astin,resigned under pressure from theSecretary of Commerce. At issuewas a battery additive that NBShad tested and found did notextend battery life as advertised bythe manufacturer. Astin waseventually reinstated.
Self-CensorshipWar work had impact on theSociety’s meetings and publications.Many members were involved inclassified defense work and had toforego their prewar research.
During the national emergency,scientists took the extraordinary stepto set up an office of censorshipwithout direction from the federalgovernment.
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Referees’ report advising delay in publication of a paper byG. Placzek on fission.
Petition submitted by WashingtonD.C. area APS members in April
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Oppenheimer with Major W. A. “Lex” Stevenson a trip to select the test site for the firstatomic bomb, 1944.
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Next Month: Consciousness Raising: Turbulent 60s
December 1999 APS News
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festival profilefestival profile
Exploring Our Fractal Universe
The lights are dimmed in theauditorium at the Atlanta College of
Art, and Richard Voss is playing a simplemelody for the audience. But unliketraditionally composed music, thismelody was generated by a computer,and is based on the fluctuations of 30years of IBM stock prices. Voss, who is intown for the APS Centennial meeting,offers it as an aural representation ofBrownian motion as part of his scheduledlecture on fractal patterns in modernculture.
A professor of physics and mathemat-ics at Florida Atlantic University’s Centerfor Complex Systems and Brain Science,Voss specializes in scientific computergraphics and the application of fractalsnot only to the natural sciences, but toart, music, literature, the stock market,cancer cells, and even the organizationof base pairs of DNA. “Mandelbrot’smathematical language of fractals hasrevolutionized the application of geomet-ric constructs in the sciences, anddrastically changed the image of math-ematics,” he says. “Fractal geometry andchaos theory provide new tools and uni-fying concepts that bridge the traditionalboundaries between science, art and fi-nance.”
Voss earned a PhD in condensed mat-ter physics from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, in 1975. He joinedthe IBM research division that same year,and found himself working closely with
the “father of fractals” himself, BenoitMandelbrot, who first coined the term in1975 to describe patterns or objects thatexhibit similar patterns and structures atdifferent size scales.
Certain fractal geometries exist onlyin the abstract world of mathematics, butMandelbrot, Voss and others have foundthat many fractal patterns provide use-ful models for the irregular shapes foundin nature, which don’t follow traditionalEuclidean geometries of perfectly regu-lar circles and squares. “The structureswe find in the natural world, going fromthe smallest microscopic scales to thelargest intergalactic scales, are mimickedin the structures we see at human scaleson Earth,” says Voss. “If you want to un-derstand, simulate and ultimatelymanipulate nature, you need to under-stand its language, and the language ofnature turns out to be mathematics.”
It was during the early period of hiscareer — beginning when he was still agraduate student — that Voss discoveredthat a wide variety of music from differ-ent historical periods and culturesfollowed the same patterns as manynatural phenomena, illustrated by themelody line generated by IBM stockprices. In music, this enables one tomake a reasonably accurate guess as towhat the next note might be in a givenpiece of music; it can also be used to
generate music.Voss’ early workhas given rise toa proliferation of“composers” offractal music, us-ing speciallydesigned softwareto generate thesame types offeedback pro-cesses used tocreate fractral images.
The same concept can be applied tothe visual arts. In the 1980s, Voss analyzedancient Chinese landscape paintings fromvarious historical periods at the requestof James Watt, curator for Asian art atNew York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.He determined the dimension of brushstrokes in each painting, and found thatthose considered superior by art historians(the earlier landscapes) had fractaldimensions comparable to those oftypical coastlines: between 1.25 and1.33. In fact, the difference between thefractal dimensions of the earlier and laterpaintings turned out to correspond tosociological changes of the time. Theearly landscapes were done by paintersworking away from urban areas in thecountryside, and hence their workinvolved objects repeated at differentsizes, one of the defining characteristicsof fractals. In contrast, the later paintingswere done by court artists living in urban
areas, and involved brushstrokes that were simpler andsmoother; the paintings weremore of an abstraction ofnatural objects and struckWatt and his fellow arthistorians as being much lessinteresting.
The fact that human beingsare drawn to objects that ex-hibit a specific fractaldimension is not surprising toVoss, or others working in hisfield. Voss conducted a studywith perceptual psychologistBernice Rogowitz, in which
subjects were shown randomly generatedfractal cloud patterns and asked to indi-cate in which cases they perceivedobjects in the pictures. He found that sub-jects saw more objects in those patternswith fractal dimensions corresponding tothose found in nature. To Voss, this issuggestive of a particular sensitivity forfractal patterns in the human perceptualsystem, which he does not find surpris-ing. “The human perceptual systemevolved in nature, which exhibits manyfractal patterns,” he says. “We live in anirregular world in time and space that isvery much at the boundary between pre-dictable and unpredictable behavior.”
However, Voss cautions against attach-ing too much importance to suchmeasurements of fractal dimension,which can be a difficult property to pindown accurately because of the infinityof different shapes that can be analyzedwithin any given image. “So specific mea-surements — including those I havemade — need to be taken with a grainof salt,” he says.
In 1995 Voss left IBM and joined theCenter for Complex Systems and BrainScience at Florida Atlantic University. Hisrecent work involves applying fractalanalysis to financial variables, such asseeming randomness in stock price pat-terns, as well as to digital mammography
IN BRIEFTownes Receives Annunzio Award
In October, the second annual $100,000 Frank AnnunzioAward was presented by the Christopher Columbus Fellow-ship Foundation to Charles Hard Townes, inventor of thelaser. Townes is a professor of physics at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. Townes, a fellow of theAPS, received the APS Plyer Prize in 1997 and the NobelPrize in Physics in 1964. The laser was developed out of hismicrowave work on molecules at Bell Telephone Labs in theearly 1950s. He was trying to produce a wavelength shorterthan a few millimeters in order to extend his spectroscopic studies. The concepton how to accomplish this came to him early one morning in 1951 while sitting ona park bench. Townes envisioned using radiation to stimulate a molecule or atomto give up energy, thus increasing the radiation intensity. This was the inventionof the MASER, Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, whichwas the basic idea behind the LASER which uses light amplification.
The Frank Annunzio Award is presented to a living American whose innova-tive thinking has had a significant and beneficial impact on society. It is namedfor the Honorable Frank Annunzio who served as a Member of Congress fromthe State of Illinois for 28 years, and was the visionary behind the establishmentof the Columbus Foundation. The Christopher Columbus Fellowship Founda-tion is an independent Federal government agency established by Congress toencourage and support research, study and labor designed to produce newdiscoveries in all fields of endeavor for the benefit of mankind.
DNP Establishes Junior Investigator ProgramThe APS Division of Nuclear Physics and the DOE have announced the initia-
tion of an Outstanding Junior Investigator Program to support the developmentof individual research programs of outstanding scientists early in their careers.Grant applications for support are invited from tenure-track faculty currentlyinvolved in experimental or theoretical nuclear physics research falling withinthe full range of activities currently supported by the Division of Nuclear Phys-ics and the DOE. The deadline is November 16, 1999. For complete informationsee the web page at the URL http://www.er.doe.gov/production/grants/fr99_25.html or contact Dr. Dennis G. Kovar, Division of Nuclear Physics, SC-23(GTN), U.S. Department of Energy, 19901 Germantown Road, Germantown,Maryland 20874-1290. Telephone: (301) 903-3613, Fax: (301) 903-3833.
APS Division Gets Off Its “High” HorseThe APS Division of High Polymer Physics — the second-oldest division within the
Society, having been established in 1944 — has voted to change its name to the APSDivision of Polymer Physics (DPOLY). According to Andrew Lovinger (National ScienceFoundation), the division’s councillor, the use of “High Polymer” in the division’sname stemmed from the original German terminology for those new materialswhose high molecular weight was responsible for their unique properties. [A lowmolecular weight polymer would have the properties of a liquid or a wax.] How-ever, over the last few decades, the high molecular weight aspects of polymershave been taken for granted, and a new term, “oligomer,” is used to describe lowmolecular weight polymers, making the modifier “high” redundant. Also, the terminol-ogy “led to the natural question of whether polymers have high physics and lowphysics, or variants thereof,” says Lovinger. “A majority of the division members felt thata change of name would not only more accurately reflect the interests of the division,but would attract additional membership.” The division members voted for the namechange and the APS Council has approved it last May.
Physics In Popular CulturePhysics has been making cameo appearances in mass media culture during the APS
Centennial year. In September, an episode of Jeopardy! included a category of ques-tions on “A Century of Physics,” which even mentioned the APS by name. And novelistThomas Harris’ new thriller, Hannibal — the sequel to his best-selling Silence of theLambs, the film version of which won several Oscars in 1991 — contains a surprisingreference of its own. On page 263 of the hardcover version, FBI agent Clarice Starlingis attempting to track serial killer Hannibal “the cannibal” Lecter by cross-checking newsubscriptions to various cultural journals Lecter has subscribed to in the past. The onlyone mentioned by name? The Physical Review.
Fractal images from Sprott’s Fractal Gallery website:http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/fractals.htm
Charles Townes
Richard Voss
Continued on page 8
New Faces at APS HeadquartersT wo new people joined APS staff’s
College Park, MD, headquarters inOctober. Barbara Hicks joined the Societyas associate publisher replacing MinaChung, and Suzanne Otwell is the neweducation programs administrator,replacing long-time APS veteran TaraMcLoughlin, who now works for theAmerican Psychiatric Association.
Hicks comes to the APS after 18 yearswith the Optical Society of America(OSA), initially as director of meetingsand conferences, and later as part ofOSA’s marketing program in its devel-opment and business strategiesdepartment. The focus of her work withAPS is to assist in maintaining the Society’snon-member subscriptions.
A graduate of Smith College, Otwellcame to the APS from ASPEN, a medicaland scientific association. She will be sup-porting the APS Committee on Educationand its work on women’s issues throughthe APS Committee on Status of Womenin Physics.
