Steven E. Koonin | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University | |||||||||
In office April 2012 –? | |||||||||
2nd Under Secretary for Science | |||||||||
In office May 2009 –November 2011 | |||||||||
President | Barack Obama | ||||||||
Preceded by | Raymond L. Orbach | ||||||||
7th Provost of Caltech | |||||||||
In office February 1995 –March 2004 | |||||||||
Preceded by | Paul C. Jennings | ||||||||
Succeeded by | Edward Stolper (acting) | ||||||||
Personal details | |||||||||
Born | Brooklyn,New York | December 12,1951||||||||
Spouse | Laurie Koonin | ||||||||
Children | 3 | ||||||||
Alma mater | B.S.,California Institute of Technology Ph.D.,Massachusetts Institute of Technology | ||||||||
| |||||||||
Steven Elliot Koonin (born December 12,1951) [1] is an American theoretical physicist and former director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He is also a professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. [2] From 2004 to 2009,Koonin was employed by BP as the oil and gas company’s Chief Scientist. [3] From 2009 to 2011,he was Under Secretary for Science,Department of Energy,in the Obama administration.
Born in Brooklyn,New York City,Koonin graduated from Stuyvesant High School at the age of 16,received his Bachelor of Science from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Arthur Kerman in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. [4] [5] [6] In 1975,Koonin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of theoretical physics becoming one of their youngest ever faculty,and served as the institute's provost from 1995 to 2004. [7] [8]
In 2004,Koonin joined BP as their chief scientist,where he was responsible for guiding the company's long-range technology strategy,particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources. [9] He was tapped for the position of Under Secretary for Science at the United States Department of Energy by Steven Chu,Obama's Secretary of Energy, [10] and served from May 19,2009,to November 18,2011. [11] [12] Koonin left in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses.[ citation needed ] In 2012,he was appointed the founding director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). [13]
He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation,the Department of Defense,and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories,such as the JASON defense advisory group,which he has chaired. [14] Koonin's research interests have included theoretical nuclear,many-body,and computational physics,nuclear astrophysics,and global environmental science. [15]
Koonin became publicly involved in the policy debate about climate change starting with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2017,in which he floated the idea of a red team/blue team exercise for climate science. In 2018,the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the leadership of Scott Pruitt proposed a public debate on climate change to refute the 2017 Climate Science Special Report. According to a draft press release edited by Koonin and William Happer,Princeton physics professor and director of the CO2 Coalition,they planned "red team"/blue team exercises to challenge the scientific consensus on climate. The draft was never released,and the plans were not carried out. [16] [17] [18]
In 2019,the Trump Administration proposed to create a "Presidential Committee on Climate Security" at the National Security Council that would conduct an "adversarial" review of the scientific consensus on climate change. Koonin was actively involved in recruiting others to be part of this review. The committee was scrapped in favor of an initiative not "subject to the same level of public disclosure as a formal advisory committee". [18] [19] [20]
Koonin wrote a 2000-word essay,"Climate Science Is Not Settled," that was published in an issue of The Wall Street Journal . [21] [22] The main points of the article were that:
In an article in Slate, [23] climate physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert criticized Koonin's essay as "a litany of discredited arguments" with "nuggets of truth ... buried beneath a rubble of false or misleading claims from the standard climate skeptics' canon."
