CHINA / Foreign Media on China
Hawking takes Beijing
By DENNIS OVERBYE (NYtimes)
Updated: 2006-06-20 11:48
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/20/science/20hawk.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5
094&en=6df9ff632bdeba92&hp&ex=1150776000&partner=homepage
BEIJING, June 19 �� Like an otherworldly emperor, Stephen Hawking rolled
his wheelchair onto the stage of the Great Hall of the People on Monday,
bringing with him the royalty of science and making China, for this week
at least, the center of the cosmos.
Slouching in profile, draped in black and moving no more than an eyelid
to send his words to a mesmerized audience of 6,000, Dr. Hawking
ruminated on the origin of the universe as the headliner of an
international physics conference.
"We are close to answering an age-old question," he concluded. "Why are
we here? Where did we come from?"
Participants listen attentively to Stephen Hawking in the Great Hall of
the People in Beijing June 19, 2006. [NYtimes]
But as weighty as his speech was, his mere presence was a powerful symbol
of what China is and would like to be.
China wants to stand up scientifically, as it is beginning to
economically, and it is pouring money and talent into the sciences,
particularly physics. Jie Zhang, director general of basic sciences for
the Chinese academy, said his budget had been increasing 17 percent a
year for the last few years as China tried to ramp up research spending
to about 2.5 percent of its gross domestic product. By comparison, the
United States spends slightly less than 2 percent, according to the
National Science Foundation.
Among the big-budget items on the table, Dr. Zhang said, are a giant
500-meter-diameter radio telescope in China's outback to study microwaves
from the Big Bang and a multinational particle-physics project, known as
the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment to study the ghostly elementary
particles known as neutrinos.
To keep track of all this activity, the United States National Science
Foundation opened an office in Beijing last month. The foundation noted
that China had gone from fourth in the world to third in research and
development expenditures from 2000 to 2006.
While some scientists express doubts that China is open enough to foster
top-tier science, others are enthusiastic.
"China is changing at a rate that is truly amazing," said David J. Gross,
the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa
Barbara, Calif., and a recent Nobel Prize winner, who has been visiting
to help reorganize the Beijing theoretical institute into a model that
can be used for future research institutes.
Dr. Hawking's talk was part of the very public kickoff of Strings 2006,
which has drawn 800 of the world's brightest and most ambitious
physicists here for a week to take stock of string theory, their vaunted
"theory of everything" that says the elementary constituents of nature
are submicroscopic vibrating strings.
Imagine, several string theorists in the audience mused, if a physics
conference in the United States started in the House of Representatives.
As he opened the conference, Chun-Li Bai, the executive vice president of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stressed that basic scientific research
had a "high visibility" in the most recent of China's five-year plans.
"The next 50 years will be of beauty for the development of Chinese
science and technology, as well as economic development," he said.
Calling string theory the cutting edge of curiosity, Shing-Tung Yau, a
Harvard mathematics professor and the meeting's chief organizer, said he
hoped to make China more involved in the field. "I want to put on a good
show," he said.
Dr. Hawking, 64, is always a good show, and his arrival set off a stellar
burst of camera flashes worthy of any rock star. A cosmologist at the
University of Cambridge, he has been in a wheelchair for most of his life
because of amytrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. But he
has nevertheless become one of the leading gravitational theorists, an
avatar of mysteries of black holes and the origin of spacetime, as well
as a best-selling author, a father of three, an indefatigable world
traveler and a guest star on "The Simpsons" and "Star Trek: The Next
Generation."
He speaks with the aid of a computer-driven voice synthesizer. He used to
operate it with his thumb but is now so weak that he has to use an
infrared device that tracks his eye movements. So the camera flashes were
potentially catastrophic, and Dr. Yau ordered the photographers away.
Dr. Hawking's star turn, across the street from the large portrait of Mao
Zedong, also had historic resonance. In the Cultural Revolution, Mao
denounced Einstein and his work as reactionary and bourgeois. Groups of
scientists and scholars were set up to criticize relativity because it
appeared to collide with Marxist dogma that the universe was infinite and
endless, eternally embroiled in a sort of cosmic class struggle.
History has buried those aspects of Marxist thought. Chinese leaders now
are technocrats, not "cosmocrats," as Yinghong Cheng, a historian at
Delaware State University who has studied the cultural revolution, put
it. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao wished good health to Dr. Hawking.
Hardly a week goes by without an announcement of another research
initiative or new investment in a building or an institute. It is hard to
find an American physicist who is not on his way to China to consult or
collaborate, or has just come from China, glowing about the experience.
"The Chinese are so smart they knock your socks off," said Andrew
Strominger, a Harvard string theorist who visits here often. "The
impression you get when you go over there is that China is going to take
over the world soon."
This week, Fred Kavli, the inventor and philanthropist whose foundation
has endowed 10 research institutes in the West, announced that he would
endow two new Kavli institutes in Beijing �� at the Institute for
Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at Beijing
University's Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics �� for several
million dollars each. Both will be linked in a network with the others.
Every summer, hundreds of Chinese-American scientists, so-called overseas
Chinese, leave their posts in the United States and elsewhere to return
to help out, lured by lucrative salaries, prestige and the chance to
"help China."
Marvin I. Cohen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
who is president of the American Physical Society, said physics had come
in for special attention in this effort, for its centrality to science
and what he calls its rigorous approach.
Dr. Cohen was impressed by an up-to-date physics building that he saw in
Beijing. "Someone writes a $10 million check, and they build the building
in Beijing that we wanted in Berkeley," he said.
Putting up buildings is easy compared with filling them with the right
people. Despite all the hype, most researchers say, their best students
are so far staying in the United States. The system, everyone seems to
agree, is rife with politics, and the sudden influx of money has created
opportunities for corruption and fraud.
Last month, a star chip designer, Jin Chen, was fired by Shanghai
Jiaotong University after a Web site run by a biochemist in San Diego,
Shi-min Fang, disclosed that his design for a ballyhooed new
signal-processing chip had been stolen.
That and similar incidents led 120 biologists to sign a letter written by
a researcher at Indiana University, Xin-Yuan Fu, calling for a government
office to investigate science misconduct. The Education Ministry has
since set up a special commission to study misconduct. Dr. Yau said he
was pleased to see China take the problem seriously, adding that there
were many more incidents of fraud.
"They want to catch up too fast," Dr. Yau said. "They want to leapfrog."
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