Barbara Hicks Suzanne Otwell
APS News December 1999
4
LETTERSVIEWPOINT...Happer to Remain on Princeton Team
In a letter to APS News, Dan Kleppner pointed out that a recent article on MRIrare gas imaging had failed to mention that this new and valuable technique wasconceived and developed by William Happer of Yale University. It falls to me tocorrect the corrector: Will Happer is a member of the Physics Department ofPrinceton University and we have no intention of trading him to Yale!Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, Princeton New Jersey
Readers Reply to Chodos Regarding Foreign StudentsIn his back page article (APS News, October 1999), Alan Chodos claims that “the
ability to change this [perceived shortage of American physicists] rests very little withprofessors in universities.” But professors can do a lot, because declining interest inphysics stems largely from faculty disinterest in teaching. The hiring, pay, promotionsand tenure of essentially every faculty member at PhD-granting departments is basednearly exclusively on research. Most departments are eager to hire promising research-ers, regardless of teaching skills. This imbalance has implications for K-12 education, forcongressional and public attitudes, and for the much-lamented problems of physics.Here at the University of Arkansas, we have demonstrated that attention to studentscan have big payoffs. We have added two new applied BS tracks geared towardimmediate employment, broken our large introductory course into smaller sectionsthat combine lecture and lab, added a BA physics degree for students headed forcareers in such non-physics fields as business and law, expanded our course for non-scientists, added two applied interdisciplinary MS programs and an MA degree forteachers, and paid greater attention to teaching and mentoring. The result? Physicscourse enrollments are up, the number of physics majors is up, and the physics bacca-laureate graduate rate is up from an average of 2.5 per year during 1990-1997 to 12 in1998, 13 in 1999 and 16 on track for 2000.Art Hobson, University of Arkansas
When APS was founded at the turn of the last century, Europe was the world centerof physics. Americans went to Europe to learn physics, and the shift to America was theresult at least in part of mass immigration of European physicists to the US in the 1930s.Thus the internationalism of physics has been one of its characteristic, proud featuresand great strengths, and Americans have learned more than they have taught. Today,America is a magnet for foreign physics students in part because of the wealth offederal funding available for physics. It is very hard, therefore, to understand whyChodos expects increased federal funding to shift the national composition of physicsstudents in favor of Americans. And it is not obvious that such a shift should be engi-neered as a matter of policy. Once we start down the road of national selectivity inscience, we move in the direction of quotas and other forms of restriction, such ascharacterized medical school admissions in the US in the 1930s, and which now arethankfully behind us. Assuming that to first approximation national groups contribute tothe pool of physics talent in proportion to their numbers, it is reasonable that students ofAsian origin should be particularly numerous. We should be grateful that they favor Americanschools as much as they do and that so many remain in this country. Our need for scientificmanpower is such that currently 55,000 persons with special skills are exempted from ourimmigration quotas. In World War II, we learned from experience with nationals of Japaneseorigin that national origin alone should not be a test of security risk, while native-borns likeAldrich Ames and the Walkers did us incalculable damage. We need better tools for credibilityassessment in security investigations — not a xenophobic manpower policy.Lawrence Cranberg, Austin, Texas
In his article concerning a shortage of American-born physicists for national secu-rity projects, Alan Chodos has ignored an obvious source of talent - those of us whowere working for the national security at the national labs and other federal andprivate laboratories but were laid off or forced into early retirement at the conclu-sion of the SDI program. The question that occurs to me, however, is do we reallyneed another large national effort on behalf of national security?Bill P. Curry, Ph.D., EMSciTek Consulting Co.
New DOE Polygraph Rules Don’t Protect National SecurityThe Department of Energy’s proposed new polygraph policy should be of con-
cern to many physicists. All APS members in particular should realize that polygraphscreening has no theoretical foundation and is without validity; anyone can be taughtto beat this type of polygraph examination in a few minutes. Any spies at ournational laboratories will take those few minutes and more to learn to beat thepolygraph. The following sources should make this clear:
Drew C. Richardson, testimony to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary,http://www.nopolygraph.com/drewtest.htm
Charles R. Honts, “Counterintelligence Scope Polygraph Test Found to be PoorDiscriminator,” Forensic Reports, 5 (1992), pp. 215-218.
Scientific Validity of Polygraph Resting: A Research Review and Evaluation — ATechnical Memorandum. Washington DC: U.S. Congress, Office of TechnologyAssessment, OTA-TM-H-15, November 1983.
David T. Lykken. A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector. 2nd
ed. New York: Plenum, 1998.By substituting cheaper polygraph exams for more expensive background in-
vestigations, the DOE is shirking its duty to protect America’s atomic secrets. Theproposed rules fail to protect both national security interests and employees, and Iurge the DOE to rescind its proposed polygraph rules and to use its discretionaryauthority to halt all polygraph screening of DOE and contractor employees. For anaccount of my personal experience with the polygraph — I was falsely accused ofbeing a spy — see http://www.nopolygraph.com/captain_jones.htmGeorge W. Maschke, University of California, Los Angeles
International Collaboration:Cost Effective or a Give-Away?by Irving A. Lerch, APS International Affairs
It’s estimated that from 70% to asmuch as 80% in the expansion of our
economy is technology-dr iven,derived from the most productivesystem of scientific innovation in theworld. This is also true of our nationalsecurity. Science is indispensable tothe development and maintenance ofthe nation’s arsenals. The Departmentof Energy’s Nuclear Stockpi leStewardship Program is central to thesafety and reliability of Americannuclear weapons and to our hope fora worldwide ban on nuclear tests. Butthis program will fail without acontinuing intense development effortbased on cutting-edge science. And agreat deal of the science needed isbeing pursued in fundamental non-weapons-related research around theworld.
Science expresses the collective in-telligence of humankind and it cannotbe impounded by any nation. As is trueof the world’s economy, so is scienceglobal. Any impediment to the ex-change of ideas serves only to isolateand degrade both international anddomestic inquiry. But what are we tomake of the return to the U.S. from itsinternational S&T investments over theyears?
Many of you may be familiar withthe 1997 Rand Corporation Study byC.S. Wagner entitled, International Co-operation in Research andDevelopment: an Inventory of US Gov-ernment Spending and a Frameworkfor Measuring Benefits. The study re-ports that in FY95, U.S. Governmentsupport for international cooperationand development exceeded $3.3 bil-lion. This constituted about 4.5% of thetotal annual federal research and de-velopment budget . Of this ,three-quarters goes directly to supportresearch collaborations. Why do wespend so much on international collabo-ration? Wagner enumerates fourreasons:• scale of equipment or investment
is large• project is global• unique expert ise is located
elsewhere• mission of funding agency is to
support international cooperationI will add one other element: Self-
organized col laborat ions yie ldprodigious increases in productivity forthe core activity, member scientists andcooperating institutions.
Let ’s look athow we distrib-uted these funds.The bar graph be-low summarizesthe contributionsby agency. Set-ting aside NASA,most of the fundsare contributed byDoD, US AID, NSF and DoE (thiswould be rearranged today if we ac-count for the DoE and NSFcontributions to the CERN Large Had-ron Collider project). The inset graphillustrates the disciplines being sup-ported (excluding the internationalspace station).
It is certainly easy to point to theimportance of the geological sciences,physics, biomedicine and materials en-gineering to our national interest. Butwhile the study develops a frameworkfor assessing the impact on national pri-orities in science and technology, itdoes not answer the question ofwhether the return on investment iswarranted. The largest investments —excluding the space program — are insupport of national security.
If we ask ourselves what’s at stakein this debate over the value of ourinvestments in international coopera-tion, we can make a relatively simpleback-of-the-envelope calculation. Ina recent study of organizational com-plexity, Barbara Drossel of theUniversity of Manchester invoked amodel for productivity dependentupon the numbers of partners in agroup and impediments to commu-nication. Drossel assumes that groupproductivity per number of cooper-ating individuals increases as the sizeof the group but is depreciated bythe costs of maintaining connectiv-ity within the group. This yields avery simple model where the pro-duc t iv i ty ga in o f a g roup permember is proportional to the num-bers of members and is reduced bythe square of the numbers of mem-be r s . So long a s the cos t o fmaintaining the group is very muchsmaller than the costs of communi-cation, group productivity will climbas members are added, eventuallyreaching a peak and plunging nega-tive as more and more of the group’sresources go into maintenance.
As the cost of maintaining the group
Irving A. Lerch
OPINION
Continued on page 5
December 1999 APS News
5
The 1999 Ig Nobel Prizes, presentedfor achievements that “cannot orshould not be reproduced,” wereawarded at Harvard’s Sanders Theatreon September 20 before 1200 specta-tors in a ceremony filled with hijinks,paper airplanes, and tea bags. ThePrizes were physically handed to thewinners by genuine Nobel LaureatesWilliam Lipscomb (Chemistry ’76),Dudley Herschbach (Chemistry ’86),Sheldon Glashow (Physics ’79), andRobert Wilson (Physics ’78) before apaper-airplane-throwing audience of1200 people.
The event was produced by the sci-ence humor magazine Annals ofImprobable Research (AIR), and co-sponsored by the Harvard ComputerSociety, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Sci-ence Fiction Association. The eveningalso featured numerous tributes to thetheme of “Heredity,” including a pa-rade of descendants of famousscientists, and a mini-opera (about hu-man cloning) starring the NobelLaureates and millenial mezzo-sopranoMargot Button. Sheldon Glashow wasthe prize in the annual Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest. Theevent was televised live on theInternet. To see a video recording ofthe entire ceremony, go to the website http://www.ignobel.org
SOCIOLOGY: Steve Penfold, of YorkUniversity in Toronto, for doing hisPhD thesis on the sociology of Cana-dian donut shops.
PHYSICS: Awarded jointly to: Dr. LenFisher of Bath, England and Sydney,Australia for calculating the optimalway to dunk a biscuit …and to… Pro-fessor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of theUniversity of East Anglia, England, andBelgium, for calculating how to makea teapot spout that does not drip.
LITERATURE: The British StandardsInstitution for its six-page specification(BS-6008) of the proper way to makea cup of tea.
SCIENCE EDUCATION: Awardedjointly to: the Kansas Board of Educa-tion and the Colorado State Board of
The 1999 Ig Nobel Prizes
Education, for mandating that childrenshould not believe in Darwin’s theoryof evolution any more than they be-lieve in Newton’s theory of gravitation,Faraday’s and Maxwell’s theory of elec-tromagnetism, or Pasteur’s theory thatgerms cause disease.
MEDICINE: Dr. Arvid Vatle of Stord,Norway, for carefully collecting, clas-sifying, and contemplating which kindsof containers his patients chose whensubmitting urine samples.
CHEMISTRY: Takeshi Makino, presidentof The Safety Detective Agency in Osaka,Japan, for his involvement with S-Check,an infidelity detection spray that wives canapply to their husbands’ underwear.
BIOLOGY: Paul Bosland of The ChilePepper Institute, at New Mexico StateUniversity, Las Cruces, New Mexico, forbreeding a spiceless jalapeño chilepepper.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION:Hyuk-ho Kwon of Kolon Company ofSeoul, Korea, for inventing the self-per-fuming business suit.
PEACE: Charl Fourie and MichelleWong of Johannesburg, South Africa,for inventing an automobile burglaralarm consisting of a detection circuitand a flamethrower.
MANAGED HEALTH CARE: The lateGeorge and Charlotte Blonsky of NewYork City and San Jose, California, for in-venting a device (US Patent #3,216,423)to aid women in giving birth — thewoman is strapped onto a circular table,and the table is then rotated at highspeed.
Beginning in the 1990s, concernbegan to be expressed as to the
underenrollment of university studentsin physics. In the U.S., where universitystudents can switch in and out of majorsthroughout their course of study, failureto recruit is compounded by failure toretain. U.S. colleges and universities havelost 16% of their first-degree physicsgraduates in the last five years (24% inthe last 10 years), dropping from anationwide annual graduating cohort of4,600 to 3,800 — a 40-year low —compared to the production annually of78,000 engineers.
In fact, fewer than one-third of U.S.physics majors actually become “physi-cists” (as defined by the profession).Research findings indicate that students donot choose science in general, physics inparticular, because of “narrowness ofstudy” and “inflexibility” as regards futureemployment. Given these findings, per-haps a physics curriculum designed toprepare students for further physics study isnot the most appropriate curriculum for therest. Not just the teaching, textbook and labo-ratory, but the physics curricula are beingincreasingly subjected to review. Supportedby national funding and by one another, wenow have a large number of physicists —even Centers for Physics Education Research— dealing with the “best practices” in theteaching of physics and the training of phys-ics instructors, as well as the productive usesof “project-based teaching,” “workshop phys-ics,” and “peer instruction.”