In 2021,Koonin published the book Unsettled:What Climate Science Tells Us,What It Doesn't,and Why It Matters. [24] Critics accused him of cherry picking data,muddying the waters surrounding the science of climate change,and having no experience in climate science. [25]
In a review in Scientific American ,economist Gary Yohe wrote that Koonin "falsely suggest[s] that we don't understand the risks well enough to take action":
The science is stronger than ever around findings that speak to the likelihood and consequences of climate impacts, and has been growing stronger for decades. In the early days of research, the uncertainty was wide; but with each subsequent step that uncertainty has narrowed or become better understood. This is how science works, and in the case of climate, the early indications detected and attributed in the 1980s and 1990s, have come true, over and over again and sooner than anticipated... [Decision makers] are using the best and most honest science to inform prospective investments in abatement (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to diminish the estimated likelihoods of dangerous climate change impacts) and adaptation (reducing vulnerabilities to diminish their current and projected consequences). [24]
Physicist Mark Boslough, a former student of Koonin, posted a critical review at Yale Climate Connections. He stated that "Koonin makes use of an old strawman concocted by opponents of climate science in the 1990s to create an illusion of arrogant scientists, biased media, and lying politicians – making them easier to attack." [26]
Nonprofit organization Inside Climate News reported that climate scientists call Koonin's conclusions "fatally out of date ... and based on the 2013 physical science report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." [10]
Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, [27] lauded the book in The Wall Street Journal as "rebut[ing] much of the dominant political narrative". [28] Twelve scientists analyzed Mills's arguments and said that he merely repeated Koonin's incorrect and misleading claims. [29] Koonin responded with a post on Medium.com answering these critics. [30]
On August 21, 2023, an interview with Koonin was released via the Stanford University Hoover Institution video series, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson.
Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".
Burton Richter was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper.
John Henry Schwarz is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.
Mark Brian Wise is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist. He has conducted research in elementary particle physics and cosmology. He is best known for his role in the development of heavy quark effective theory (HQET), a mathematical formalism that has allowed physicists to make predictions about otherwise intractable problems in the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. He has also published work on mathematical models for finance and risk assessment.
David Louis Goodstein was an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he was also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
JASON is an independent group of elite scientists that advises the United States government on matters of science and technology, mostly of a sensitive nature. The group was created in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch as a way to reinvigorate the idea of having the nation's preeminent scientists help the government with defense problems, similar to the way that scientists helped in World War II but with a new and younger generation. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members. Its work first gained public notoriety as the source of the Vietnam War's McNamara Line electronic barrier. Although most of its research is military-focused, JASON also produced early work on the science of global warming and acid rain. Current unclassified research interests include health informatics, cyberwarfare, and renewable energy.
William Aaron Nierenberg was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986. He was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.
Maria Spiropulu is a Greek particle physicist. She is the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
Raymond Thomas Pierrehumbert is the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.
The MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) is the hub of theoretical nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information research at MIT. It is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics.
Raymond Lee Orbach is an American physicist and administrator. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy from 2006 until 2009, when he was replaced by Steven E. Koonin. Until his resignation in December 2012, Orbach was director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach continues to do research as a tenured professor in the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of Texas.
Steven Chu is an American physicist and former government official. He is a Nobel laureate and was the 12th U.S. secretary of energy. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research at the University of California, Berkeley, and his research at Bell Laboratories and Stanford University regarding the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips.
Steven C. Frautschi is an American theoretical physicist, currently professor of physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is known principally for his contributions to the bootstrap theory of the strong interactions and for his contribution to the resolution of the infrared divergence problem in quantum electrodynamics (QED). He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 for "contributions to the introduction of Regge poles into particle physics, elucidation of the role of infrared photons in high energy scattering, and for seminal contributions to undergraduate physics education".
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science is a book written by American science author Natalie Angier.
John Francis Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Novim is a non-profit group at the University of California, Santa Barbara that organizes teams for objective scientific study of global issues and identification options for addressing the concerns, based upon a collaborative problem-solving approach used in the field of physics.
Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), a nonprofit organization working on climate and energy technology issues, which he co-founded in 2017.
Glennys Reynolds Farrar is a professor of physics at New York University who specializes in particle physics, cosmology and the study of dark matter. She has made several significant contributions to the fields of hadron and dark matter phenomenology, helping to develop the working "Standard Cosmological Model". Farrar is a figure in developing many modern particle-search techniques, achieving numerous recognitions including as the Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences and Sloan Fellowship. She holds a faculty position at New York University (NYU), where she has been since 1998.