Prelude
Some years ago the power line energy loss and its technical connection to Kirchhoff's laws were topic in an EU meeting. A small percentage loss must be taken into account and is unavoidable. So far, so good. But the word law triggered an EU official to state laws can be changed. The idea of physics being decidable by parliament is... at least ambitious. This had to do nothing with Direct observation of the violation of Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation (2023-07-24). The latter one is an interesting scientific observation.
DEI 2020
DEI is short for diversity, equity, and inclusion. At least in the US and in Canada it eventually became mandatory to file DEI statements in conjunction with scientific job and research grant applications. As The Hill reported in 2020, UC Davis in California used those statements to filter:
[...] Of those applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate.
In other words, UC Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. [...]
DEI 2025
Recently in the US: President Donald Trump started tabula rasa:
Shortly after his inauguration, United States President Trump issued an executive order that ordered the dismantling of “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.”
Lawrence Krauss, known to be far from being right wing or a Republican or dogmatic, supports canceling this nonsense on the Canadian side.
As DEI in American academia is being rolled back, Canada is grappling with a similar force. Here, DEI-related discrimination is actually much more severe than it ever was in the U.S. because it’s as long as the groups being discriminated against were the supposed perpetrators of discrimination in earlier times. So, university positions can legally be advertised as being off-limits to white males, for example.
Trump 2025
As the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports, US President Donald Trump is completely out of control.
Thousands of other federal scientists were similarly shocked over subsequent days as President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a massive, unprecedented, and chaotic wave of firings across the U.S. government.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are tens of thousands of workers affected by those decisions.
- Mass firings decimate U.S. science agencies (2025-02-18)
WP: Kirchhoff's circuit laws
WP: Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation
WP: Diversity, equity, and inclusion
WP: Lawrence Krauss