{"id":3218,"date":"2008-12-10T19:54:28","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T19:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/10\/change-physicists-can-believe\/"},"modified":"2008-12-10T19:54:28","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T19:54:28","slug":"change-physicists-can-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/10\/change-physicists-can-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"Change Physicists Can Believe In"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cosmic Variance (among others) reports that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/12\/10\/steven-chu-nominated-to-be-secretary-of-energy\/\">1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics Steve Chu will be the next Secretary of Energy<\/a>. Sean gives a good run-down of the many reasons why this is a Good Thing.<\/p>\n<p>Like Sean, I&#8217;ve met Chu in person. Unlike Sean, my one meeting with him doesn&#8217;t shed any light on anything.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I met him at a reception at the National Academy of Sciences in honor of the American science laureates (Chu, Bill Phillips, and&#8230; somebody else). I was talking to Paul Lett, one of the permanent members of Bill&#8217;s group about something or another when Chu stopped to say hi to Paul.<\/p>\n<p>He was badly jet-lagged from flying in earlier that day, and mentioned that his room at the Watergate hadn&#8217;t been available when he got in. Genius that I am, I said &#8220;Just tell them you&#8217;re a plumber, and go on up.&#8221; He looked at me like I had two heads, and I had to explain my unfunny Watergate joke. He wandered off shortly after that.<\/p>\n<p>So, there you go. What that tells you about his likely policy direction as Secretary of Energy, I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>Congratulations to him, and to the Obama administration for making a good pick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cosmic Variance (among others) reports that 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics Steve Chu will be the next Secretary of Energy. Sean gives a good run-down of the many reasons why this is a Good Thing. Like Sean, I&#8217;ve met Chu in person. Unlike Sean, my one meeting with him doesn&#8217;t shed any light on anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}