How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Diagnose the BP Oil Spill

Here's what's happening. After the [Space Shuttle] Challenger accident, the U.S. government formed a panel of very, very bright scientists and engineers to come together and figure out what happened and what could be done in the future to prevent it. Most of the people on that panel were not aeronautics experts, not rocket experts or NASA experts. They were very smart people who had a broad range of knowledge and experience. This is actually what you want: you want a set of fresh eyes, people who can propose potential out-of-the-box solutions, who might foresee what might go wrong. If you're an expert and you're used to certain things done certain ways, that limits your ability to cast a wider net, and so one of the most important things that we're doing at the national laboratories is putting together these scientific teams, many of whom would be considered non-experts. In times like this, those are many of the people you want. BP and the oil industry have the lion's share of the experts that are exactly germane to this. So this is how we think we can best add value.

Chu here is talking about the committee for which Feynman gave the famous O-ring demonstration.

I think whatever you think about Obama's politics, you've gotta be happy that we have someone like Chu running DOE.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just...

Would this not work? Is it just politically incorrect?