William J. Broad

Broad knows what's up with missile defense. As the New York Times science correspondent during the 80s, he was close to many of the principles in various stabs at Star Wars during the Reagan administration. The prime mover was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, founder of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the conservative doyen of nuclear scientific clientage. For all his successes, Teller had a checkered record as a scientist. The mainstream academic community had turned against show more him in the 1950s over his betrayal of Oppenheimer during the Red Scare. He hadn't made a major scientific contribution on the order of his Manhattan Project peers. And the public regarded him as a Dr. Strangelove-esque madman who's plans for peaceful hydrogen bombs had come to nothing.

In this climate, Teller grabbed onto the scientifically advanced bomb-pumped X-Ray laser as a way to defeat the Soviet nuclear arsenal, shield America from mutually assured destruction, and ensure his place in the history books. Theoretically, the X-ray laser could amplify an H-bomb into beams of coherent light billions of times brighter than the blast itself, shooting 100,000s of independently targetable beams at a nuclear strike. Theoretically. Engineering this thing would be a nightmare, as the whole apparatus existed for only a nanosecond next to an exploding hydrogen bomb.

Teller's optimism, vision, and passion were his greatest assets as a scientific leader, but in this case they lead to his downfall, as Teller oversold Reagan on the potential of the X-ray laser. The narrative mostly follows Roy Woodruff, the nuclear scientist in charge of the X-ray laser program, and his attempts to properly inform the Reagan administration and the public about the serious limits and uncertainties around Star Wars in the face of Teller's PR campaign and scorched earth bureaucratic warfare.

The story of Star Wars is bigger than just Teller and Woodruff, but Broad's framing is essentially correct, and provides a gripping and technically accurate account of some of the most fraught science politics in recent memory. show less

Star Warriors is a detailed look at a very strange group of people in a very strange place. O Group was a small team of about twenty to forty scientists, most in their mid-20s, mostly white, mostly with Caltech and MIT pedigrees, and all male, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in 1985. Under the direction of Lowell Wood, O Group worked on applications for third generation nuclear weapons, primarily the "Star Wars" missile defense project based around bomb pumped X-ray lasers. The team also show more dabbled in supercomputer programming, fusion research, and starship design. Broad uses a week of interviews with O Group to provide flesh to what's often an abstract debate about nuclear strategy and technology policy.

The picture that emerges is of an elite scientific team, sharply competitive with each other and hand-picked by Lowell Wood through his control of the Hertz Fellowship (Wood was in line to succeed Edward Teller as director of LLL before a classification scandal broke his career momentum). What drives these people is the desire to be the best, to prove it mathematically, as when the soul of the group, Peter Hagelstein, made the key calculations that proved X-ray lasers were possible. These are no political naifs, but hardened Cold Warriors who see the Soviet Union as fundamentally evil, and their work as a way to gain a strategic edge. Unlike Reagan, who imagined a perfect shield, they know the limits of any system, and believe that the possibility of merely blunting a nuclear strike might prevent escalation to nuclear war, and that forcing the Soviets to compete on defense would further drain their resources. But above all else, it seems to be the coolness of the physics, of the way that the basic laws of reality break down at a thermonuclear shock front, and how that energy can be harnessed to make dreams real.

Over 30 years on, Star Warriors is a historical curiosity. It still stands as a fascinating look at some very interesting scientists, right next to The Soul of a New Machine. show less

I've been practicing yoga in the Iyengar school since 1978. I was a physics graduate student when I started and have been working in engineering since I got my Master's degree. Reading I. K. Taimni's book with the same title as William Broad's was a real turning point in my life. Broad's book, however, was rather disappointing.

Is anyone surprised that yoga has great potential for helping people along with great potential for harming people? I suppose there is a lot of blindness around, on show more both sides of the question of the value of yoga. What is more interesting there is that blindness itself, rather than its object. Hmm, Joel Kramer's work, such as the book The Guru Papers, wasn't mentioned in Broad's book.

The subject of Broad's book is really vast. What we have here is just a few small tastes, an appetizer. Perhaps it will motivate folks to look a bit deeper. But this is also a very difficult subject.