But is this enough? Will improved peda-gogy be sufficiently attractive to win backthe physics student who likes and doeswell at physics, but isn’t inspired by thecareer options currently available? Someof us who care both about the continuedhealth of physics and about the lack ofphysics-trained professionals populatingother fields (e.g. banks, Foundations, gov-ernment) think that, in addition toimprovements in teaching, some alto-gether new graduate degree programs arecalled for, leading to careers related tophysics but not circumscribed by physics andits immediate applications. Those involvedin these new degree programs are callingthem “Professional Masters” intending there-with to convey their equivalence (if notcongruence) with the MBA and LLD degrees.
It is easier by far to create new programswithin existing degree structures in highereducation than to create new degrees. Newprograms certainly have their challenges.They often involve wholly new techniquesor new applications of old techniques. Theychallenge the notion of who is the “expert”in a changing field, one in which no “expert”received his or her degree. And quality con-trol has to be imaginatively reinvented whenthe lines between disciplines are blurred. Fi-nally there is the issue of pedagogy: how isone to teach a new subject?
Though often stimulated by the pres-sure of emerging fields, the creation ofnew degrees is not an inevitable conse-quence of new discoveries or new researchdirections. In my view, a new degree hasto have its own dynamic and rationale tobe supported by higher education admin-istrators and their stakeholders. Thus, thenew professional MS degree in the sciences(and mathematics) is not to be construedas just a way of accrediting or institutional-izing or allocating scarce resources to oneor more emerging fields. Rather, it is ameans of providing and legitimizing some
OPINIONConceptualizing a New Degreeby Sheila Tobias
post-baccalaureate alternatives for scienceand mathematics majors who don’t wishto do medicine or engineering, or pursuea research PhD, but do not wish to leavescience altogether.
Until now, these students have hadnowhere to go, except directly into in-dustry where, as terminal BS or BA degreeholders they are housed in research labsas techies. There is of course the MBA orlaw option. But for many of the studentswe are eager to serve, such post-graduateoptions cause them to have to reinventthemselves as law or business students,and to compete with students who, whilenot well-schooled in mathematics or sci-ence, are able to compete with them inthe arts of advocacy and/or marketing.
The Sloan Foundation — along with theKeck Foundation, the mathematics com-munity, and local initiatives at a few dozenuniversities — supports the new profes-sional master’s degree with hopes ofpositively impacting the science/mathpipeline in a number of ways: seed re-form in graduate education moregenerally; keep non-research oriented stu-dents in the major; provide a cadre ofscience-trained professionals useful to busi-ness, industry and government; and bringmore science-trained people into thepower centers which tend to be over-populated with professionals from the lawand finance communities.
Thus, the professional MS in science andmathematics is characterized not only bynew subject matter, but also by newpedagogies and new means of evaluatingapplicants for admission and matriculation.The new professional MS degree programsare not identical. Some involve an emerg-ing new field, such as bioinformatics; othersinterdisciplinary study, such as computa-tional sciences; still others, science/mathematics “plus” business, law, organi-zational theory and communication. Newpedagogies are also being discussed, suchas case studies within a modular scheduleat the Keck Graduate Institute; a lab rota-tion through a variety of cutting-edgeresearch fields at the University of Arizona;and, at Michigan State University, a seriesof “basics for business” weekend shortcourses tailor made for the background andmindset of science/mathematics students.
Like the MBA, which took nearly 40years to sell to students and employers,these programs must be packaged andsold. What we are after is a high-level edu-cation in the science/mathematicsunderpinnings of today’s and tomorrow’stechnologies, one that will offer graduatesflexible careers at the interface of R&D,product development, regulatory affairs,intellectual property issues, marketing, fi-nance and management. Let us hopestudents will perceive these opportunitiesthe way we do and that employers willprovide innovative career pathways oncethey are in the work force.
Sheila Tobias is the author or co-authorof seven books on the subjects of mathemat-ics and science teaching and learning,among them They’re Not Dumb, They’reDifferent (1990), Breaking the ScienceBarrier (1992), and Rethinking Scienceas a Career (1995). A version of this ar-ticle appeared in the November 1999 issueof the European Journal of Physics. Infor-mation about Sloan-sponsored professionalMS programs can be found online atwww.ScienceMasters.com.
zero gravity
decreases from 5% to 9% of the pro-duct iv i ty gain parameter, themaximum group productivity declinesby a factor of 3 and the optimumgroup size declines from 14 to abouthalf. We can generalize this model toexamine the combination of groups toform larger collaborations of “super-groups.” Using this model to examinethe behavior of interacting groups wefind that collaborations provide enor-mous increases in productivity. Overa broad range of small group’s produc-tivity and connectivity parameters, theputative gains in productivity of thefull collaboration can be impressivelylarge. In fact, calculations for largernumbers of collaborating groups im-ply that rather large gains can beachieved for modest investments tobring these groups together. This
Viewpoint, continued from page 4
model may be further generalized tohigher-order collaborations of groupsof supergroups. Thus, researchgroups, institutional collaborationsand regional intergovernmental orga-n i za t ions may be examined .
We have a long way to go before wecan confidently assess the likely gains andcosts of maintaining an international col-laboration for all but the largest projects.But such assessments are possible andthe early results support the economicfoundations for vigorous internationalscientific collaborations.
An expanded version of the article, in-cluding references, can be found in theDecember 1999 APS News Online atwww.aps.org under the APS News button.
Irving Lerch is the APS director ofinternational scientific affairs.
Ig Nobel 1999, as seen from a vantagepoint behind the winners and authorityfigures on stage.
Eric
Wor
kman
APS News December 1999
6
Four Corners Section, October 1-2, Tucson, AZThe APS Four Corners Section held its second meeting at
the University of Arizona in October, featuring contributionsfrom all fields of physics. Friday afternoon’s plenary sessionfeatured Marlon Scully of Texas A&M University, speakingon Bose-Einstein condensates and their analogy to laser phasetransitions, followed by a tour of the University Mirror Labo-ratory. The banquet Friday evening was followed by a publiclecture on cosmology and new evidence for the accelera-tion of the expansion of the universe by Robert Krishner ofHarvard University. Other highlights included a lecture onthe science behind the popular TV series “Star Trek” by Andre Bormanis, a con-sultant on the series. Harry Lustig, APS Treasurer emeritus, provided acomprehensive account of the founding and evolution of the APS since 1899 aspart of the Centennial celebration. Saturday afternoon’s plenary session featuredspeakers from each state in the section, covering a wide range of topics, includingin-situ microscopy of the growth of quantum dot islands, statistics of the cosmicdensity field, solar system studies, and the origin of universal scaling in biologyfrom molecules and cells to whales.
Ohio Section, October 8-9, Dayton, OHThe APS Ohio Section held its annual fall meeting at Wright State University in Ohio
in October, hosted jointly with the Air Force Institute of Technology. The fourlectures focused on the history of various physics disciplines in honor of the APSCentennial and the 60th anniversary of the Ohio Section. On Friday afternoon,Norman Ramsey of Harvard University spoke on the history of atomic and mo-lecular beams, along with Lawrence Slifkin of the University of North Carolina whosummarized the history of defects in solids. They were followed by a special social hourand a special Centennial display featuring a collage of photos on early educationalphysics apparatus taken by Kenyon College’s Thomas Greenslade, who was also theafter-dinner banquet speaker. Saturday morning’s plenary session featured lectures byNicolaas Bloembergen of Harvard University on the last century in nonlinear optics, andCharles Slichter of the University of Illinois on the history of magnetic resonance.
New York State Section, October 22-23, Brockport, NYThe APS New York State Section held its annual fall meeting at the State Uni-
versity of New York at Brockport in October and focused on low-temperaturephysics and nonlinear dynamics and chaos. Friday afternoon’s sessions featuredlectures on aerogel and 3He-introducing disorder into a superfluid; the superfluidtransition of 4He as a test of critical phenomena; the photophysics of silver halidenanoclusters; and the flow properties of granular matter. Kenneth Schlecht ofSUNY’s Chemistry Department spoke after Friday evening’s banquet on the ex-citement of chemistry. On Saturday morning, the sessions covered such topics asnonlinear patterns in nature, swirling of superfluid films, laser cooling and Bose-Einstein condensation, and spatiotemporal organization during ventricular fibrillation.
Texas Section, October 28-30, Austin, TXThe APS Texas Section held its annual fall meeting in October at the University
of Texas, Austin (UTA), featuring an opening plenary lecture on high-temperaturesuperconductivity by Paul Chu of the University of Houston. In addition to theusual technical papers in such subfields as statistical mechanics, nanoparticles,femtosecond physics, and particle physics, Friday afternoon’s program includedtwo sessions on physics in industry, with lectures on flat panel display technolo-gies, chemical and physical characterization of semiconductors, micro-Raman analysisapplications, and making integrated circuits on spherical surfaces. In honor of theAPS Centennial, the banquet speaker, David Gavenda of UTA, gave an overviewof the last 100 years of physics in the state of Texas. Saturday’s session on bio-physics featured papers on optical spectroscopy and imaging for pre-cancerdetection and the use of multiphoton-excited fluorescence as a biological probe.In a more unusual area, another Saturday session focused on forensic science, withtalks on DNA analysis, drugs and toxicology, and fingerprint analysis.
New England Section, November 5-6, Waterville, METhe APS New England Section held its annual fall meeting at Colby College in
November. Friday afternoon’s invited session focused on quantum technologywith lectures on quantum information and coherent control, followed by a ban-quet with a keynote address about the Keck Observatory by Gary Chanan of theUniversity of California, Irvine. Saturday morning began with a session on physicsin elementary school education, featuring lectures on developmental issues forgrades K-8 and the use of bright light-emitting diodes to teach elementary gradelevels about physics. The meeting closed with a session on novel semiconductors,with talks on organic LEDs and semiconductors.
Southeastern Section, November 7-9, Chapel Hill, NCThe APS Southeastern Section held its annual fall meeting in November at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, organized jointly with corresponding geo-graphical sections from the Materials Research Society and the American Vacuum Society.Invited sessions covered such topics as physics teaching and education, imaging withhyper-polarized gases, physics with high-intensity lasers, thermo-ferroelectric materials,free electron lasers, and nonequilibrium dynamics and spatial structure. On Monday, theAVS and MRS organized additional sessions on novel materials fabrication and on fabri-cation, processing and characterization of wide band-gap materials. In honor of the APSCentennial, the Centennial Timeline Wall Chart was on display throughout the meeting,and Monday evening’s banquet featured a lecture by Richard Voss of Florida StateUniversity on fractals and scaling in nature, culture and finance. [Voss gave one of thepopular physics talks for the Festival of Physics program held during the Centennialmeeting in Atlanta in March; see page 3 for a full profile.]
MEETING BRIEFS
T he APS spoke out in October in support of the Comprehensive Test BanTreaty (CTBT). APS President Jerome Friedman organized a letter signed by 32
physics Nobel Laureates, calling the treaty “central to future efforts to halt thespread of nuclear weapons.” Their sentiments were echoed in the New York Timeson October 8 by world leaders Jacques Chirac (France), Tony Blair (England) andGerhard Schroder (Germany). The APS Council statement on the ComprehensiveTest Ban Treaty was issued almost three years ago. Despite such efforts, the U.S.Senate voted against the CTBT (48-51) on Tuesday, October 12. The text of theAPS Council statement is below.
