Nicholas Goldberg: Can scientists moonlight as activists — or does that violate an important ethical code?
The physicist Nicholas Goldberg was born in New York to a Jewish family. He has worked on many major projects over the course of his career. For example, he was a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during the Manhattan Project. He also was a theoretical physicist at NASA Goddard Space Center. And he has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Joint Quantum Institute and LANL Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Security, LLC. Most recently, in 2006, he joined the Institute for International Science and Technology at the University of Southern California. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Southern California.
But Goldberg’s academic career is not over — and he’s still working for the world. Not only is he on the editorial board of a website named after himself, but he is also contributing to two other science-themed publications. Not bad for a physicist who is “working on a science column now, but still has a day job.”
The website, which he named after himself, does not yet have a name. But for the time being, to understand how Goldberg has gotten into this position as an academic, and why it is important that we understand it, I want to make one point clear: I have no idea who is responsible for this column. I, as the author, am doing the writing, I am responsible for everything that I write. The column is a piece written by someone else. The person responsible for this website does not control it or have anything to do with it. It is the product of someone else’s imagination, and the person responsible for it may or may not be the one who owns it. I wish this column to be made public; and so if somebody wants to know who the author is, I feel comfortable doing so.
How did he get into
