I accused John Pike of being a physicist in today's Fox column. Someone emailed me and asked me on what basis I did this. Doing a quick Google, I couldn't find any evidence that he has any degrees whatsoever, let alone a physics degree. Does anyone have any information on his CV?

AFAIK he doesn't have a degree in anything. He got his job because of political connections, not qualifications.

The problem is not that he doesn't have any degree, as highly educated people can be completely and totally wrong. It's that he's never demonstrated any capacity for productive, constructive work, especially in his self-proclaimed areas of expertise. He's just great at whining, self-promotion, selective use of the facts and an ability to "move on" when proven wrong.

(In case you can't tell, I have little respect for the guy, irrespective of his education. For me, if Pike says it, it's gotta be a half-truth at best. He's correct only by accident.)

I just read his bio on his own website.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/staff/pike.htm

Some of my favorites of his claims to fame include:

"Pike is widely noted for his ability to translate complex technical information into concise and pithy soundbites."
- No wonder Wired likes to quote him!

The bio is vague on educational background, but it does talk about where he got his start:

"Pike began his career as a political consultant and science writer."
- Aha! Now there's a source we can believe in!

Looks like a autobio, without a sanity check.

There was a minor hullabalo about 5 years ago about John Pike's not having a degree. The Weekly Standard had an item on it, which unfortunately I can't search for, having recently allowed my subscription to lapse.

But as you note, a degree is a poor predictor of whether a person has anything interesting to say.

Ken Silber
B.A., Economics & History, NYU '87

Well, what I was really trying to clarify, rather than whether or not he had a degree, was whether or not he should be considered a physicist. At this point, the evidence that he is, or ever has been, is pretty thin on the ground. I'll put out an erratum next week.

The secret to John Pike's success is that he is able to reinforce the prejudices of the liberal media in a style which is very presentable on TV. He has mastered the eight second sound byte while taking on a kind of professorial air which has tended to fool even his critics into thinking he has more credentials than he really does.

Ugh - this is so wrong on so many levels:

"And in 1994 he was named one of the 25 "Rising Stars Who Will Lead us into the Next Space Age" by the National Space Society's Ad Astra magazine."

Stone, a PhD mathematician from Stanford, acknowledged that his star staff member attended Vanderbilt but never got a degree. "I view him as the Edwin Land of our community – Land never graduated from Harvard. He was a great genius, and he didn't have time for college," Stone said. "John didn't have time for anything that didn't interest him. As opposed to working on lost causes, John works on things that are ripe for media attention – and he's been far more successful at managing the media than any scientist at FAS."

Pike

Ugh. There have been times I agreed with Pike, but the comment about X-33 completely shreds any remaining credibility he may have had. Yes, getting to orbit is a lot harder than suborbital, but NASA threw away the DC-X (while nowhere near complete, had working hardware) for the Lockheed pipedream. Evaluations I saw on it said that there HAD to have been a black project with most of the technology already developed. How could you expect to build something with an aerospike engine, structurally complex composite tanks, and advanced thermal protection, all virtually unknown outside a lab, in just a few years unless it had already been done ... somewhere? Of course, it hadn't been, and it didn't work. What we needed was high reliability, low maintenance hardware. That's the direction DC-X had been trying for. Not this piece of junk.

All:

Here's my own "pithy soundbite" on John Pike...I should put this on my website:

"John Pike is proof positive that any self-declared pundit can support himself these days on little more than the strength of a subscription to "Jane's All The World's (insert topic here)."

On a more serious note, I not only take issue with his total lack of credentials, as outlined above, but with the idea that he really *does* ever have anything particularly smart or noteworthy to say in the first place!

For example, when asked about the use of UAVs in Iraq and the possibility of developing UAVs with more autonomy, Pike said something like "Well, I'd be concerned about them going after targets we don't want them to once the man is out of the loop!"

OH REALLY JOHN?!?!! IS THAT THE CONCERN?!?!? THANKS FOR POINTING THAT OUT FOR US MISTER ENGINEERING EXPERT! WE WOULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT AS BEING THE ISSUE....DUH.

In fact, he sometimes actually misleads the public, as when he critiqued the failed results of a close-in, theater-missle defense test and implied directly they spelled doom for ICBM defense programs -- which rely on mostly different scales of physics and types of technology. I'm not saying ICBM defense can necessarily work, but it's wrong to mix apples and oranges to make one's politically-motivated point. I once questioned John Pike on this, and his reply can be paraphrased quite accurately as saying "what do you want? I had only 15 seconds to get a soundbite in!"

Somebody in this thread compared him to Edwin Land! I beg your pardon?!?! Edwin Land was the holder of more than 500 patents, founded the Rowland Institute of Science in 1960, etc. What has John Pike done except copy the web archive from the FAS web site when he left them and given a bunch of obvious quotes on cable news shows?

Face it guys, he's nothing but a libertarian who his own site professes is simply trying to fill some "independent, watchdog" function on the government...the Bush administration is getting enough attention in that area right now anyway.

What galls me is how once one of these self-professed experts gets into the media stream, they all borrow them from each other, figuring they've "gotta be" experts once SOMEBODY'S used them! It's a snowball effect...they should have a reality TV series wherein people jostle for pundit status in the interview offices of the major news outlets....

- Bill