“On September 10, 1996, the United Nations overwhelmingly approvedthe Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a treaty ending all nuclear testing,of any yield, at any location, for all time. The United States, all other declarednuclear weapon states, and a growing majority of the world’s nations havenow signed that treaty. Although the date at which the CTBT will enter intoforce is not yet certain, the treaty is of extraordinary importance to the UnitedStates and to the future of all humankind.
“The CTBT, the culmination of over 40 years of effort, ends the qualitativearms race among the nuclear states and is central to future efforts to halt thefurther spread of nuclear weapons. The promise to negotiate and put intoforce a CTBT was an essential pre-condition to achieving an indefinite extensionof the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in May 1995. Ratification of the CTBTwill mark an important advance in uniting the world in an effort to containand reduce the nuclear danger.
“Having been the first country to develop nuclear weapons, having beena major participant in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, and havingplayed a leadership role in the NPT extension and the CTBT negotiations, it isappropriate and imperative that the United States ratify the ComprehensiveTest Ban Treaty at the earliest possible date. The Council notes that detailed,fully informed technical studies have concluded continued nuclear testing isnot required to retain confidence in the safety and reliability of the remainingnuclear weapons in the United States’ stockpile, provided science andtechnology programs necessary for stockpile stewardship are maintained.This conclusion is also supported by both the senior civilian and military officialsresponsible for US national security.
“The Council of the American Physical Society, representing 40,000academic, industrial, and laboratory physicists, endorses the CTBT, includingits extensive technical and procedural provisions to verify compliance withtreaty requirements.”
An excellent analysis of the pros and cons of the CTBT was published byJeremiah Sullivan, University Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in the March 1998issue of Physics Today. This article, plus others on CTBT, can be accessedthrough the APS server at www.aps.org/public_affairs/ctbt.html.
Physics Nobel Laureates SupportComprehensive Test Ban Treaty
INSIDE THE BELTWAYA Washington Analysis
Harry Lustig
Politics generally follows a well-defined set of rules, but when hatred,
mistrust and partisanship dominate thescene, as they clearly have in recentmonths, those rules get washed away liketiny grains of sand in a pounding surf.
The demise of the ComprehensiveTest Ban Treaty bears stark testimony tothe radioactive cloud that hangs over ournation’s capital today. Here’s the insidestory. Judge for yourself.
For more than two years, Republicans,led by Senate Foreign Relations Commit-tee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC),bottled the Test Ban Treaty up by refus-ing to hold hearings.
For more than two years, the WhiteHouse studiously avoided wooing GOPinternationalists like John Warner (R-VA), Pete Domenici (R-NM) andRichard Lugar (R-IN). Instead of care-fully establishing a broad base of publicadvocacy for the treaty, as PresidentBush did for many months before heproceeded with the Persian Gulf War,President Clinton sniped at treaty op-ponents almost whimsically, as thepolitical climate dictated.
Conservative Republicans, for whomhatred of the President has become man-tra, sat back waiting patiently for theopportunity to humiliate him. Theirchance came in October.
Sinking the Test Ban Treatyby Michael S. Lubell
Scroll back to early September, whenthe Senate returned from its summer re-cess. With Helms stymying all attemptsby Foreign Relations Committee Demo-crats to bring the treaty up forconsideration, Ranking Member JosephBiden (D-DE) took to the Senate floor,threatening to tie up business until Re-publicans agreed to consider the treaty.
Byron Dorgan (D-ND) joined the fray,and as the rhetoric became more rancor-ous, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott(R-MS) sent out a clear signal that he wasprepared to bring the treaty up for animmediate Senate vote, one that wasguaranteed to generate far fewer thanthe 67 supporters needed for ratification.
Democrats can count noses as well asRepublicans. So Senate Minority LeaderTom Daschle (D-SD) stepped in with apromise to call off the attack dogs if Lottwithdrew his threat to schedule a vote.Reliable sources inside the ranks of theSenate Democrats reported that the as-sault on the GOP had been a carefullyorchestrated political maneuver. Thetreaty, according to these sources, wouldnot hit the policy agenda of either partyuntil the spring of 2000, at the earliest.
With the tacit cease fire between thewarring Senate factions in place, CapitolHill debate on the treaty fizzled out. But,
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Imagine a business where user demanddoubles every six months. Imagine a
business that draws new users at a far fasterrate than color TV, digital audio disks orVCRs. Imagine a business in which the rateof improvement in technology capabilityexceeds the rate of advancement in siliconintegrated circuits technology over the past25 years. This hot business is the Internet,and optical communications is thetechnology base that speeds the Internetinformation around the world.
Internet information (which is doublingevery six months) travels through optical fi-bers. Five years ago each optical fiber carrieddata via pulses of light at rates up to 2.5 giga-bits per second. Today, fiber opticcommunication systems are being installedwhere a single fiber has the ability to carryinformation as much as 200 times faster thanwas possible just five years ago. In fact, datarates as high as 3 terabits per second havebeen demonstrated.
This revolutionary capability is beingachieved with a technology known as wave-length division multiplexing (WDM). WDMtechnology relies on the fact that optical fi-bers can carry many wavelengths of lightsimultaneously without interaction betweeneach wavelength. Thus, a single fiber cancarry many separate wavelength signals or
Wavelength Division Multiplexing: An Optical Communication RevolutionDonald R. Scifres
channels simultaneously. Each of thesewavelength channels can be pulsed ormodulated at rates of up to 10 gigabitsper second (and even 40 gigabits per sec-ond or greater in experimental systems).This capacity to wavelength multiplex sig-nals in one fiber has led to the tremendousincrease in bandwidth available to power theInternet around the globe.
Certain key products are required to makeWDM possible (see Figure 1). The first is anoptical fiber with very low loss in the wave-length range of 1530 to 1570 nm. A secondkey product is an erbium doped fiber ampli-fier (EDFA) which amplifies each of up to100 wavelength channels identically every100 kilometers in order to overcome the trans-mission loss in the optical fiber. Opticalamplifiers operate based on the stimulatedemission process. Each signal photon stimu-lates the emission of 10 to 100 or moreidentical photons from erbium atoms withelectrons excited to a high-energy statethrough the absorption of photons at wave-lengths of either 980 nm or 1480 nm. Dueto stimulated emission, the amplified outputsignal matches both the wavelength and pulseshape of the input signal.
A third key product is the signal generat-ing transmission laser. Each signal laser emitslight at a single precisely defined wavelength.
Each wavelength channel requires a sepa-rate signal-generating transmission laser.These are generally spaced on 100 GHz or200 GHz spacings across the 1530 to 1570nm gain bandwidth of the EDFAs. Up to ap-proximately 100 wavelength channelsprovided by 100 distributed feedback semi-conductor lasers can be used.
A fourth key product is a wavelengthmultiplexer. This allows the insertion of allthe separate wavelength laser signals tobe combined into a single fiber. Narrowband dielectric stack filters are generallyused to combine the separate wavelengthsignals into one fiber.
At the opposite end of the system from atransmission laser, a wavelengthdemultiplexer (which is a mirror image ofthe multiplexer) separates the signals intoseparate wavelengths of light. Each wave-length then impinges on a fifth key product,the light receiver. Generally, the receiver(which converts each wavelength channelback into electricity) consists of a PIN photo-diode or avalanche photodiode and associatedhigh-speed electronics to interface the sig-nal into the computer or electronic network.
All of these elements combine to sendinformation from one point to another viafibers. However, for the purpose of redun-dancy, reliability, capacity and cost efficiency,optical mesh networks are now being builtwith the ability to route wavelength chan-nels along multiple paths to get to their finaldestination. In order to accomplish this, prod-ucts such as Add/Drop Multiplexers allowthe insertion or separation of one or morewavelengths from the many wavelengths inthe fiber. This allows WDM systems toachieve the desired mesh network topology.
Finally, optical switches that allow dynamicrerouting of separate wavelength channelsare now being announced. These put in sightthe final goal of a transparent fiber opticalnetwork with minimal conversion of lightback into electricity. Within five years, weanticipate that light will be able to flow likeelectricity does today through optical switchesand routers to the proper network destina-tion. As a result, low cost, high-speed data at
rates up to 1 gigabit per second may over a10-year time frame arrive at your computerterminal with the apparent ease and cost pro-vided by today’s telephone networks.
In order to develop these advanced tech-nologies, there are many opportunities forcutting edge jobs with plenty of intellectualchallenge. Some of the challenges involvedeveloping new methods of amplification(see Figure 2 for Raman Amplifier), higherdata transmission speeds, and smaller size,lower cost modules. All this may occur throughthe transition from hybrid products with dis-crete fibers, lenses and chips to fullymonolithic products that integrate these func-tions onto a common substrate. In this manner,applied physicists, optical scientists, and elec-trical engineers will enable the wavelengthdivision multiplexing optical communicationsindustry to grow from a $1.6 billion marketin 1997 to a $12 billion market in 2005.
Dr. Donald R. Scifres is chairman, CEOand a founder of SDL, Inc., a companyspecializing in fiber optics and lasers forthe communications, printing and ma-terials processing industries. Dr. Scifreshas been issued over 100 patents, pub-lished over 300 technical papers and hascontributed to or edited several books inthe field. Dr. Scifres has also won a num-ber of industry awards including the APSGeorge Pake Award in 1997.
Figure 2: Shown above is a high power (1.5 W) fiberlaser operating at 1455 nm. This allows amplificationof 1550 nm optical signals through 20 km of standardsingle mode optical transmission fiber via stimulatedRaman scattering (SRS). SRS amplification isexpected to allow 40 Gb/sec transmission over manywavelength channels to further enhance thetransmission capacity per fiber.
Nothing brought the reality of theworld of the U.S. Congress into sharp
focus for APS Congressional Fellow AntoniaHerzog as much as the day she was askedto draft a rationale for an upcoming vote onthe Senate floor a mere 15 minutes beforethe voting was scheduled to take place —concerning a proposed amendment sheknew nothing about. “It’s so important formembers of Congress to make every floorvote,” she says of what she learned from theexperience. “Their schedules are basicallyruled by when votes are going to occur, whichis rarely certain until the last minute.”
Fortunately, not every day of her fellow-ship year featured such last-minutescrambling, although she admits, “Things dooperate constantly in crisis mode.” Herzogspent the last year as a special legislativeassistant in the Congressional office of Sena-tor John D Rockefeller IV (D-WV), jugglingsuch varied duties as preparing for hearings,organizing meetings, writing statements tobe read from the floor, building support forpending legislation, and meeting with con-stituents and lobbyists. “It’s not that youactually figure out how Congress works in asingle year, but you do walk away with amuch better understanding of how our coun-
Herzog Navigates Hectic Waters of Congressional Life on the Hilltry runs, and how tohave an impact onthe process,” shesays. “And that typeof knowledge is use-ful no matter whatyou end up doing.”
