PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
James Lawrence Powell serves as executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium, a partnership among government agencies and laboratories, industry, and higher education dedicated to increasing the number of American citizens with graduate degrees in the physical sciences and related engineering fields, emphasizing recruitment of a diverse applicant pool that includes women and minorities. He received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at Oberlin College and served as its acting president. He has also been president of Franklin and Marshall College, Reed College, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush both appointed Powell to the National Science Board. He is also the author of The Inquisition of Climate Science.
Powell breaks new ground. His scholarship is deep, and his stories are well-written and enriched with human detail. Anyone with an interest in how science progresses will profit from reading this. -- Spencer Weart, Director Emeritus of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics Absorbing Publishers Weekly 6/23/14 This clear and well-written book offers four classic examples that show how science progresses - despite tough opposition, generally accepted ideas are often slowly replaced by newer, better ones. As an apocryphal medical school dean told incoming students: Half of what we will teach you in the next four years is wrong. The problem is that we don't knowwhich half. James Lawrence Powell's new title provides a lively look at how the sciences, in this case the Geosciences, really work. -- Seth Stein, Northwestern University
