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Stephen White
(22 Nov 1915 - 27 Mar 1993)
American science writer who was a science writer for The New York Herald Tribune. He was on the staff of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television (1965-1967) and wrote the report that became the basis for the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, from which public television began in America.
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Science Quotes by Stephen White (6 quotes)
For more than two years, ever since August 6, 1945, I have been looking at physicists as science writer for The New York Herald Tribune.
— Stephen White
The context of this quote makes it interesting. White had been a staff reporter at the newspaper since 1943. The day he became science writer is notable. The first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on 6 Aug 1945. The newspaper immediately responded to the need to provide information on science for the public’s interest stimulated by that event. (The newspaper also had to compete with the New York Times science reporter, William L. Laurence, who had been on the inside track at the Manhattan Project, and covered the news of the atomic attacks on Japan.) In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 15.
I have, also, a good deal of respect for the job they [physicists] did in the first months after Hiroshima. The world desperately needed information on this new problem in the daily life of the planet, and the physicists, after a slow start, did a good job of giving it to them. It hasn’t come out with a fraction of the efficiency that the teachers might have wished, but it was infinitely more effective than anyone would have dared expect.
— Stephen White
In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 15.
Physicists are people, differing from the common run of humanity only in that from time to time they tend to speak a strange language of their own, much of which they understand.
— Stephen White
In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 15.
Physicists are, as a general rule, highbrows. They think and talk in long, Latin words, and when they write anything down they usually include at least one partial differential and three Greek letters.
— Stephen White
In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 15.
The terminology of the layman is an absence of terminology; the precision of the layman is an accuracy of impression rather than an accuracy of specific fact.
— Stephen White
In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 33.
There may be some interest in one of my own discoveries in physics, entitled, “A Method of Approximating the Importance of a Given Physicist.” Briefly stated, after elimination of all differentials, the importance of a physicist can be measured by observation in the lobby of a building where the American Physical Society is in session. The importance of a given physicist varies inversely with his mean free path as he moves from the door of the meeting-room toward the street. His progress, of course, is marked by a series of scattering collisions with other physicists, during which he remains successively in the orbit of other individuals for a finite length of time. A good physicist has a mean free path of 3.6 ± 0.3 meters. The shortest m.f.p. measured in a series of observations between 1445 and 1947 was that of Oppenheimer (New York, 1946), the figure being 2.7 centimeters. I know. I was waiting for him on the street.
— Stephen White
In 'A Newsman Looks at Physicists', Physics Today (May 1948), 1, No. 1, 33.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
