Dr. James C. Owens
Senior Fellow
Torrey Pines Research
Past President
Society for Imaging Science and Technology
Member, Executive Committee, New York
State Section
American Physical Society
29 August 2001
Marc H.
Brodsky (via e-mail)
CEO and
Executive Director
American
Institute of Physics
One Physics
Ellipse
College
Park, Maryland 20740
Dear Dr.
Brodsky:
I was very disturbed
to read the email from SpeechRights about your firing of Jeff Schmidt.
My career
and my father's have both been in physics — he was an APS member since the late
1920's (his obituary appears in the latest issue of Physics Today) and I
have been a member and participant since 1961.
My
conception of the APS and AIP has been that they have been since their
beginnings intellectually open, exploratory seekers after fundamental truth,
primarily physical truth, but expanding into areas beyond that when required or
appropriate. The APS special reports on
salaries and careers, for example, are entirely appropriate studies of the
current state of reality, however frustrating to basic scientists they may be. Although I recognize that growth into a
major professional society and interactions with the federal government in WWII
have given rise to seductive pressures for accommodation in order to receive
funding, sometimes in clear opposition to the independent search for truth and
understanding, I had still assumed that the APS and AIP would be open to
unconventional and nonconformist searches for reality rather than kowtowing to
political pressure and suppressing alternative ideas. My thesis advisor, Nicolaas Bloembergen, joined with others in
opposing the overenthusiastic and technologically illiterate Star Wars program;
I gave a talk at the Lasers '87 meeting in Lake Tahoe when Kumar Patel and
others continued the battle, still as underdogs, against the demagoguery of
Edward Teller and his military opportunist supporters.
Jeff
Schmidt's analysis, as described in the 8/24/01 email from SpeechRights, sounds
to me entirely realistic, and consonant with the pressures, however subtle, I
have found in my own career.
I am
disturbed and even disgusted at your actions, and trust that you will explain
them to me and show that they are not simply the mindless reaction of an
entrenched and supplicant Washington bureaucracy, which is certainly how they
appear. I would expect the APS and AIP
to be principled investigators and enlightened searchers for truth, not merely
suppressors of all viewpoints that do not support the machinations of
Washington as the ultimate source of "truth," however transient.
James C. Owens