So the other day I was reading in the news an article about a group of Scientists who call themselves The Jasons losing their government contracts.
Here is the link:
A secretive group of scientists who advise the U.S. government on everything from spy satellites to nuclear weapons is scrambling to find a sponsor after the Defense Department abruptly ended its contract late last month.
The group, known as the Jasons, will run out of money at the end of April. The Pentagon says that the group’s advice is no longer needed, but independent experts say it has never been more relevant and worry the department is throwing away a valuable resource.
From here we were lead to their Wikipedia page:
For administrative purposes, JASON’s activities are run through the MITRE Corporation, a non-profit corporation in McLean, Virginia, which operates seven Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) for the Federal Government of the United States.
The founders of JASON include John Wheeler and Charles H. Townes. Other early members included Murray Gell-Mann, S. Courtenay Wright, Robert Gomer, Walter Munk, Murph Goldberger, Hans Bethe, Nick Christofilos, Fred Zachariasen, Marshall Rosenbluth, Ed Frieman, Hal Lewis, Sam Treiman, Conrad Longmire, Steven Weinberg, Roger Dashen, and Freeman Dyson.
MITRE Corporation
Wikipedia
Under the leadership of C. W. Halligan, Mitre was formed in 1958 to provide overall direction to the companies and workers involved in the U.S. Air Force SAGE project. Most of the early employees were transferred to Mitre from the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where SAGE was being developed.
SAGE
Wikipedia
The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SAGE directed and controlled the NORAD response to a Soviet air attack, operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s.
SAGE became operational in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a combined cost of billions of dollars. It was noted that the deployment cost more than the Manhattan Project, which it was, in a way, defending against.
In 1966, SAGE communications were integrated into the AUTOVON Network.
AUTOVON
Wikipedia
The Automatic Voice Network was a worldwide American military telephone system. The system was built starting in 1963, based on the Army’s existing Switch Communications Automated Network (SCAN) system. In June 1966 the Air Defense Command voice network was cut over to the new service. In 1969, AUTOVON switching centers opened in the United Kingdom, and later in other European countries, Asia, the Middle East, and Panama.
Murray Gell-Mann
Edge.org profile
MURRAY GELL-MANN is a theoretical physicist; Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology; winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics; a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, where he is a professor and cochairman of the science board; a director of the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation; one of the Global Five Hundred honored by the U.N. Environment Program; a member of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology; author of The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.
Wikipedia
Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.
The Santa Fe Institute
Wikipedia
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems.
Freeman Dyson
Edge.org profile
FREEMAN DYSON, now retired, has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public.
Wikipedia
Freeman John Dyson FRS (born 15 December 1923) is a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He is known for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering.[7][8] He originated several concepts that bear his name, such as Dyson’s transform, the Dyson tree, the Dyson series and the Dyson sphere.
