Most voters trust themselves more than either Congress or President Obama when it comes to the economy, but they have way more confidence in themselves when it comes to the news media.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 85% of U.S. voters trust their own judgment more than the average reporter when it comes to the important issues affecting the nation. Only four percent (4%) trust the average reporter more. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

To me, this says two things: (1) Despite all the slander and misinformation spread by the media, Americans are not stupid—they know when someone is trying to push and nudge them in a direction they don’t want to go, and they resent it; (2) This is how a once respectable profession gets destroyed—through politicization and injection of overt bias in what is supposed to be professional work.

The collapse of mainstream journalism is something scientists should take notice from—it could happen to us. Some scientists think they know better than the John Q. Public. They think that they need “scare” the public into action, “for their own good.” They think they need to misrepresent their own work (you know, tweak a point here, hide some data there, to make, e.g. global warming seem more dire than it actually is, etc. etc.) so that the public will be duped into doing the “right thing”.

They are playing with fire, and its their reputation and credibility that’s going to burn, much as that of journalists has.

At least for the moment, the public trusts scientists in generic terms. Perhaps they take a step back on specific issues such as evolution or global warming, but in general, when a scientist speaks, they listen and trust. This should be more a note of caution than jubilee and abandon, for with great trust comes great responsibility—not to betray that trust.

But will scientists listen to this warning (I’m sure others have said this many times; at least Prof. Muller said a similar version at the colloquium earlier this semester), or will their ego make them hear without listening?

By using a laser beam to impose the quantum state of a molecular transistor, the research team demonstrated control of a second laser beam, which reflects the way in which a conventional transistor works.

“The next step is to ‘connect’ two or more [single-molecule optical transistors],” Pototschnig told us with regard to future areas the team will be focusing on. “In other words, we have to connect two molecules in a way that the quantum mechanical superposition state of each molecule is exchanged in a coherent manner. Only that way the strength of the quantum computing principles can be fully taken advantage of. We are in the middle of coming up with actual ways to implement the connection idea.”

I fail to see how this is different from normal and usual techniques (such as CPT and EIT, which involves two lasers (or more) acting coherently on three (or more) atomic levels) people have been using in AMO physics for a very long time. And I think at least for two decades or so (i.e. since the advent of laser cooling), people have been doing this stuff with single atoms (and maybe single molecules) in a cavity.

I mean, it’s one thing for some people to call these devices “optical switch”, in order to bring attention to the fact that, well, these effects can be used as optical switch (networks and communications people wouldn’t be as enthralled with words like “electromagnetically induced transparency” or “coherent population trapping”). But to claim that something that is little more than an optical switch is actually a “optical transistor”? That seems, well, irresponsible.

It’s a shame that this article didn’t actually link to the journal article supposedly published in Nature. Then I could see for myself whether this is yet another typical bad science journalism (for every good article I see in science and tech, I see at least 2 or 3 spectacularly bad ones), or if the author himself is, well, so isolated from the scientific community that he doesn’t know that he is simply reproducing what others have been doing for a long time—except, I guess, that he’s using a slightly more complicated molecule, maybe.

Edit: This article links to the journal in the references (found via Slashdot comments). You’ll need some kind of library subscription to see full article, but even the abstract shows that the authors of this article did consider other work in AMO physics using cooled/trapped atoms in cavities, and their work, presumably, represents a marginal advancement in these techniques. So, this is yet another case of bad, sensationalist journalism, where the so-called “journalist” tries to justify his salary by trying to paint a small-step improvement as some kind of other-worldly breakthrough (… that he happens to be covering).