Review - Physics for Future Presidents

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Review - Physics for Future Presidents - Richard A. Muller

Sometimes I see a book title that is so brilliant that I can't help feel (as a writer) 'I wish I'd thought of that.' This is just such a title. It's a brilliant concept - the physics any decent US president really ought to know to be able to make the decisions that face him or her.

What's more, the contents live up to the title. Physics professor Richard A. Muller delivers some real surprises, separating what many of us think we know from reality. In five sections, handling terrorism, energy, 'nukes', space and global warming he delivers some devastating truths, putting across information that it's hard to believe any president has really grasped - yet it's so important that they do.

I don't want to go into too much detail - read the book - but, for example, in the terrorism section he points out that petrol (and aviation fuel) has more energy per tonne than TNT. This was why the Twin Towers came down on 9/11 - not because of the impact of the planes, but the energy released by the burning fuel. Each section uses the main theme as a starting point, but then pulls in other ideas. So, for example, while the space theme has plenty about the fact that manned spaceflight is not undertaken for scientific reasons (he argues strongly against it, encouraging much more unmanned space work), he also covers the use of gravity for remote detection, and the use of non-visible light (infra-red, radar etc.) in intelligence gathering.

One small gripe and one big one. The small gripe is that it's a shame there isn't a European edition of the book. Muller has used US units throughout, rather than scientific units (Fahrenheit temperatures instead of Celsius, for instance), which is ideal for the target audience of would-be US presidents, but less helpful over here. The big one is I think there is one big section missing - pure physics. It doesn't really come through that there's any need to do physics without an immediate application. In the past this has meant passing the crown for nuclear physics from the US, with the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, to Europe with the Large Hadron Collider (due to go live days after this review was written) - future presidents should understand the implications of not putting money into such valuable research.

All in all, without doubt, both the best concept I've seen in ages and an excellent fulfilment of the promise of the title.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

Reader Review

by Earl Killian

This book is not Physics or Science, but rather opinions dressed up as Science. It is more entertainment than teaching. Its premise is to discredit things we think we know, but in doing so the author substitutes things he doesn't know.

In the Terrorist Nukes chapter he gives the blast radius of a 1-kiloton bomb at about 450 feet. The web page cited by Professor Muller no longer gives a figure, but a sister page has an estimate of 700m (2,300 ft), which represents an area 26 times larger than the value cited in the book.

Consider the climate chapter. He talks about the hockey stick reconstruction. He never mentions that his account is strongly disputed by many in the field. I've read large portions of the NAS report (the one on which Professor Muller was a reviewer), and it doesn't say what he says it does. He never mentions that there is independent corroboration for the reconstruction that is independent of the statistical methods used in Mann's particular reconstruction. He never mentions that there is more recent work with additional data and better statistical methods. And so it continues with his apparent axe to grind with Al Gore and a highly misleading assault on electric cars.

If this is what are Future Presidents are being taught, we’re going to continue to have problems in this country.

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