PLANCK IS DEAD

An energy-absorbing cavity is still often called by its German name Hohlraum (hollow space), and is the only thing that is needed here to take us on to the fusion story, but I hope you will not object if I digress some more on the person of Max Planck (1858-1947) and the remarkable difference between him and most contemporary physicists.

Planck had been working on the law of black-body radiation for years (at least since 1896) before he published his famous 1901 paper as the last of a series. He made the discovery of energy quantization that was to change the physics of the 20^th century in 1900, and that evening he told his wife at dinner (she reports) "I think today I made a discovery as important as one of Newton's." She was the only one to whom he made this boast. It took another year for his paper to be published; it took years and decades before it was fully accepted by the scientific community; and it is probably fair to say that its importance did not reach the broader public until after World War II.

Now compare this with the short-cut scientists who observed a 30% reduction for six weeks in the ozone layer in the Antarctic, now ludicrously called "the ozone hole." Geophysics is not physics, where you work in a laboratory to see what happens under the most varied conditions; serious geophysicists accumulate evidence for decades and even centuries, before they draw firm conclusions. But the ozone-holers discovered something in 1984, not knowing whether it had been there for decades or millennia, nor knowing what causes it. No matter: it fit in well with a fashionable doomsday hunch about CFCs, to which no persuasive evidence links it to this day, and they had no audible objections to the "hole" being used as another ideological campaign embraced by the politicians, who grandstanded with fraudulent agreements to phase out CFCs at your considerable expense. A genuine scientist does not frighten innocent laymen with scenarios that have no good scientific foun-dation, least of all if there is evidence contradicting their half-baked hypothesis.

One wonders how many leading US physicists would pass such a test. Most of them did nothing in opposing the totalitarian Soviet threat at a time when, unlike their German colleagues under the Nazis, they had nothing to fear. They denigrated and actively op-posed US defense research, even though it is defense of freedom; they ostracized the renowned physicists, such as Edward Teller, who were proud to defend it. They eagerly cooperated with Soviet state-run physics at a time when the Stalinist state killed their col-leagues for genuine or alleged dissent. They heaped scorn on the Strategic Defense Initiative, with some universities even refusing to accept any funds for it, effectively barring all faculty members from defense research. And relatively few of them have spoken out against abusing physics and science to push ideology and social engineering in environmentalist camouflage.

The generation of Planck-type physicists like Edward Teller is fading; and among the young ones there are too many who bathe in the taxpayers' billions for constructing Hubble Telescopes that are out of focus, and multi-billion supercollider monstrosities that will produce more and more results of the same kind in the con-fused world of nuclear particles, when some believe that it is time to take a new (and comparatively inexpensive) look at the fun-damentals of physics themselves.