Talk Like A Physicist

Soon The entire US Congress would consist of physicists!

NY Times has an interesting article about the inordinate number of physicists in the Congress.

WASHINGTON — According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress, and that is counting the psychologist, the psychiatrist, a dozen other M.D.’s, three nurses, an engineer, two veterinarians, a pharmacist and an optometrist.

But physics is on a roll.

“Go back 15 years, and there weren’t any physicists,” said Vernon J. Ehlers, a Republican who taught the subject at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he was elected to Congress in 1993.

His was a lone voice until 1998, when Rush Holt, assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, won election from New Jersey as a Democrat. And today there are three, adding Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab and another Democrat, who won a special election in March in Illinois.

“If we continue to reproduce in this manner,” Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, “the entire Congress would consist of physicists!”

And the reason why there are so many physicists in the congress:

“Physicists are versatile,” Mr. Ehlers said. “We live in the real world.”

And Vernon J. Ehlers also quipped:

“We’ve done the calculation,” Mr. Holt said. “By midcentury, I think, we’ll have a functioning majority.”

I bet it was a back of the envelope calculation, correct within an order of magnitude. So the physicists majority will happen sometime between 2050 and 2550…

great! I can’t wait. I wonder when will we have our first Physicist President?