Herzog chose towork in Rockefeller’s office in part becauseof his longstanding interest in science andtechnology issues. At the time, he was theranking Democrat on the CommerceCommittee’s Science, Technology & SpaceSubcommittee, and he is currently the rank-ing member of the Aviation Subcommittee.But she also admired his idealistic decision tomove to West Virginia some 30 years ago,despite his privileged background, withhopes of assisting the population of this pre-dominantly poor region. In particular, sheworked on legislation involving authorizedfunding increases for R&D, and to stream-line the technology transfer process fromgovernment labs to the private sector, al-though none of her projects were voted intolaw. “My year was about small victories, mov-ing things forward and raising people’sawareness about issues I felt were impor-tant,” she says, citing R&D funding and
alternative fuel vehicles as examples.The latter is a natural extension of Herzog’s
long-standing interest in energy use and itsimpact on the environment, evidenced byher past involvement in the San Diego chap-ter of the Sierra Club to preserve theremaining coastal wetlands in San DiegoCounty. As a member of Rockefeller’s staff,she was able to help build co-sponsorship ofa bill to promote tax incentives to promotethe use of alternative fuel vehicles, and towork the legislation into the massive tax billpresented to the Senate Finance Commit-tee. The bill was eventually vetoed byPresident Clinton, in large part because ofthe Republicans’ proposed tax cut of $795billion, but “It was neat to be involved insomething that was featured on the frontpages of the Washington Post and New YorkTimes every day, even in a relatively minorcapacity,” she says.
Herzog came to the APS fellowship fromthe American Association for the Advance-ment of Science (AAAS), where she servedas a consultant. The experience introducedher to the various issues related to the ethi-cal, legal and policy implications of scienceand technology, and convinced her that shewanted to make science policy her career.
She earned her PhD in physics from the Uni-versity of California, San Diego. There shestudied the transport properties of disorderedmetallic and superconducting one-dimen-sional wires. She also gained valuable industrialexperience through a summer internship atXerox Corporation, and held a postdoctoralresearch position at the Salk Institute for Bio-logical Studies, investigating the organizationof neuronal circuits for visual information pro-cessing.
Ironically, Herzog didn’t use her specificknowledge of physics during her fellowshipyear on the Hill, but she still considers sci-ence fellows a necessary asset to Congress.“What proved crucial was having an under-standing and appreciation of the scientificprocess and enterprise, which few of themany lawyers on the Hill possess,” she says.For her part, she appreciated the network offormer fellows currently working throughoutgovernment, academia and the private sec-tor, and while her future plans are not yetfinal, she ultimately hopes to remain in sci-ence policy, possibly working for a non-profitscience policy organization. “I firmly believethat no matter where my career may lead,this year will continue to have a profoundimpact on it,” she concludes.
Antonia Herzog
Figure 1: Key components in a WDM system.
APS News December 1999
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Festival Profile: Fractals, continued from page 3
BELTWAY BRIEFSOSTP Seeks Public Comment on Definition of ResearchMisconduct
The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is seeking commenton a proposed uniform, government-wide definition of research misconduct.Public feedback to OSTP on the proposal must be postmarked no later thanDECEMBER 13, 1999. The result of four years of consideration and extensiveconsultation with the primary federal R&D agencies, OSTP and the NationalScience and Technology Council have drafted a single definition of researchmisconduct that will apply to all federally-sponsored research, along with uni-form guidelines for conducting fair and timely investigations into allegations ofmisconduct, which appeared in the October 14 issue of the Federal Register.
Research misconduct, as defined in the proposal, comprises “fabrication,falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing or reviewing research, or inreporting research results.” Each of these terms is then defined in more detail.It is noted that “research misconduct does not include honest error or honestdifferences of opinion.” A finding of research misconduct requires that “therebe a significant departure from accepted practices of the scientific communityfor maintaining the integrity of the research record; the misconduct be committedintentionally, or knowingly, in reckless disregard of accepted practices; and theallegation be proven by a preponderance of evidence.” The entire notice canbe found online at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fedreg/a991104c.html,under “Science and Technology Policy Office, Notices”. [Item courtesy of AudreyLeath, AIP Public Information]
Report Urges State Department To Place Higher Value onS&T Expertise
In October, members of a National Research Council committee unveiled along-awaited blueprint for improving scientific and technical expertise withinthe State Department. The report was requested last year by Secretary of StateMadeleine Albright, in response to concerns both within the State Departmentand from the science community that the department lacked the capability toforesee relevant developments in science and technology and incorporate thoseissues into its foreign policy-making process. “As the world becomes moretechnologically interdependent, the trend at the State Department has been todownplay science and technical expertise. It’s time to reverse that trend,” saidRobert Frosch, chair of the NRC Committee on Science, Technology and HealthAspects of the Foreign Policy of the United States, which issued the report. Thecommittee’s recommendations focus on raising awareness of the importance ofS&T at all levels of the department. While it calls for improvement of thedepartment’s in-house S&T capability, the report recognizes the reality of budgetconstraints and also suggests tapping into outside expertise, including a S&T Advi-sory Committee, and rotating specialists from other departments and agencies.Entitled “The Pervasive Role of Science, Technology and Health in Foreign Policy:Imperatives for the Department of State,” the full 111-page report can be pur-chased from the National Academy Press at 1-800-624-6242 or http://national-academies.org. [Item courtesy of Audrey Leath, AIP Public Information]
Robb Introduces Bill for New Category of High-Tech WorkersIn September, Senator Charles Robb (D-VA) introduced the Helping Improved
Technology Education and Competitiveness Act (HITEC Act) (S. 1645), new leg-islation that would establish a five-year pilot program allowing non-immigrantaliens completing an advanced degree in mathematics, science, engineering, orcomputer science at a U.S. college or university to apply — through an employerwilling to provide a job with total compensation of $60K or more per year — fora new five year “T” or “Tech” visa. The bill was co-sponsored by democraticSenators Tim Johnson (D-SD), John Kerry (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), JosephLieberman (D-CT) and Charles Schumer (D-NY). The HITEC Act requires partici-pating companies to pay a $1000 per visa fee on applications for the T-visa and$500 for visa extensions or to change employers. The fees would be used to helpfund public-private partnerships between schools and businesses to improve K-12 math, science and technology education.
Robb’s bill is the latest piece of legislation introduced in response to industrylobbying to raise the H-1B visa cap on entry of high tech guest workers. A H-1B visa bill is expected shortly from Presidential-hopeful Senator John McCain(R-AZ). Senate Republican leaders have indicated that they are unlikely tomove forward H-1B visa increases this year, but Senator Gramm (R-TX) andothers are hopeful that measures will receive early consideration in 2000. Thefull text of the bill and current status can be found online at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d106:s.01645:
Final A-110 Revision on Access to Research DataIn October, the Office of Management and Budget issued the Final Revision
of the Circular A-110 administrative requirements to comply with a law “torequire Federal awarding agencies to ensure that all data produced under anaward will be made available to the public through the procedures establishedunder the Freedom of Information Act.” This legislation came about throughthe efforts of Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), with the support of Senate Major-ity Leader Trent Lott (R-MS).
The October 8 issue of the Federal Register has a thorough discussion of therevisions in this regulation. OMB was charged with the revision of the circular, andreceived over 12,000 comments since it first proposed changes in early February— an extraordinary response to an OMB regulation. The revision went into effecton November 8, 1999. It applies to grants and other financial assistance providedto institutions of higher education, hospitals, and non-profit institutions, from allFederal agencies, but not to procurement contracts. For the entire citation, seeManagement and Budget Office/Notices at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fedreg/a991008c.html. [Item courtesy of Richard Jones, AIP Public Information]
A series of printsdepicting images
derived from classicaland quantum chaos iscurrently on exhibit inthe cafeteria at theAmerican Center forPhysics in CollegePark, MD. Created byEric Heller, a physicistat Harvard university,the exhibit wasoriginally displayed aspart of the APSCentennial meeting’sFestival of Physics inMarch in Atlanta, GA.The prints wereproduced on an Epson3000 inkjet printer from computer datagenerated in Fortran, Matlab andMathematica.
Heller’s interest in the field of chaosbegan with his investigation of standingquantum waves in a stadium shapedbox, specifically the periodic orbitsgenerated by a classical particlebouncing around the box. This “stadiumbilliard table” is shown on page 1. The
to improve the diagnostic ability of radi-ologists, particularly in the early detectionof breast cancer. This is an area where earlydiagnosis has particular importance in termsof increasing life expectancy, but to datethe diagnosis of breast cancer from X-raymammograms has proven to be an ex-tremely difficult perceptual process.
“Science is a series of approximations.What we call the great equations of
science, are not something we can proveto be true. Rather, they are those wehave not yet proven to be false,” saysVoss of his lifelong work. “Everything wedo is useful, but not quite correct; it is anapproximation to the real world.” Heoften closes his lectures with a quote byPablo Picasso: “Art is the lie that helps ussee the truth.” In his eyes, this is just astrue of science as it is of art.
Creating Art from Classical andQuantum Chaos
Inside the Beltway, continued from page 6
planners at the other end of Pennsylva-nia Avenue had different thoughts.
For some time, according to WhiteHouse insiders, presidential advisors hadbeen split on how to handle the treaty.One group urged delay, possibly untilafter the next election, when the GOP’svisceral hatred of the White House oc-cupant would be not be the dominantfactor.
Another group argued that there wasa political advantage to be gained by forc-ing a vote. This group saw the outcomeas a “win-win” situation. In the unlikelyevent that the treaty passed, the Presidentwould claim credit. If the more probablescenario of treaty defeat became the real-ity, the Democrats would have a primeissue for the 2000 campaign.
A third group, bolstered by outsidenon-proliferation advocates, argued infavor of a vote, because they genuinelybelieved that they could win it, eventhough the White House had done littlespade work and Senate Republicans wereloathe to give the President credit foranything if they could help it.
Matters came to a head the last weekin September. Under the questionablepretext of scheduling a bipartisan event,the White House came into possessionof a letter that had been signed by thirty-two Nobel Laureates [See page 6]advocating treaty ratification. The letter,addressed to all members of the Senate,had not been released, pending SenateForeign Relations Committee action,which had remained stalled.
On Tuesday, September 30, SenateRepublicans got wind of the plannedWhite House event featuring the
Nobelists. It became the hair triggerneeded for an immediate vote on treatyratification.
Majority Leader Lott addressed theSenate early Wednesday morning, tak-ing most of his colleagues by surprise,when he asked for unanimous consentto schedule a vote. The Democrats werein a bind. Most of them had long calledfor Senate action: How could they ex-plain to their constituents that they hadopposed the vote? In the end, none ofthem did.
As members debated Lott’s motion,Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and PeteDomenici worked furiously behind thescenes to get the vote postponed. Can-cellation of the Nobel event, scheduledfor the following Wednesday, was key.But the “win-win” group at the WhiteHouse held sway, and the President re-fused to back down, according to an aide.
Predictions that the treaty wouldn’teven get a majority of Senators to sup-port it only fueled the partisan fires.When the vote finally occurred, the treatyfailed 48-51, with but four Republicansvoting in favor of it.
The GOP Clinton-haters had madetheir point, and the Democrats had theircampaign issue. The treaty was the bigloser.
Stanley Greenberg, a prominentDemocratic pollster, observed that theWhite House took a huge risk in pursu-ing its strategy. While it is true that eightypercent of the American electorate sup-ports the treaty, the issue is buried so fardown on the public’s wish list, that thecampaign pay-off may be nil. Time willtell whether Greenberg’s right.
image Heller is standing beside in thephoto above depicts a Westerveltresonator, in which a plane waveimpinges from below on a wall with asmall slit. Beyond the wall is a circularmirror which causes narrow resonancesto form at certain energies. Becausethe hole in this system is slightly offcenter, this resonance wavefunctionhas an asymmetrical shape.
