i agree, though it could just be shyness (it is often mistaken as other things).
i really didn't get anything from this docu, if he was going to attempt presenting one why didn't he do one on his area of expertise, particle physics (though when he did talk about that kind of thing here he seemed to find it hard stringing two words together!)

there's a list of his papers here for proof that he probably is a really good physicist:
http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+AUTHOR+COX,%20Brian+AND+EPRINT+hep-ph

I won't pretend to know a damn thing about particle physics, but I can't wait for the outcomes of these experiements.

"How can you talk about what "we" should do over a few thousand generations when we only live one life?"

Just saying we should realize our limited part in those generations. What we do effects what they'll do.

As far as freaking out, you get that when you jump into the water not knowing how to swim. I study particle physics for fun and that gets me to at least a dog paddle. Even Quantum theory doesn't freak me out as much when I learned the basics and see how it's used practically. On the emotional side, knowing where you stand helps. As simple and humble as your position may be, it is your position and nothing in the universe can take that away.

Reminds me of the a third world guy talking to this reporter. The reporter asked him who he was and he told him his name. Then the reporter asked him what proof he had as to who he was, (the article was about how 3rd worlds have no ID cards etc). The guy just looked at him like he was an idiot and said, "I'm standing right in front of you! What could be more proof than that?"

yes, that was done by Fred Niell ( http://www.niell.org/ ) who, amazingly, won the International Science and Engineering Fair in the 90's by actually building a cylotron in his garage! ( http://www.niell.org/cyc2.html ) If you saw "Stephen Hawking's Universe" in '97 on BBC or PBS, that was also him doing the linac demo (at 8:00 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRThXjIMo0A ). He did advanced particle physics research at Fermilab and then just sort of dropped off the face of the earth a few years ago. He does have a flickr account though.... http://www.flickr.com/photos/99408389@N00/page3/

Good post codenazi. I totally agree with the pro nuclear people here.

I'd like to dispel the anti-nuclear argument that there is not that much uranium in the earth to sustain nuclear power for a long time. This is bullcrap. The cost of electricity from a nuclear plant is almost completely unrelated to the price of uranium. That it, the process is much more expensive than the raw uranium. The uranium prices can increase 10 fold and we would barely notice it in the energy price. When the price of uranium increases new reserves can be tapped. Also there hasn't been nearly as much uranium exploration as oil exploration so there's tons of the stuff still to be found. Also there are scientist working on extracting uranium from the ocean which would give us all the uranium we could ever need in the foreseeable future.

Then there's Chernobyl which as been stated was just a complete cock-up and bad design. However the effects of the event were nowhere near the magnitude reported by scaremongers like greenpeace.

http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/nuclearsafety/colloquiumNovember2006website.pdf
"Professor Wade Allison of Oxford University (a lecturer in medical physics and particle physics) gave a talk on ionising radiation 24 Nov 2006 in which he gave an approximate figure of 81 cancer deaths from Chernobyl (excluding 28 cases from acute radiation exposure and the thyroid cancer deaths which he regards as "avoidable"). In a closely reasoned argument using statistics from therapeutic radiation, exposure to elevated natural radiation (the presence of radon gas in homes) and the diseases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors he demonstrated that the linear no-threshold model should not be applied to low-level exposure in humans, as it ignores the well-known natural repair mechanisms of the body."

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. The ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1800 physicists (Including 400 students) participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 35 countries.
Visit http://atlas.ch for more information.

Episode 1 is listed below. This episode is in two parts, YouTube has part 2 here

from YouTube:
"ATLAS is a particle physics experiment that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. The ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1800 physicists (Including 400 students) participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 35 countries.
Visit http://atlas.ch for more information."