For the politically inclined scientist in all of us:
A link to the “Bush and Kerry on the scientific issues” article that I wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s now available for free, no subsription required.
Counterbalancing this repeated foray into politics, they’ve also printed a letter of correspondence (subscription required, sorry) in which the authors (who are also scientists) claim that scientists should concern themselves with science and not politics. Because that’s what scientists are good at, you see, therefore they should just stick to one thing. The authors were upset about the Kerry endorsement from a loose conglomerate called “Scientists and Engineers for Kerry”. The group contains scores of prominent researchers, including 48 Nobel prize winners.
Speaking of the Nobels, I believe the committee has finally flushed particle physics out of their system — basically everyone who contributed a significant piece of the Standard Model puzzle has been given a Prize. This has been a frequent topic of conversation this week, and while I agree that particle physics is the most “physics-y physics” there is (an understanding of matter at its most fundamental level), I think we can start filling in a few more Prize pieces in some other fields.