Eric Heller stands beside one of his creations at APS Headquarters.
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CHAIR ELECT OF THENOMINATING COMMITTEECURTIS G. CALLAN, JR.Princeton University
Callan is Profes-sor of Physics andChairman of thePhysics Depart-ment at PrincetonUniversity. Heworks in theoreti-cal elementaryparticle physicsand his research has covered a wide rangeof topics, including the phenomenologyof K-meson decays, the role of therenormalization group in QCD and the useof string theory to explain black hole en-tropy. He received his PhD from Princetonin 1964, and then held an assistant professor-ship in the Harvard Physics Department anda long-term membership at the Institute forAdvanced Study. In 1972, he returned toPrinceton as Professor of Physics and has re-mained there ever since. Apart from histeaching and research, he has been activefor many years in advising U.S. governmentagencies on the applications of science andtechnology to national security problems.
In his candidate’s statement, Callan dis-cussed the enormous changes both in theintellectual content of the science itself,and in the societal and funding context inwhich it lives, and the challenges thesepresent to the APS and the physics com-munity in general. “Finding people withthe necessary qualities of intellect, energyand judgement to lead the APS, and con-vincing them to stand for office, is morecritical today than it ever has been,” hewrote. “The future health of our Society isdependent on the judgement and activismof today’s Nominating Committee.”
GENERAL COUNCILLORSJIN-JOO SONGOklahoma State University
Born in Seoul,Korea, Song re-ceived her PhD inexperimental solid-state physics andquantum electron-ics from YaleUniversity in 1974.She worked at MITas a post-doctoral research associate, and laterwas on the faculty of the University of South-ern California. In 1987, Song moved toOklahoma State University where she nowholds the positions of Regents Professor ofPhysics and Noble Professor of Photonics, as
well as the Director of the InterdisciplinaryCenter for Laser and Photonics Research. Songwas recently elected the 21st and first womanpresident of the Association of Korean Physi-cists in America. Her present research interestsinclude nanotechnology and ultrafast phe-nomena, especially widegap semiconductorquantum structures, epitaxial growth, char-acterization, and device fabrication.
In her candidate’s statement, Song citedthe growing internationalization of the Soci-ety, and the continual advancement ofinformation technology that is acceleratingthe development of professional exchangesto a level previously inconceivable, andprompting a reassessment of the role of theAPS in fostering this growing internationalcharacter. In Song’s view, one of the biggestchallenges the APS faces is that of makingphysics and physicists more relevant to soci-ety while preserving the pursuit of the mostfundamental understanding of the nature ofthe physical universe. “I believe the APSshould embrace diversification andmultidisciplinary approaches in physics edu-cation with courage and conviction, for suchevolution does not necessarily lead to thede-emphasizing of fundamental research inthe traditional subfields known to academia,but is instead vital to the survival of physi-cists and physics education,” she wrote. “Infact, I believe that the physics communitywill begin to realize that diversification is atthe very root of fundamental research, andthat the study of physics could not have pro-gressed to today’s levels of understandingwithout such diversification in the past.”
PHILIP PHILLIPSUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Born inScarborough, To-bago, Phillipsreceived his PhDfrom the Universityof Washington in1982. After twoyears at the Univer-sity of California atBerkeley, he served on the faculty in thechemistry department at MIT until 1993,when he moved to the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign. His research is in theo-retical condensed matter physics with aspecial emphasis on explaining experimen-tal observations that challenge the standardparadigms of transport and magnetism in dis-ordered and correlated electron systems.While he has worked on numerous prob-lems such as the size and disorderdependence of the Kondo effect, bi-critical-ity in quantum spin glasses, and pair-tunnelingin quantum dots, much of his recent efforts
have been devoted to explaining the originof the new conducting phase found in a di-lute 2D electron gas.
In his candidate’s statement, Phillips citedthree areas he believes merits particular at-tention by the APS, its officers and electedrepresentatives, because of their potential forconcrete action. These include the need fordiversity in the physics community; the edu-cation of students to the notion that a physicsmajor opens more doors than it closes; and aneed for efficient lobbying to increase thelevel of research funding for condensed mat-ter physics, particularly theory.
MARGARET M. MURNANEUniversity of Colorado
Murnane joinedJILA and the Depart-ment of Physics at theUniversity of Coloradoin August of 1999.Prof. Murnane re-ceived her BS and MSdegrees from Univer-sity College Cork,Ireland, and her PhD degree in physics fromthe University of California at Berkeley in1989. She remained at Berkeley for one yearas a postdoctoral fellow, before joining thefaculty of physics at Washington State Uni-versity in 1990. In 1996, Professor Murnanemoved to the University of Michigan. Prof.Murnane’s research interests have been inultrafast optical science. In particular, herwork has made it possible to generate vis-ible and x-ray pulses of a few cycles induration, using extreme nonlinear opti-cal interactions. She is a past recipientof the APS Simon Ramo Award.
In her candidate’s statement, Murnanelooked to the 21st Century and the manyopportunities for physicists to impact thescience and technology of the newmillenium, including advances in nanoscalestructures, laser manipulation of matter, andcomputational. She suggested the APS pro-mote meetings in rapidly changing fields, byproviding more opportunities for multi-disci-plinary meetings, by advertising newdiscoveries and their impact on society asmuch as possible, and by supporting in-creased participation of industry to broadencareer-choices for students. She also supports
APS 2000 Election Results, continued from page 1
continuing the Society’s efforts to articulatethe breadth and diversity of physics, and tocommunicate the beauty, excitement, andimpact of physics to the general public.
STUART J. FREEDMANUniversity of California at BerkeleyLawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryArgonne National Laboratory
Freedman is anexperimental physi-cist working in areasof nuclear and par-ticle physics. He hasheld a joint appoint-ment in theBerkeley PhysicsDepartment andthe Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryNuclear Science Division since 1991. His re-search focuses on problems related to thefundamental weak interaction, symmetrybreaking, neutrino mass, and particle searches.Freedman received his PhD in 1972 fromBerkeley for his experimental test of Bell’sinequality with a two-photon cascade inatomic calcium. He was instructor and lec-turer working in nuclear physics at PrincetonUniversity until 1976 when he left to be-come assistant professor at StanfordUniversity. He joined the Argonne PhysicsDivision in 1982, and the University of Chi-cago in 1987, jointly with Argonne, returningto Berkeley in 1991.
In his candidate’s statement, Freedmanspoke of how the role of physics in the high-tech world of the next millennium, itsrelationship to society, and the character ofbasic research are changing dramatically. Hecited two challenges in particular facing theAPS: public education and outreach, and glo-balization. “A scientifically illiterate society istotally inappropriate for the 21st century, andthe APS should strengthen its resolve for ef-fectively advocating a sensible scientificcomponent in the education for every youngAmerican,” Freedman wrote. Similarly, “Com-munication technologies and the emergingglobal economy provide us with the oppor-tunity of creating a truly internationalcommunity of scientists and scientific re-search, and we should take a leading roletoward insuring that physics continues todevelop as an international enterprise.”
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) have
developed a new thumb-sized microscopethat operates on the same principles as aCD-player, using microwaves rather thanvisible light. Dubbed a ScanningEvanescent Microwave Probe (SEMP), thisunique new instrument can be used tosimultaneously characterize criticalelectronic properties along withtopography in a wide assortment ofmaterials. Xiao-Dong Xiang, a physicistin LBL’s Materials Sciences Division,described the instrument in a paper hedelivered at the APS Centennial meetingin Atlanta last March.
The SEMP uses near-field microwaves tomeasure the electrical impedance ofmaterials with submicron resolution — acritical property for the electronics industry.By measuring the interaction betweenevanescent microwaves generated off an ultrasharp-tipped probe and the surface of thematerial, Xiang and his colleagues can notonly map electrical impedance across theface of the material, they can simultaneouslymap the topography of its surface, anothercritical factor for manufacturing chips andother electronic devices.
The SEMP’s probe is connected to a highquality-factor microwave resonator equipped
LBL Scientists Introduce NewMicroscope for Characterizing Materials
with a thin metal shield designed to screenout all but the evanescent microwaves frombeing generated at its tip. “This feature iscrucial for high resolution quantitativemicroscopy,” says Xiang. “If both evanescentand propagating microwaves had to beconsidered and calculated, as is the case forall other types of microwave probes, thequantitative microscopy would beimpossible.” The interaction betweenevanescent microwaves and the samplesurface gives rise to a resonance frequencyand quality-factor changes in the resonatorthat are recorded as signals. These signalscan be measured, and the measurementsplugged into equations that translate theminto a measurement of the sample’s complexelectrical impedance, with a spatial resolutionof 100 nanometers.
The SEMP can be used on conductorsand insulators as well as semiconductors.It has applications in any situation in whichthere is a need to characterize a material’selectrical properties as a function of electricor magnetic fields, optical illumination, ortemperature variations. The basictechnology has been licensed to ArielTechnologies, but Xiang and his colleaguescontinue to refine the device, and arecurrently building a low-temperature versionto enable them to study superconductors.
Staff donated and distributedlasagna, sandwiches, cookies andother foods to needy people nearAPS headquarters in Maryland thisFall.
APS Staff Serve at Local ‘Soup Kitchen’
a trillionth of a second between the be-ginning and end of a reaction. It has alsoprovided a way for controlling the coursesof chemical reaction and developing de-sirable new materials for electronics. Ithas provided insights on the dissolvingof liquids, corrosion and catalysis on sur-faces (see Physics Today, October 1999,p. 19); and the molecular-level details ofhow chlorophyll molecules can efficientlyconvert sunlight into useable energy for
Nobel Prizes, continued from page 1
plants during the process of photosyn-thesis.
Veltman and Zewail are fellows of theAPS. Zewail was awarded the APS EarlePlyler Prize in 1993 and the HerbertBroida Prize in 1995. Although not an APSmember, nonetheless, Gerardus ‘t Hooftreceived the 1979 Dannie HeinemanPrize.
—Philip F. Schewe, AIP Public Information
APS News December 1999
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AnnouncementsAPS/AIP 2000-2001CONGRESSIONAL SCIENCE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY AND THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS areaccepting applications for their 2000-2001 Congressional Science FellowshipPrograms. Fellows serve one year on the staff of a Member of Congressor congressional committee, learning the legislative process while theylend scientific expertise to public policy issues.
QUALIFICATIONS include a PhD or equivalent research experience inphysics or a closely related field. Fellows are required to be U.S.citizens and, for the AIP Fellowship, members of 1 or more of theAIP Member Societies. A stipend of up to $49,000 is offered, inaddition to allowances for relocation, in-service travel, and healthinsurance premiums. Applications should consist of a letter ofintent, a 2-page resume, and 3 letters of recommendation.
PLEASE SEE our websites (http://www.aip.org/pubinfoor http://www.aps.org/public_affairs/fellow.html) fordetailed information on applying. If qualified,applicants will be considered for both programs.All application materials must be postmarked byJanuary 15, 2000, and sent to: APS/AIPCongressional Science Fellowship Programs, c/oErika Ridgeway/APS Executive Office OnePhysics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844.
