{"id":384,"date":"2006-05-01T15:45:48","date_gmt":"2006-05-01T20:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=384"},"modified":"2006-05-12T22:04:57","modified_gmt":"2006-05-13T03:04:57","slug":"scientists-speak-out-about-guantanamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=384","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Speak Out About Guant\u00e1namo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking there&#8217;s too much politics on this blog recently, and yet I still think the political activities of well-known theorists are worth noting here.  As commenter Arun pointed out, this Sunday&#8217;s New York Times has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/04\/30\/opinion\/l30gitmo.html\">letter to the editor<\/a> criticizing the human rights violations at Guantanamo, signed by many prominent particle theorists, including Susskind (whose name comes first, perhaps he&#8217;s the organizer), Bjorken, Deser, Dyson, Gaillard, Gross, Polchinski, Schwarz, Wilczek, Witten and Zumino.<\/p>\n<p>Over at the science policy blog <a href=\"http:\/\/sciencepolicy.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/\">Prometheus<\/a>, Roger Pielke has a posting called <a href=\"http:\/\/sciencepolicy.colorado.edu\/prometheus\/archives\/science_policy_general\/000799a_very_bad_dream_ind.html\">A Very Bad Dream Indeed<\/a>, in which he strongly criticizes the authors of this letter for writing such a letter that has nothing to do with science policy.   He seems to be worried about these scientists &#8220;transforming their privilege in the scientific domains into authority in non-scientific domains.&#8221;  Somehow, I just don&#8217;t see the possibility of theoretical physicists grabbing political power and ramrodding through policies they support as being something much worth worrying about.  My reaction to this particular letter was not &#8220;who do these people think they are to do this?&#8221;, but rather &#8220;how come everyone else isn&#8217;t doing this?&#8221;  The situation at Guantanamo is a disgrace to this country and that the courts allow it to continue is shocking.<\/p>\n<p>More about this at  <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/nosenada\/2006\/05\/worth_reading_scientists_tradi.php\">No Se Nada<\/a>, the blog of Kevin Vranes.<\/p>\n<p>OK, now, no more about politics for a while. I promise&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking there&#8217;s too much politics on this blog recently, and yet I still think the political activities of well-known theorists are worth noting here. As commenter Arun pointed out, this Sunday&#8217;s New York Times has a letter to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=384\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}