I wish to add my congratulations to those of you newly elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Your scholarship and dedication to discovery are acknowledged by the largest and most eclectic scientific organization in the world. You join a distinguished group upon whom the AAAS depends for scientific leadership. I am here to urge you to provide a visible presence for science in our nation.

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I am Raymond L. Orbach, Director of the Office of Science, the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science appropriation for FY 2005 was $3.6 billion, supporting research across the scientific spectrum from high energy physics to biology and environmental research, from fusion energy sciences to nuclear physics, and from basic energy sciences to advanced scientific computation research. We provide more than 40% of all the federal funding for the physical sciences in the United States, and are the stewards of support for fields such as high energy physics, catalysis, and nuclear physics. We build and operate the large scientific facilities, used by over 19,000 faculty, students, and post-doctoral fellows each year. They include all the synchrotron light sources, the high energy and nuclear physics accelerators, the DOE Joint Genome Institute, the soon-to-be-completed Spallation Neutron Source, five nano-technology centers, a protein production and tagging facility, and an X-ray free electron laser light source. Roughly half of our budget goes to the construction and operation of these facilities; the other half to support research roughly equally between our ten national laboratories and universities, in support of about 23,500 students, postdocs, and faculty throughout our nation.

By now you have heard the news: the President has requested total FY 2006 Federal R&D funding to increase by ~1%, or $733 million, over FY 2005. The budget request for non-defense R&D spending would increase 0.75% over this year's budget. As the President’s Science Advisor, Dr. Jack Marburger, put it, "The budget is not flat, but pretty close." The Office of Science request for FY 2006, when Congressional directed projects are subtracted from the FY 2005 appropriation, is reduced by 1.6%. There is an 8% increase in NIST's core research activities, a 2.4% increase for NSF, a 2.4% increase for NASA, and a 1% increase for NIH. Congress will have to decide upon budget priorities within a tight fiscal discipline. The future years do not look much better as this nation works to pare the budget deficit to half its current value. How science will fare, both within the Administration and in Congress, depends on us, on you and me, and our ability to convince this nation of the importance of science.

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We are not without arguments to make this case. For me, they rest upon three pillars: economic growth, scientific literacy, and intellectual excitement. Each is a critical element for our society, and you contribute to all three.

Economic growth since World War II has depended upon contributions from science across the industrial spectrum. Fully 50% of that growth has arisen from developments easily attributable to the scientific enterprise. Although economists are loath to pin the precise number down, it is widely accepted that, as Nobel Laureate Robert Solow put it, “[T]echnology remains the dominant engine of growth, with human capital investment [that is to say education] in second place.” From his December 8, 1987 Nobel Prize lecture: “…Technological progress, very broadly defined to include improvements in the human factor, was necessary to allow long-run growth in real wages and the standard of living…. Gross output per hour of work in the U.S. economy doubled between 1909 and 1949; and some seven-eighths of that increase could be attributed to ‘technological change in the broadest sense’ and only the remaining eighth could be attributed to conventional increase in capital intensity…. The broad conclusion has held up surprisingly well in the thirty years since then… …[E]ducation per worker accounts for 30 percent of the increase in output per worker and the advance of knowledge accounts for 64 percent….”

Or, in other words, Science is good for you. Support of science, the basis of technological growth, is a necessary investment for fully two-thirds of economic growth, according to Solow. This message needs to be heard far and near. We are not asking for a handout. We are the fuel of economic prosperity for this country.

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Science provides much of our intellectual nourishment. The excitement of discovery, from relativity to quantum mechanics to genomics to cosmology, pervades not only our psyche but our very language. Quantum leap, chaos, uncertainty, relativity, the big bang, and even E=mc2 have all entered our modern vocabulary – though they tend to get misused or misunderstood. In National Science Foundation (NSF) surveys conducted since 1979, about 90 percent of U.S. adults report being very or moderately interested in new scientific discoveries and the use of new inventions and technologies. However, only half of NSF survey respondents knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs, that it takes the Earth one year to go around the Sun, and that electrons are smaller than atoms. Only one-third could adequately explain what it means to study something scientifically.

Scientific literacy is an essential task to which we must all contribute. The future of our society depends upon an understanding of the scientific method. Otherwise, we shall be bedeviled by quackery, and our ability to adapt to our rapidly changing technological environment will be at risk.

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We must never forget H.G. Wells' vision in The Time Machine of the world beyond. In Wells’ words, “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes.... It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble…. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”

We are certainly not without needs and dangers in this modern world. Yet it would seem that too many are giving in to the comfort and ease available today. The NSF survey found that most adults get their information about science from watching television. The primary objective of television is, of course, to entertain. All too often, programming fails to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Carl Sagan put it bluntly: “If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.” Yet, 42% of scientists do not engage in any form of public outreach. We must continue to confront scientific illiteracy, to press for the scientific method in place of superstition. This organization, the AAAS, has proven a powerful voice in that enterprise. The beauty of science, its import, and its logic have much to contribute to our national heritage. All of us are teachers. We must continue to show the way.

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That beauty manifests itself in our philosophy. Since the earliest humans first noticed the stars above us, we have longed to understand the heavens. They are still mysterious, but in the last century, we have substantially advanced our understanding. This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis in which he published three seminal works: on the Photoelectric Effect (for which he won the Nobel prize and which led to Quantum Mechanics), on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (Special Relativity), and on Browninan Motion (which I think of whenever I pour cream into my coffee).

This year has been designated the World Year of Physics in recognition of the centenary of Einstein's remarkable papers of 1905 which laid the foundations of so much of our modern science and technology. His papers on Special Relativity revolutionized our understanding of the relationship between matter and energy, and led eventually to General Relativity, his theory of gravity and space-time.

General relativity is a crowning achievement of the human mind, providing us with the deepest insight into the vast Cosmos which we inhabit and linking its structure and evolution with properties of the tiniest known components of matter, the quarks and leptons discovered in the latter half of the last century. Unifying General Relativity with quantum mechanics has become one of the great intellectual challenges of our time.

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I can’t help but focus on the recent excitement that has resulted from the one time Einstein was “wrong,” or rather “wasn’t wrong,” or rather was “mistaken about being wrong.” The “cosmological constant,” which he added to his theory of General Relativity, was regarded by him as “the biggest blunder of my life.” With the opposite sign, it was resurrected in 1998 to model an accelerating expansion of the universe with implications that push the matter and energy we know and see to a scant 5% of the energy budget of the universe.

In recognition of the World Year of Physics, the AAAS has organized an outstanding series of symposia and lectures tomorrow. They will trace the development and impact of Einstein's work up to the present day. One aspect I would like to emphasize is the tremendous impact of science and technology on our daily lives. Think of how we communicate with one another today, and compare it with Einstein's day. Think of how and with whom we do business: more and more, the world of commerce is becoming globally integrated.

We owe all of this to the fantastic advances in science that have occurred in the last hundred years, advances in basic science inevitably leading to major applications and technology. The World Year of Physics is giving us an opportunity to tell this story, not only about physics itself, but through its interaction with other sciences as well. I believe that we should continue to tell this story not only this year, but next year, and the year after, and the year after that.