APS MASS MEDIA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMApplications are now being accepted for the 2000 summer APS Mass Media
Fellowships. In affiliation with the popular AAAS program, the APS is sponsoringtwo ten-week fellowships for physics students to work full-time over the summeras reporters, researchers, and production assistants in mass media organizationsnationwide.
PURPOSE: The program is intended to improve public understanding andappreciation of science and technology, and to sharpen the ability of the fel-lows to communicate complex technical issues to non-specialists.
ELIGIBILITY: Priority will be given to graduate students in physics, or aclosely related field, although applications will also be considered fromoutstanding undergraduates and post- doctoral researchers. Applicants shouldpossess outstanding written and oral communication skills and a strong interestin learning about the media.
TERM AND STIPEND: Following an intensive three-day orientation in early June1999 at the AAAS in Washington, DC, winning candidates will work full-time throughmid-August. Remuneration is $4500, plus a travel allowance of up to $1,000.
Mail application materials, which must be received by January 15, 2000, to:APS Washington OfficeATTN: Mass Media Fellowship Program529 14th Street NW, Suite 1050Washington, DC 20045
Information on application requirements can be found at http://www.aps.org/public_affairs/Media.html
Y2K MARCH MEETING TUTORIALS,WORKSHOPS & SHORT COURSESTUTORIALS
The following eight half-day tutorials will beoffered on Sunday, March 19, 2000, just priorto the APS March Meeting in Minneapolis, MN:
8:30 AM - 12:30 PMT1 Cellular Automata Simulations with
MathematicaT2 High Temperature Superconducting Power
ApplicationsT3 Physics of Optical CommunicationsT4 Biological Fluorescence Imaging
1:30 PM - 5:30 PMT5 Achieving High Performance in Numerical Computations on RISC
Workstations and Parallel SystemsT6 Silicon Quantum Dots: Fundamentals and Application to Advanced and
Future Nanoelectronic DevicesT7 Advanced Magnetic Resonance Technologies in New Frontiers of ScienceT8 The Changing Roles of Researchers in Industrial and Applied Physics
CAREER WORKSHOPSSunday evening, March 19, 6:00pm - 9:00pm, the APS will offer a free Career
Workshop run by the Career Services Division of AIP.
DPOLY SHORT COURSE TO FOCUS ON POLYMER THIN FILMSThe APS Division of Polymer Physics (DPOLY) will hold a short course on adhesion
and other issues in polymer thin films and coatings as part of the 2000 APS MarchMeeting, to be held on Saturday and on Sunday morning, March 18-19 in Minneapolis,MN. The science and engineering of polymer thin films and coatings has numerousindustrial applications, including adhesives, composites, fillers, and tissue implants.The course will provide an overview of recent developments in this area, such aspolymer-surface dynamics and interfacial rheology; macromolecular physics ofbiological surface interactions; the glass transition of thin films; simulation methodsand theory; and dewetting and coating of interfaces.
See Meeting Announcements for more information and enrollment instructions.
Prize and Award NominationsOTTO LAPORTE AWARDEndowed by the friends of Otto Laporte and the Division of Fluid Dynamics.Purpose: To recognize outstanding research accomplishments pertaining tothe physics of fluids.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Joel Koplik; Levich Inst T-1 M; CCNY-CUNY; 138th St & Convent Ave; New York NY 10031. Phone (212) 650-8162;Fax (212) 650-6835; email [email protected]: January 18, 2000
FLUID DYNAMICS PRIZESupported by friends of the Division of Fluid Dynamics and the AmericanInstitute of Physics journal Physics of Fluids.Purpose: To recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in fluiddynamics research.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Joel H Ferziger; Dept of Mech Engr;Stanford University; Stanford CA 94305. Phone (650) 723-3615; Fax (650) 725-3525; Email [email protected]: January 18, 2000
Y2K Spring Meeting DeadlinesMarch Meeting (www.aps.org/meet/MAR00)
Abstract Submission Deadline ......................................... 12/03/99
Early registration deadline ............................................... 01/14/00
Receipt of postdeadline abstracts ....................................... 02/04/00
Housing ........................................................................... 02/17/00Late Registration Deadline .............................................. 02/18/00
April Meeting (www.aps.org/meet/APR00)Abstract Submission Deadline ............................................. 01/14/00
Early registration deadline ............................................... 02/18/00
Housing (APS hotel blocks released) .............................. 03/31/00
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL PRIZE IN PLASMA PHYSICSSponsored by Maxwell Technologies, Inc.Purpose: To recognize outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Jeffrey Friedberg; Dept Of NuclearEngineering; MIT; Room 24-107; Cambridge, MA 02139. Phone (617) 253-8670;Fax (617) 257-7437; Email [email protected]: April 1, 2000
AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PLASMA PHYSICS RESEARCHEstablished with support from friends of the Division of Plasma Physics.Purpose: To recognize a particular recent outstanding achievement in plasmaphysics research.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Earl Marmar; NW17-119; MIT; 77Massachusetts Ave; Cambridge MA 02139. Phone (617) 253-5455; Fax (617) 253-0627; Email [email protected]: April 1, 2000
OUTSTANDING DOCTORAL THESIS IN PLASMA PHYSICSAWARDEstablished originally as the Simon Ramo Award and endowed in 1997 byGeneral Atomics Inc.Purpose: To provide recognition to exceptional young scientists who haveperformed original thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achieve-ment in the area of plasma physics.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Linda Vahala; 138 Nina Ln;Williamsburg VA 23188. Phone (804) 683-4968; Email: [email protected]: April 1, 2000
NICHOLSON MEDAL FOR HUMANITARIAN SERVICESponsored by friends of Dwight Nicholson.Purpose: To recognize the humanitarian aspect of physics and physicists.Send FIVE (5) copies of the nomination package with the name of proposedcandidate and supporting information to: Herbert L Berk; RLM 11.326 Dept of Phys;Univ of Texas, Institution for Fusion Studies; Dean Keaton & Speedway; Austin, TX78712. Phone (512) 471-1364; Fax (512) 471-6715; Email: [email protected]: April 1, 2000
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December 1999 APS News
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Volunteers Sought for APS Initiative onInter-American Cooperation in Physics
The APS jointly through its Office of International Affairs, The APS Committeeon International Scientific Affairs (CISA), and the Forum on International Physics(FIP) is presently pursuing an initiative designed to promote increased Inter-Americancooperation in physics.
As one component of the overall Inter-American physics cooperation effort,the APS is currently seeking to identify volunteers who are interested in makingcontacts and establishing collaborations and working relationships with physicistsin Latin America and Caribbean. A list of such volunteers is now being compiledthat will be available as a Directory both on the APS Web site and in a hard-copyform that will be directly distributed to physics departments in Latin America andthe Caribbean.
The purpose of the new directory is to provide initial contact information thatcan be used by Latin American and Caribbean physicists for the purpose of identi-fying potential lecturers, research collaborators, teachers, students, etc. who wouldbe willing to visit and work for varying periods of time in a host country. Naturally,any details involving partial or full support of travel and living expenses in the hostcountry would be arranged on an individual basis directly between the prospec-tive visitors and their hosts without any involvement on the part of the APS.Additionally, while there is an emphasis on identifying individuals with Spanish orPortuguese language skills, individuals who do not possess such skills but who arepersonally motivated to interact with Latin American and Caribbean physicists arestill encouraged to complete and submit the form for inclusion in the Directory.
All APS members who are interested in being included in this directory of po-tential scientific collaborators with Latin American and Caribbean counterparts arerequested to provide the following information:
FAMILY NAME ___________________________________________________
FIRST NAME ____________________________ MIDDLE INITIAL ________
ORGANIZATION __________________________________________________
DEPARTMENT _____________________ MAIL STOP___________________
STREET ADDRESS _______________________________________________
CITY_______________________ STATE ______ POSTAL CODE __________
COUNTRY________________________________________________________
PHONE ____________________ FAX ________________________________
E-MAIL__________________________________________________________
WEBPAGE URL (IF AVAILABLE)_______________________________________
PRESENT POSITION _____________________________________________
DEGREES HELD __________________________________________________
LIST YOUR AREAS OF RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTEREST ANDEXPERIENCE:
FLUENT IN? SPANISH______ PORTUGUESE______ OTHER__________
Please return the completed form or email the information to: Michele Irwin,International Programs Assistant, Office of International Affairs; American PhysicalSociety; One Physics Ellipse; College Park, MD 20740-3844; email: [email protected]
APS SEEKS ASSOCIATE EXECUTIVE OFFICERThe American Physical Society is seeking applications and nominations
for the position of Associate Executive Officer. The primary responsibility ofthe Associate Executive Officer is to work with the Executive Officer tocoordinate and enhance APS programs and activities. It is expected thatthe person selected will play a leadership role in APS efforts to communicatewith the public and with APS members and act as editor of APS News, bothpaper and online versions. Other responsibilities may include theadministration of APS awards and fellowship programs, working with APSdivisions, sections, forums and topical groups, and initiating new programsto serve APS member needs. Qualifications for the position include a PhDin physics or a related field, extensive familiarity with the physics community,and excellent communication skills. APS offers a competitive salary and anoutstanding benefits packet. For consideration, send a cover letter, resume,and professional references to Judy Franz, Executive Officer, APS, OnePhysics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740, fax: 301-209-0865, email:[email protected] . For further information, don’t hesitate to send an emailmessage or call: 301-209-3270.
March Meeting: www.aps.org/meet/MAR00April Meeting: www.aps.org/meet/APR00Prize & Award Recipients: www.aps.org/praw/New APS Fellows: www.aps.org/fellowship/Fractal Gallery: sprott.physics.wisc.edu/fractals.htmA Century of Physics timeline: timeline.aps.orgPlayground Physics: www.aps.org/playground.htmlPhys. Rev. Focus: focus.aps.orgPhysics Limericks: www.aps.org/apsnews/limericks.htmlAmazon Books: www.aps.org/memb/amazon100 Years of the APS - Exhibit & History: www.aps.org/apsnews/history.htmlWacky Patents: colitz.com/site/wacky.htm
CAUGHT IN THE WEBNotable information on the World Wide Web
Announcements
The APS has entered into an agreement with GEICO, a leading auto insurer, to providemembers with a preferred rate. With a current or new GEICO Preferred auto insurancepolicy, mention your APS membership number (listed on the first line of your APS Newsmailing label) and, in most states, GEICO will give you an extra 8% discount.* Thesavings will cover the cost of annual APS dues in most cases. In addition to savings,GEICO offers convenient 24-hour service from a professional representative for ratequotes, claims, or questions. When you qualify, you’ll get coverage tailored to yourpersonal needs and a choice of payment plans.
All it takes is a quick call to GEICO Preferred at: 1-800-368-2734 or a visit to their website at: www.geico.com.
*Discount is 10% in CA, DC, and IL; 3% in NY; not available in all states. Discount is not availablein GEICO Indemnity Company or GEICO Casualty Company. One group discount applicable perpolicy. Government Employees Insurance Co. GEICO General Insurance Co. GEICO IndemnityCo. GEICO Casualty Co. These shareholder-owned companies are not affiliated with the U.S.Government. GEICO Auto Insurance is not available in MA , NJ or outside the U.S.
