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| Her Excellency Naledi Pandor, PhD, Minister of Science & Technology, South Africa |
Her Excellency discussed the Square Kilometer Array. She spoke Wednesday with passion of the need to approve this project for her country: they're in the running with Australia. The decision will hopefully be in South Africa's favor when announced in February 2012.
Apparently, you don't just need a lot of real estate for radio telescopes: the southern hemisphere is free of light as well as transmission "pollution" (only to mean there's a lot of it north of the equator).
She spoke of "Nobel Prize winning research" possibilities for her nation. I sense the South Africans are taking academics quite seriously and pursuing Nobel. Not a bad achievement post-Apartheid. She spoke of undergraduates and graduate students having the opportunity to work there. Capetown is supposed to be a beautiful country: THE most beautiful country according to Her Excellency.
It reminded me of how seriously we took academics post-1968: when books were delivered to our schools not decades out-of-date, written in or pages missing; when we had to be integrated via forced busing in the south, when our friends no longer just looked like us, or lived so close in the neighborhood. Now integration is along the lines of youth culture and hip hop.
At the Joint Conference for the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, that passion is evident in every conversation, casual and "business"; formal and informal.
I approved a comment from a student Friday that said my "Parent Function" post helped them pass a test. (It's not my rap: a good friend named Cody put it together for his math class at Manor High School; I just copied the embed code.) I'm glad to be of assistance.
What I also hope is: one day physicists are as popular and revered as musicians and basketball players (minus the paparazzi).
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