WHAT'S NEW Friday, April 22, 2005

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 22 Apr 05   Washington, DC

1. EVOLUTION: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE FINDS A SCIENTIST TO DEBATE. 
The National Press Club in Washington, DC is a good place to hold
a press conference.  If a group can make its message look like an
important story, it can get national coverage.  The message of
the Seattle-based Discovery Institute is simple: "Intelligent
Design is science."  That's bull feathers of course, but that's
why they have PR people.  Science is what scientists do, so they
gotta look like scientists.  Nothing can make you look more like
a scientist than to debate one.  Scam artists all use the "debate
ploy": perpetual-motion-machine inventors, magnet therapists, UFO
conspiracy theorists, all of them.  They win just by being on the
same platform.  So, the Discovery Institute paid for prominent
biologist Will Provine, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of
Biological Sciences at Cornell, to travel to Washington to debate 
one of the Discovery Institute's "kept" PhDs, Stephen Meyer, at
the National Press Club on Wednesday.  It was sparsely attended. 
Most were earnest, well-scrubbed, clean-cut young believers, who
smiled, nodded in agreement and applauded at all the right times. 
The debate was not widely advertized.  I'm not sure they really
wanted a lot of hot-shot reporters asking hard questions.  The
only reporter was from UPI, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon and the Unification Church, a spiritual partner of the
Discovery Institute.  The next day I searched on Google for any
coverage of the debate.  The only story I could find was in the
Washington Times, a newspaper owned by   the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. 

2. METHYL TERTIARY BUTYL ETHER: THE SMELL IS COMING FROM TEXAS. 
Does your water smell like kerosene?  Don't worry, it's just a
gasoline additive, MTBE, meant to reduce emissions.  It finds its
way into groundwater.  The energy bill that just passed the House
would immunize the producers from law suits.  The House tried the
same thing in 2003 http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn010204.cfm.  It
wound up killing the bill in the Senate.  You better hope it does
again, because the rest of the bill smells worse than MTBE.  The
president admits the bill will do nothing to reduce the price of
gasoline, nor will it reduce dependence on foreign oil.  

3. RHIC: NEW RESULTS INDICATE SOMETHING INTERESTING IS HAPPENING.
If it's time for a new energy bill, it must be time for some
amazing new results to come out of energy laboratories, and
behold, the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, may
have created a quark-gluon plasma in the collision of gold ions. 
Or maybe it didn't, because a clear signature for such a state is
not really known.  But it did make some really dense stuff that
seems to behave more liquid-like than gas-like, with very low
viscosity.  And all of this might be related to string theory.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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