Discounted Auto InsuranceAdded to Member Benefits
MAKE SURE WE HAVE IT RIGHT!The 2000-2001 APS Member Directory will be compiled inJanuary 2000. Please check your directory listing online(www.aps.org/memb) or on your latest member invoice andforward any necessary changes to [email protected]. Updates mayalso be given to a Membership Representative at 301-209-3280 or faxed to 301-209-0867. All requests should bereceived no later than December 17, 1999.
In celebration of the Centennial, the APS has initiated a $100discount off new life memberships between March 1, 1999 andFebruary 29, 2000. A life membership, which ordinarily costs 15times the regular current annual dues rate, includes a free lifemembership in one dues-requiring unit.
To take advantage of this special offer, look for details in yournext invoice renewal packet. The offer is not valid on an existing orpreviously purchased Life membership. Questions may be directedto the APS Membership Department at 301-209-3280 [email protected].
Take $100 Off a New Life APS Membership
Y2K APS Fellowship Nomination DeadlinesInternational Physics04/01/2000Industrial and Applied
Physics 02/20/2000Education 04/15/2000
TOPICAL GROUPSFew Body Systems04/01/2000Precision Meas. Fund.
Const. 04/01/2000Instruments
& Measurement 04/01/2000Shock Compression04/01/2000Gravitation 04/01/2000Magnetism and Its
Applications 03/30/2000Plasma Astrophysics04/01/2000Statistical &
Nonlinear Physics04/01/2000
APS GENERAL 06/01/2000
DIVISIONSAstrophysics 05/01/2000Atomic, Molecular,
Optical 02/15/2000Biological Physics 04/01/2000Chemical Physics 02/15/2000Computational
Physics 03/15/2000Condensed Matter 01/30/2000Fluid Dynamics 02/15/2000Polymer Physics 04/15/2000Laser Science 04/01/2000Materials Physics 02/15/2000Nuclear Physics 04/01/2000Particles & Fields 04/01/2000Physics of Beams 03/15/2000Plasma Physics 04/01/2000
FORUMSPhysics & Society 04/01/2000History of Physics 04/01/2000
APS News December 1999
12
The Back Page is intended as a forum to foster discussion on topics of interest to the scientific community. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the APS, its elected officers, or staff. APS Newswelcomes and encourages letters and submissions from its members responding to these and other issues. Responses may be sent to: [email protected].
THE BACK PAGE
Christmas is a time for the crunch ofsnow, spiced wine, and tinseled
trees. Christmas is a time for giving,meeting friends and feasting. Christmasis a time for carols, family gatherings,gaudy greeting cards, and all the jollityof the seasonal spirit. Christmas is also atime for science.
Chemists are hard at work in theChristmas kitchen. Experts on thermo-dynamics have drafted equations to helpus cook turkeys to perfection, scannershave scrutinized steaming plum pud-dings, and pharmacologists have tracedthe baroque metabolic pathways of thebrain to explain why chocolates can beso addictive. Meteorologists study everyaspect of the snow cycle that provides aseasonal sprinkling, from the seeding ofan ice crystal high in the sky to the tracesof past Christmases buried deep in thesnowpack. Climatologists are plunderingthis record to help predict white Christ-mases far into the future. A handful areeven concocting outlandish schemes toguarantee that each and every Christmasis white. Psychologists tease out the hid-den agenda of the Christmas card andwhat it reveals about our social status.Anthropologists hunt for the foundationof the celebration in pagan rituals thattook place before the birth of Christ,during long winter nights when our an-cestors feared that the sun would neverreturn.
I have been investigating the scienceof Christmas for more than a decade.When I first began to take an interest in
Christmas and the Scientist in the Technological Ageby Roger Highfield
the subject, I was unprepared for thebreadth and depth of the insights thatwould eventually emerge. Take thoseflying reindeer, Santa’s red and white colorscheme and his jolly disposition, for ex-ample. They are all probably linked tothe use of hallucinogenic toadstool inancient rituals. I can add that Santa wasborn with a genetic predisposition tobecome obese and now suffers from dia-betes. He does not live at the North Pole,preferring the warmth of an island offthe coast of Turkey. There, panting athis side, you will find Rosie — not Rudolph— the reindeer.
I was at first puzzled by how Santacould fly in any weather, circle the globeon Christmas Eve, carry millions and mil-lions of presents, and make all thoserooftop landings with pinpoint accuracy.The answer lies in his unprecedentedresearch resources and expertise acrossa range of fields, spanning genetic engi-neering, computing, nanotechnology, andquantum gravity. My experience under-mines the idea that the materialist insightsof science destroy our capacity to won-der, leaving the world a more boringplace. For me, the very reverse is true. Ican still remember the day when, as achild, I first became convinced that Santadid not exist. Now, by refracting the Santamyth through the prism of science, heseems more real than ever.
I believe that science and technologycan even shed a little light on a deeperquestion: where did Christmas come fromin the first place? Peel back the wallpa-per of centuries and you will find thatthe festival is an amalgam of influences— German, Dutch, English, American andother traditions, both religious and pa-gan — that emerged over the millenia.Even today, the traditional Christmashoopla is far from a homogenous phe-nomenon, taking place alongsideKwanzaa, an African-American harvestholiday, and the eight-day Jewish celebra-tion of Hanukkah. Together theyconstitute the annual celebration.
Part of the reason winter festivitieswent global can be found 150 years ago,at the tail end of the Industrial Revolu-tion. It was then that the “Christ’s Mass”,the church service that celebrates the birthof Jesus Christ, along with a wealth ofother traditions, entered the scientific ageof mass communication, transport, andother technologies. This collision be-tween ancient tradition and the age ofscience and technology was particularlysignificant in Victorian Britain where, dur-ing a single decade, there was a strikingcoincidence of events of significance forscience and the annual celebrations.
The 1840s saw a dizzying rate ofchange in society due to efforts across aproliferating range of disciplines. In theworld of science, there was Darwin’sideas on natural selection, Joule’s workon thermodynamics, and Faraday’s stud-ies of magnetism, light and electricity. Inthe sister disciplines of engineering andtechnology, there were developments infactories, machine tools, and informationtechnology. Babbage was hard at workon his difference engine and a web oftelegraph lines spread across the nation.
All the while the old certainties seemedto have been squashed flat by the steamhammer, steamboat, and steam train. Theresulting turmoil in society made the tra-ditional Christmas message of charitymore relevant than ever. Emerging com-munications technologies, from speedyrailways to the telegraph, paved the wayfor that message to be disseminated andhomogenized for mass consumption,forging much of what we think of todayas the traditional festivities.
The tumultuous 1840s also saw animportant token of the rising influenceof science: the birth of a specific labelfor the burgeoning army of individualsat work in this field. William Whewell, apolymath who was a Fellow of the RoyalSociety, coined the word “scientist” in ear-nest in his two-volume book ThePhilosophy of the Inductive Sciences.The word was of dubious legitimacy inphilological terms, a hybrid of Latin andGreek, and was attacked (wrongly) as“an American barbarous trisyllable.” Butthe pressure to put a name to this in-creasingly influential group wasoverwhelming.
At the same time that the scientist wasborn, an eminent and extraordinary indi-vidual, Henry Cole, decided to reducethe burden of writing Christmas greetingletters by taking advantage of anotherdevelopment he’d had a hand in: the in-troduction of the penny post in 1840.His invention, the first Christmas card, waspublished in 1843 and cost a shilling, theequivalent of a day’s wages for a laborer.After two decades, the price fell dramati-cally thanks to one of the technologicalinventions of the day, cheap color lithog-raphy, and Christmas cards entered themass market.
Cole regarded the card as the folk artof the Industrial Revolution, and it ulti-mately became the greatest popularizerof now-standard Christmas iconography,with designs ranging from bizarre char-acters with pudding heads to mannequinsin period costume, as well as the moreconventional mistletoe, robins, holly andfireside scenes. Not only were the cardsprinted on paper, but they were alsogilded, frosted, and dressed with satin orfringed silk. Some were even made tosqueak. Through the evolution of one ofthe card’s most familiar characters, it ispossible to trace the influence of scien-tists, engineers, and technologies on ourway of life. I am, of course, referring tothe many depictions of the fat man withthe white beard.
A silk-fringed card published in 1888reveals how by then, Santa had resortedto the latest communications technologyto improve the links with his market. Thefigure shown on the card seems to beengaged in what can only be describedas a conference call, listening to the si-multaneous demands for presents froman assortment of children. Only the pre-vious decade, Alexander Graham Bell hadpatented the telephone had made it allpossible.
By the 1890s Santa had decided togive up his sleigh and reindeer,preferring to haul his gifts around by “thenew monstrosity from France,” the
automobile. As a result of thedevelopment of the internal combustionengine, the silent night, holy night nowthrobs to the sound of traffic. The stillnessof the snowy landscape shown on somany Christmas cards is marred by thegroan of the snowplow. The search forthe Bethlehem star is now obscured bya haze of photochemical smog. Anothernewfangled device, the wireless, appearson one 1929 Christmas card, whichfeatures a Santa apparently mesmerizedby the crackling message it is receivingover the ether. Radio would become thefirst mass medium to reinforce thetendency for Christmas to be a festivalheld behind closed doors. When Santareached for a cool soda pop in a Coca-Cola advertisement that appeared duringthe Christmas season of 1937, he wasagain a technological pioneer. The sourceof his refreshment was a refrigerator, eventhough iceboxes were still being usedby most American households that year.
Santa can now be found incyberspace. The last time I checked,there were hundreds of Santa homepages for children’s email. Digitized im-ages of Santa now scud about the webof international computer networks ev-ery Christmas. One day these images mayeven supplant the traditional Christmascard. However, I believe that an emailedSanta, spouting digital “ho, hos” and sea-sonal greetings, would still honor the spiritin which Henry Cole first dreamed upthe card — as a practical way to marrymass communication and art.
Cole would be amazed and gratifiedby the extent to which his little inven-tion has caught on today. A century anda half later, science is still altering the verynature and fabric of the celebrationsthrough the introduction of new technol-ogy, whether cloned Christmas trees, theInternet, or those infuriating cards thatplay carols over and over again. The fu-ture of Christmas and Hanukkah in ourincreasingly technological age seems as-sured.
Roger Highfield earned a D.Phil inchemistry from Oxford University andis currently science editor at the DailyTelegraph in London, England. Theabove is adapted from his book ThePhysics of Christmas, published in1998 by Little Brown & Company.
Festive FormulaFor those who like to plan their
Christmas in advance, here is a littleformula that can reveal the day ofthe week that Christmas Day fallson in any year (including leapyears) after 1600.1. Write down the year you’re
interested in, e.g., 1998. Split thisnumber into its century number C(19) and its year number Y (98).
2. Now divide C by 4 and keepjust the whole-number part of theresult, K. In this case K=19 [div]4 = 4.75, which is rounded offto 4.
3. Do the same for Y, giving a newfigure, G. [G = 98 [div] 4 =24.5, rounded off to 24]
4. Now work out the value of D,using the formula D = 50 + Y+ K + G - (2 x C)[D= 50 + 98 + 4 + 24 - 38 =138]
5. To work out the day of the week,divide D by 7 and write downthe remainder, R. [138 [div] 7 =19 with a remainder of 5, orFriday] Use the following table todetermine the day of the week:
R = 0 .............. SundayR = 1 .............. MondayR = 2 .............. TuesdayR = 3 .............. WednesdayR = 4 .............. ThursdayR = 5 .............. FridayR = 6 .............. Saturday
