Ed Moses departs from Giant Magellan Telescope Organization:
The GMTO Board would like you to know that, effective immediately, Dr. Ed Moses
is on leave for substantial and significant family matters
that require his attention.
Dr. Moses will not return to GMTO. The GMTO Board thanks Dr. Moses for his
important service to the GMTO.
The GMTO Board has appointed Dr. Pat McCarthy as interim President and looks
forward to his leadership of the GMTO project.
A public statement will be made at a later date.
70 comments:
Big surprise. Bigger zero.
Smells fishy, no link and I cannot find any corroborating evidence that this is true.
Very sad news for those of us that know him personally. Nothing comes up on the GMT website, so news must be breaking today.
I call BS. The wording is not professional, and no organization like GMTO would send out something like that. There there is the fact that there is not a word about it anywhere except here. Someone is playing a "joke".
You are correct about the non-professional wording, "on leave, but not returning" Say what ??
Who posted this announcement ? Forum moderator, any comments !
Like a good LLNL manager, Ed is probably making enemies over there. Probably this is someone from the GMTO just lashing out. As long as Ed enjoys positional power over that project, he probably has nothing to worry about.
Hope he and his family is ok. We all have our differences, but we put them aside in times of need.
Moses or any of the sociopaths that become upper managers at the lab couldn't care less about an employee's family. You're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Get over it.
This is a fake report. Nothing at all on the gmto.org website. Format doesn't match their press and media releases. They always spell out "GMTO" at the beginning of their releases.
We may get clarification next week, otherwise this is a fake.
http://www.gmto.org/2015/07/leadership-change/
So there it is.
No one makes enemies faster than LLNL upper managers who are despised at the NNSA, command no respect outside of their sychophants at the lab, and posses poor leadership and communication skills. Moses is widely considered to be an idiot and a bully. Everything he has touched turned to failure - AVLIS, NIF, LIFE. His legacy will live on with the NIF high-foot "achievement" - obtaining 1% of predicted yield and propelling a mediocre golden boy into low-level fame.
Well there it is.
Agree with 6:38 PM, Moses did nothing but make enemies *except* with a handful of key people who enabled and empowered him because he kissed their asses. Miller was a key one, Lindl was another. That only worked in special circumstances, and only continued to work because he so totally controlled everything that he ensured he was indispensible. One it was discovered that he had no clothes, nor any protectors anymore (except the syncophants below him, who he accumulated), he was deposed without mercy.
I suspect he didn't get away with that at GMTO, and his arrogance and quickness to make enemies sank him. I don't believe the "family matters" reason, that's a standard graceful-exit for someone who's been fired.
Parney fell on his sword to get rid of him. The high foot experiments were enabled by Parney, but that was because of the the need to bring in more talent and disrupt the Lindl-Moses cabal.
Miller was crucial because of his connection to the weapons community. He once told people that he was spending 25% of his time as director promoting LIFE. Lindl was thrown under the bus in favor of high-foot golden boy who used to meet with Parney and Moses on a weekly basis. NIC was a disaster so they came up with this dead-end non-igniting design to save face and buy time. It worked and will probably be the focus of research for decades on NIF. Oh, and they get to make this "climbing Mt. Everest" analogy that equates golden boy with Sir Edmund Hillary.
Please read
http://www.gmto.org/2015/07/leadership-change/
Dr. Moses gets a very positive review from the GMTO organization. The last three rather stupid comments above on this blog from July 28th and 29th not withstanding.
Incidentally, I can't speak for AVLIS, but the NIF design, engineering and construction was a unquestioned success by those that are qualified to judge, and on the LIFE Project, substantial progress was made in understanding the optics and physics issues in designing a very large (384 beam) high average (20 MW) and high peak power (> 500 TW) laser system to operate in the UV for ICF.
NIF is a failure. It did not achieve ignition as planned. If you do not achieve your physics goals, that is failure, regardless of the engineering. Similarly, the EOS work has also been a failure on NIF, regardless of the best fabrication efforts of some.
