Sunday, July 23, 2023
By:
Welcome!
I felt really proud about how this week went. And, like much of the media coverage from this week, everything was fairly Oppenheimer themed.
On Monday, I got everything set up for the week with a list of events I would need to attend and take notes on. My first event was in the afternoon, but I had a couple more small tasks that I worked on with Amber before trekking over to Rayburn for a briefing by the American Nuclear Society on the construction of nuclear weapons and nuclear non-proliferation. (You can get the Oppenheimer vibes already.) The presenter discussed the different types of nuclear weapons, how various different isotopes are selected and concentrated, signs of nuclear activity that the U.S. looks for in countries, and how the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty works – it basically allows five countries to have nuclear weapons, and every other country is expected to ally with one of them to avoid being destroyed by another nuclear power. If that seems kind of funky to you, it is, but it works for the U.S., so no one’s going to change it! When I was leaving my committee’s briefing room, I ended up talking to some staffers who happened to work for Bill Foster, and I’m hopefully going to meet with them sometime next week. After work on Monday I went out with MJ, Julia, and Eva to a small but cozy restaurant where there was going to be a cabaret! The group usually meets once a month, and it was really just such a wholesome environment where people got to express themselves through music. I’d definitely like to go back in the future! It’s really nice that I’ve gotten to know about things going on in DC that I might want to come back to during my semesters at UMD.
On Tuesday, I was technically working remotely, but I decided to go into the Hill so I could attend a lunch with the House Science and National Labs Caucus. I had a zoom meeting right before, and ended up sitting in the cafe in Longworth, where I saw Lauran Boebert and AOC. The lunch panel had representatives from a number of different National Labs, like Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and a few others, and they were mainly discussing what their labs have to do with High Performance Computing. (Meeting the director of Los Alamos was the second Oppenheimer themed part of my week.) Some of them spoke about quantum computing, some about AI, some about chip manufacturing, and some about national security. Overall, it was a really interesting look into how different aspects of the research our government is doing work together. After that I finished up the day from home, taking notes on a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the right to repair. It was a fascinating hearing, one because I believe the right to repair is so important, but two because it was really non-partisan. The Science Committee is nonpartisan in the way that everyone wants to fund research, but this hearing had two sides – people who were getting money from big companies that didn’t want to allow consumers to repair or increase the longevity of their own products, and everyone else. I got to catch up with a friend on the phone for a while in the evening, which was really nice.
Wednesday I was back in person, had another event to take notes on, and finished up the right to repair hearing. I also got asked to write an opening statement for the Ranking Member of our Committee, Zoe Lofgren, to read at a hearing we’re having next week. It was a big moment for me, and I really felt like I was being trusted by the staff of the committee. I also got Amber and the new Staff Assistant, Carlos, to come with me to a climate awareness event where they were giving out ice cream because I thought it would be fun and I wanted ice cream. It was fun, and I got to explore the Senate buildings and tunnels for the first time. I’m trying to use the last few weeks of the internship to really explore and take advantage of everything that I’m right in the middle of. I finally got through the first bit of research for Ms. Lofgren’s statement when the day ended, and I headed home to make dinner, make slides for something I was doing for the UMD physics department on Thursday, and pack because I was taking a train to New York straight from work on Thursday as well!
The slides I’d made on Wednesday night were actually for a talk I was giving to the UMD Physics Department’s summer high school outreach program. I attended and then worked at the program when I was in high school, and being asked to talk at it was really rewarding and encouraging for a number of reasons. It felt like a way to give back to the program that had given me so much, and it also felt like a recognition that my path is a real and valuable path to take with physics. I’m really happy with my presentation and the Q&A session at the end! It was a strange parallel to a lot of the events I’ve had to take notes on this summer. Once the UMD talk wrapped up, I returned to my Committee work. I was supposed to take notes on another House Judiciary hearing, but it ended up being a political circus with not much material consequences, so after about an hour of that I turned off the hearing and went back to working on the opening statement for Ranking Member Lofgren. I feel really really good about what I wrote, and I’m hoping that it gets used without too many edits. The hearing is going to discuss the cleanup of legacy nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project, and doing research on that was the third Oppenheimer themed part of my week. When I wrapped up for the day (and the week!) I headed over to Union Station to catch my train – and got to New York safely, where I was staying with my best friend, Aharon. It was his birthday on Saturday, which was the occasion for my visit.
Friday was the real Oppenheimer themed day of the week, when Aharon and I actually saw Oppenheimer! We also saw Barbie, but this is a physics blog and I am a physics nerd so I will write about Oppenheimer at the end of the blog (without spoiling anything except history). After a long but wonderful day of movies, we made a potluck dinner with some of the people Aharon lives with, and got to spend some great time together. Highlights of Saturday included meeting up with some mutual friends for lunch and attending a Korean inspired orchestra performance at Lincoln Center. We went for the music of course, but also because they’ve been working with a group that provides assisted listening devices to people attending live music events which are strapped to different parts of your body and vibrate in time with different instruments. I’ve always loved getting to experience music by feeling the vibrations at concerts and parties, and this was an incredibly special experience for me. I’m so glad that this technology is being made for everyone, but especially people who are deaf or hard of hearing! On Sunday we went to the Met Cloisters, and then I headed back to DC.
Back to Oppenheimer as promised – as a high schooler, I became obsessed with the fact that there were so many Jewish physicists that really defined the era of physics at the beginning of the 20th century. This included American born Jews like Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman, as well as a plethora of Jews who fled persecution in Europe like Einstein and Szilard. I’ve done an immense amount of research on all of these characters, but I always felt that my favorite Jewish physicist of the era was I.I. Rabi. Though before the Oppenheimer movie he was largely lost to the Jewish teenagers obsessed with physics and NBLA staff, I think the movie at least brought him to the attention of a broader audience, even if it didn’t really give people an understanding of the amazing man and scientist he was. After working with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project, Rabi noted that Oppenheimer “would have been a much better physicist if he had studied the Talmud” (Rigden, 228). Rabi, a non-practicing Jew, recommended studying the Talmud because it would have “given [Oppenheimer] a greater sense of self,” a greater awareness of what they worked towards each day, of the forces physics explores, of the underlying truth of all things.
I don’t think that all physicists have to study the Talmud, but one of the things I’ve learned while working for the House Science Committee is that scientists need to understand the complex environment that their work is a part of. Rabi said that when he came home from school every day, his mother “would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’” and that is what made him a good scientist. Good questions aren’t just experimental questions: they’re also questions about the consequences of your work and how it might be used. Research doesn’t just exist in a vacuum, it has repercussions outside of labs and in the lives of real people.
Rigden, John S. Rabi: Scientist and Citizen. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Ruthie Vogel