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Robert L. (Bob) Park is
professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the
University of Maryland. For twenty years, research into the properties of
crystal surfaces occupied most of his waking hours, but in 1983 he was
recruited by astrophysicist Willie Fowler (who was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physics later that year) to open a Washington Office of the American
Physical Society. Bob initiated a weekly report of happenings in
Washington that were important to science, and with the development of the
internet, the weekly report evolved into the news/editorial column What's
New. For the next twenty years he divided his time between the University and the Washington Office. In 2003 he returned to the University full time. With the support of the Department of Physics of the University of Maryland, he continues to write the occasionally controversial What's New, which has developed a following that extends beyond physics. Dr. Park has also written two books based on his Washington experience: Voodoo Science: The Road from foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000) Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2008). |