As for LIFE, doing ignition capsules at 15 Hz was a joke. First, it was impossible. Second it could never be cost efficient to be a power plant. Again, physics goals could not be reached.
Is canceling LIFE stupid? That's what happened. NIF can't be cancelled because of the "fixed cost" argument.
Moses is widely despised. He's be thrown out of Forrestal for his behavior.
"NIF is a failure. It did not achieve ignition as planned"
Well we learned that ICF is really hard. Maybe requires a bomb to do it. And certainly not a cost efficient way to build a power plant in this century. I've seen estimates that the LIFE target costs would have to be less than $0.25/each for LIFE to be a competitive energy solution at the GW plant scale.
Should LIFE have been cancelled in 2012. Maybe, but only because NIF showed that ignition requires either more target precision or more laser energy than we could afford starting in the late '90s, early 2000's.
But as a conceptual design test bed for high-average power lasers and UV generation, the LIFE effort was well worth the cost to LLNL, in my opinion, and significantly advanced our knowledge.
This is what the "red pill" world thinks of Moses and LIFE:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2015/07/abrupt-move-president-giant-magellan-telescope-resigns
11 am is so dense, he can't read between the lines of the "very positive review from the GMTO organization".... (by the way, O already stands for organization) He also seems unaware of the spectacular failures Moses and Co. were responsible for. Yes, he was an effective project manager, but that's very different from being a visionary and strategic leader. And he was only effective with a great accompanying interpersonal price that most organizations can not pay. I guess GMTO wasn't willing to pay, even if LLNL was.
Previous post is dead on. Livermore does not have leaders, just people that exercise their positional power. They rely on sycophants and staff relations to get them through each day. The WCI leadership is miserable, consisting of one unqualified wash out after another. Moses typified the Livermore management style which has no place outside that square mile of irrelevance.
" “Under Ed’s leadership, the LIFE project damaged the reputation of the research field. It was premature and its timescale was unrealistic,” says Robert McCrory, director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester in New York."
Usual sour (New York) grapes. McCrory is jealous that his people where not working on the technology development for LIFE. LLE has tried to get into the high average power laser business for at least the last 20 years, but has been overshadowed by Aerospace and our latest developments at Livermore - many ideas of which come out of the LIFE project.
McCrory was dead-right, if the goal is not just to build lasers.
McCrory is not peanut-butter-and-jealous. He's right. By the way, LLE has some good scientists that are doing more that make sure high-foot golden boy gets good press.
I want to see this happen to every one of Livermore's upper management. They should try getting a job somewhere else, anywhere else, and see how long they last. Their positional power and ability to use their Gestapo agents in staff relations protects them. Outside of the lab where "leadership" is required they would be dead meat.
Does anyone remember Moses's attack dog's name while he was at LLNL? I forgot his name but I did have brief albeit unpleasant experience with him as I am sure many have. I also had an interesting, mind bending, experience with their underling Tietbohl.
I often wonder if these individuals ever realized just how little respect they had with their fellow coworkers.
I really doubt they care at all: That does not compute. Psychopaths do not have normal human ability to be swayed by emotions like remorse, or by the feelings of other people. Add in titanium egos and arrogance, and you have what passes in recent years for LLNL management, and what was embraced as NIF management style under Moses. That does not fly just about anywhere else, especially in an academic alliance like GMTO.
1:53 PM: Some (now former) lab leaders have done quite well indeed. Those that were smart enough to get our early...
Wikipedia has an excellent section on the Moses-Hurricane "break-even" scam:
A memo sent on 29 September 2013 by Ed Moses describes a fusion shot that took place at 5:15 a.m. on 28 September. It produced 5×1015 neutrons, 75% more than any previous shot. Alpha heating, a key component of ignition, was clearly seen. It also noted that the reaction released more energy than the "energy being absorbed by the fuel", a condition the memo referred to as "scientific breakeven".[104] This received significant press coverage as it appeared to suggest a key threshold had been achieved, which was referred to as a 'milestone'.[105]
However, a number of researchers pointed out that the experiment was far below ignition, and did not represent a breakthrough as reported.[106] Others noted that the definition of breakeven as recorded in many references, and directly stated by Moses in the past, was when the fusion output was equal to the laser input. In this release, the term was changed to refer to the energy deposited in the fuel, not the energy of the laser.[107] The method used to reach these levels, known as the "high foot", is not suitable for general ignition, and as a result, it is still unclear whether NIF will ever reach this goal.[108]
I doubt Moses would get such criticism if he were a woman.
