Word: nobelity
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...salesmanship. He got his unofficial welcome to politics in February, during a tour of the University of Pennsylvania's operations facility, when a snippy Vice President Joe Biden responded to Chu's seemingly innocuous comments about energy efficiency by publicly chastising him for straying off message. "He won a Nobel Prize," Biden told the crowd. "I got elected seven times...
...that he's the most qualified leader ever at the Department of Energy (DOE) - which is a bit like being the most likable character ever on NYC Prep. It's also that Chu is the kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers. "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people...
...abstract theoretical physics. At Bell Labs, he spent phone-monopoly money playing with electron spectrometers, gamma rays, polymers and other gee-whiz stuff few of us can understand; he once accidentally discovered an important pulse-propagation effect. But even his most obscure technical work had practical applications; his Nobel-winning breakthrough - supercooling atoms into "optical molasses" - inspired improvements in GPS data and oil exploration. "He's a real-world scientist," says physicist Carl Wieman, who won a separate Nobel using techniques that Chu pioneered. "He's very, very intense, and he's very, very good at solving problems...
...After winning his Nobel while at Stanford in 1997, Chu gradually concluded that global warming was the biggest problem facing mankind and decided to change fields to help solve it. He admired the Nobel laureates whose discoveries sparked the agricultural Green Revolution that averted a global hunger crisis, and he couldn't justify fiddling with molecules when a new Green Revolution was needed to avert a climate crisis. LBNL scientist Art Rosenfeld, Chu's mentor on energy issues, can relate: he was once a star particle physicist, the last student of Enrico Fermi's, but during the crisis...
...Welcome to Washington, where a Nobel Prize winner's opinion is just another opinion, where facts are malleable and sometimes irrelevant. It's tough to be Mr. Outside in a town where policy happens on the inside. Congress is blocking Chu's plan to create eight "Bell lablets" to investigate his game changers, along with his efforts to scuttle hydrogen-car research he considers futile. He's trying to make DOE's bureaucracy more nimble, but it still pushed less than 1% of its stimulus funds out the door in five months. And while Chu ends speeches with Martin Luther...