WHAT SCIENTISTS DO

Of course simply living simply is not possible in 2011. There are things to be concerned  about.

At Harvard a couple of weeks ago, a group I belong to, New England Science Writers, was meeting in Jefferson Hall to hear physics professor Gary Feldman talk about the recent CERN (hadron collider) experiment that described measuring nutrinos traveling at speeds faster than the speed of light. The press had a brief heyday with that, and one of the NESW members asked Feldman, who’s a member of the MINOS project at Fermi Lab in Chicago – one of the few places on earth equipped to test the French-Italian results – to interpret the findings. It was a delightful talk, and Feldman was clearly convinced  that “mistakes were made,” understandable mismeasurements, which will be tested and explored by the MINOS group. That’s how science works, day-to-day.

But a side note to our Harvard trip turned out to be equally deightful. We arrived  early, and were poking about to make sure we had the right place and time.  Across the hall from Jeff 256 was Jeff 257, the office of Professor Emeritus Richard Wilson, with a handwritten note on the door: “Dick won’t be in for the next few days. “

But “Dick” had left an invitation for folks to help themselves to a handful of interesting publications in his Outbox, including a reprint of a talk he’d given earlier this year on the Fukushima disaster and its lessons, as well as a wonderful book he published in 2001 called Risk-Benefit Analysis. At one point in the book, he calculated the relatively high risk of being a U.S. president by dividing the number of presidential assassinations by the number of president-years served by our 44 leaders. Even though it’s a high-risk job, he pointed out that people continue to line up and apply for it!

Turns out that studying risk has been one of Wilson’s longtime passions, and he now considers himself somewhat of an expert on “dangerous things.”  We were intrigued with his voice, and decided to see if we could find him actually speaking on the Web. Sure enough, we located a brief interview with Andrew Revkin of the NY Times.

In the end Wilson was engaging, but may also have felt a bit adrift. The time has passed, he said, when politicians and policymakers paid attention to the scientists. Back in the 50s and 60s, during the threat of nuclear war, they had listened, he said. But somewhere, somehow scientists have lost their bully pulpit, he admitted ruefully. Still, he keeps his scientific voice out there. We’re happy to hear it. It’s important to have all the facts we can.