Broad tells us about the delicate routing of blood vessels into the skull at its juncture with the spine. A sharp bending there could interfere with blood flow, leading to a stroke. This has been observed, we learn here. But that much is not really enough to work with. Most folks ought to know that there are better and worse ways to practice headstand and shoulder stand. In headstand the real question is not so much how much weight is on the arms, as discussed here, but whether the neck is kept long. If somebody lets their neck to collapse in headstand... but this distinction isn't even mentioned in Broad's book. Similarly, in shoulder stand, the cervical spine should be kept long, should keep its natural curve. The big bend is where the cervical spine meets the thoracic spine, not where it meet the skull. Again, this is not mentioned in Broad's book.

Broad tells us in his epilogue that the goal of his book is really a transformation of yoga. Well, he tells us that yoga is always evolving. The point of the book is more to steer that evolution, to bring science and yoga closer together, to improve the positive value and effectiveness of yoga. He admits that science cannot fathom the full potential of yoga but still, as far as science can go, it has the power to steer yoga in a positive direction.

So far so good, perhaps, but it really misses half the story,and maybe missing half the story leaves a half story that is not altogether free of danger. The limits of science are not merely an inability to fathom the potential of yoga. Science itself introduces distortions. Science has the potential to steer yoga wrong, to amplify its potential for harm. Broad mentions the distinction between science and scientism but doesn't dig into that problem at all. Science is just as capable of persistent error as any other institution. Certainly science has the capability of freeing itself from such error, but then so do other institutions.

Broad talks about the evolution of yoga and the need to steer that in a positive direction. What he misses is the evolution of science - not the catalog of facts and theories generated by science, but evolution of the institution of science, its methods and practices, its character, its relationships with other institutions. These too evolve and require constant effective steering if science is to continue as a vital and positive force in human society.

Science works best when it is dealing with inert objects, or at least with unconscious systems. Yoga is all about conscious action, aware action. Science doesn't have effective methods for dealing with systems that exhibit will and freedom. Yoga could be the difficult topic that drives science to evolve, to transcend its present limits.

The science of yoga indeed has the almost miraculous potential that Broad outlines in his epilogue. But that potential could well be more in the transformation of science, the development of a science that is capable of studying a discipline such as yoga. What kind of science might a science of yoga be? Surely yoga must evolve, too, to engage in such a partnership.

If science and yoga could learn to dance in a mutual exploration and expansion, leading each other to every vaster freedom of experience... what a bright future awaits! But how to realize that potential? That is a daunting challenge! But what else is there to do?! show less

If you are a fan of thinking that the world is, by and large, safe and that we have weathered the storm of the cold war without any major apocalypses happening, then this book will shatter that thinking.

Broad and Miller look at the bioweapons programs of the US, Russia, and Iraq, and how bioweapons featured prominently in geopolitical posturing from the end of WW2 on. Along the way, they scare the bejeezus out of the reader, though with good reason.

We all know the stories about how close the show more world came to nuclear annihilation, and how many times we came that close. Well, we came much much MUCH closer to a biological apocalypse, and came that close many many more times. And since bioweapons don't have the cachet of nuclear weapons, the stories are relatively hidden. Up until this book, that is.

Nuclear weapons require a certain amount of expertise and equipment, and every intelligence agency in the world is on the lookout for suspicious transactions that could lead to nuclear weapons. But bioweapons are so easily concealable as agricultural or medical research that it is much harder to see whether the intentions of people doing that research are good or not. And bioweapons are no less deadly than nuclear weapons--in fact, they may be more so, especially with the advent of recombinant organisms that are resistant to conventional antibiotics or vaccines.

Adding to this problem is the fact that, ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, scientists who have expertise in making bioweapons and distributing them have been unemployed and their facilities have lost state protection. This has led to a black market where rogue states and organizations can essentially buy talent and expertise to make bioweapons, and I fear this will lead to something very bad happening in the future.

But there is hope. The book also details the efforts of both the US and Russia to curb the spread of bioweapons. While there is still research going on, it seems to be better monitored, and I hope this trend continues through the rest of the century.

Overall a very good read about something I didn't know much about before. show less