Physicists should choose carefully the political issues on which to voice their opinions
Statements by physicists about controversial political issues have a long and honourable tradition, notably Einstein’s famous letter in 1945 warning US President Roosevelt about nuclear weapons. Jorge Hirsch, a condensed-matter physicist from the University of California, San Diego, is maintaining that tradition (see “Antinuclear call to arms”), having recently written to President Bush urging him not to use nuclear weapons against Iran. Such is Hirsch’s anxiety about the issue that he persuaded a dozen other leading US physicists, including five Nobel laureates, to sign the document too.
But a recent letter in the New York Times sees another group of prominent US scientists commenting on an issue that has nothing to do with physics at all – America’s treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. While Guantánamo Bay is no doubt a serious matter, physicists would be well advised to stick to those issues that are underpinned by science.
Leonard Susskind, Frank Wilczek, Ed Witten and the other signatories are aware that they are going beyond their remit, stating that “although this is not a scientific issue in the usual sense, we feel that to ignore it would be to abdicate our responsibility to the truth”. But by exploiting their authority as eminent scientists to make political statements on non-scientific issues, physicists could be undermining their influence on matters where they deserve to be listened to – like nuclear weapons.
