The NY Times today has a profile on Congress's 3 PhD physicists. Congressman Vernon Ehlers (R, Michigan), PhD, tells the NY Times that he has had to stop his Congressional colleagues from trying to cut funding for research on game theory and ATM - apparently some politicians thought that game theory is about sports, and that ATM in a science proposal really does stand for automatic teller machines. (In the particular case, ATM means Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a fiber-optic data transfer protocol).

The problem, these politician-physicists suggest, is not that members of Congress lack science knowledge (although they do lack it) - it's that they don't bother to ask for help on technical issues when they need it.

Representative Rush Holt, also a PhD physicist, said this: "We know more than our colleagues, but not more than they could know."

Most politicians lack the interest to ask questions about the science relevant to the legislation they are considering, according to these politician-physicists. So instead of asking questions, some politicians apparently just assume they know what game theory means and see it as a waste of research dollars. Compounding the problem of politicians' lack of interest in science, according to Rep. Ehlers, is the assumption that science will magically come up with the technical solutions we need, without any effort on Congress' part to be supportive.

Without funding for research on more efficient or alternative sources of energy, for example, scientists aren't going to magically come up with solutions. Members of Congress are elected to make decisions, while scientists are not. Politicians should have enough self-confidence in their role as decision makers to go get help from scientists when they need it.

Getting advice from an expert is not a commitment to heed that advice - ultimately, the decision still belongs to the politician. It doesn't matter whether a member of Congress last took physics (and failed it) in high school in 1953 - but it does matter if that member of Congress thinks it's not even worth getting scientific advice before making a decision.