Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate, single molecule biophysics pioneer, and current director of LBNL, has just been named Secretary of Energy for the Obama administration. How awesome is it that we have an incoming president who actually wants to put a Ph.D. and Nobel Laureate in charge of energy? Compare that with the Bush appointment: a political hack (and founder of the Federalist Society) who perpetrated the Hydrogen Hoax.
Apropos of nothing, a brief personal story about Steve Chu: For the UIUC Physical Revue one year, I wrote and sang "I Am The Very Model of a 'Sperimental Physicist" (preserved for posterity by the Internet Wayback Machine.) In it, I sang:
"I've got so many articles, my Erdős number's less than two/I'm published more than Rutherford, Yukawa, Gauss, or Steven Chu!"
I wrote it that way because the meter worked and it was funny. But, apparently, TJ Ha, who postdoc'd with Steve Chu (and with whom I co-authored a paper) was talking with him at BPS that year, and mentioned the song, which elicited the reply, "That's odd, I don't publish that many papers." Well, at least he's not getting tapped for Secretary of Humor.
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