A woman that built NIF would surely have received the Nobel Prize.
Anybody disagree?
A woman who did all the dishonorable, unethical and psychopathological things Moses did would get the same criticism. But that would be remarkably rare, I think. Women don't normally act like that.
LIFE was the failure of Tomas the Wanker. Moses signed on only because it was a strategic move to try to get more buy-in from the fusion research sponsors (didn't work) and give Moses more "story-telling" content to present. But the main con artist was Tomas, Ed did not see through the bull because he was blinded (as were all the physicists and engineers) by his own hubris as well as aspirations of nobel prizes and fame. They were all in groupthink mode which is Ed's contribution to all the failures.
Ed was fired. "family issues" was just a convenient cover in this case to help him save some face and avoid escalating any bad feelings.
The senior management of the lab believed in LIFE. We were told that LIFE would generate billions for the lab and eventually LIFE-like reactors would provide 50% of the world's energy.
Had the high-foot capsule shown more promise or ability to attain higher yields, LIFE would have stuck around.
Don't blame that malparido Tomas. ALL UPPER LEVEL MANAGEMENT BELIEVED IN AND PROMOTED LIFE, including the current head of WCI. This including trying to get money from the VC world. I believe many of these people thought they would be joining spin offs headed by Moses and Tomas. You could see the $$$ in their eyes when this was going on. I heard that Moses and Co. at one point were trying to get $5 billion in VC investment.
Also Parney and Moses wanted to personally run all HEDP facilities in the complex including ZR and Omega. They put in a proposal to the NNSA for their plan.
Big plans. Big failure.
Might be true, but surely not even Moses believed this garbage. The lab, like a fish, rots from the head down. Scientific objectivity and ethics matter.
Re 8/2 1:11pm: you are just making stuff up. Verdon never supported LIFE. He may have stayed quiet since Miller was a supporter, but that all. Tomas took credit for LIFE, but Ed ran with it. Tomas was a Moses sycophant. Parney never submitted a plan to run all HEDP facilities, and he never put in a proposal to NNSA to do that. He did propose a change in NIF governance, and that was eventually put in place. And he was the guy who started the cuts to LIFE, and ordered Ed to stop talking about it. I don't understand why posters to this blog just decide to make things up. Remember when someone posted that Ed had been frog marched off the property? There is plenty of ridiculous things to post that are based on fact and not fantasy.
staying quiet = implicit support. Though upper management was in fact uniformly and explicitly supportive long before the alpha heating debacle. There were no upper mgmt dissenters, not openly. And coming around AFTER the milestone failure to say "I told you so" is just monday morning quarterback scumbagging on the part of any pos jerk off upper mgmt who is just trying to make a cheapshot power play to consolidate their authority.
Yeah this blog attracts all sorts of riduckulous rumors like the one about Moses removed from his position at GMTO for "family matters." People should be more truthful about the actual details.
All this obsession about Moses is just curious. I didn't think he was that attractive.
By the way, Moses encouraged people to read this rumors blog.
What do you think about that?
The man kicked me out of a seat in a conference room once and I've been butt hurt ever since. True story.
8:57 pm, I think he loves publicity that strokes his ego, good or bad. A lot like Donald Trump, who Ed would probably get along very well with.
Hay don't "diss" The Donald. He has done a great job inspiring and education his children for success in their personal and professional lives. I attended an afternoon seminar given by daughter Ivanka. She recounted how she and her siblings were raised in a very strict household and challenged to be excellent in every endeavor. She proceeded to give a detailed presentation on systems engineering in the hotel construction business that would equal the best presentations I attended on large projects at the national labs. It's a shame that Ivanka is not running Trump's national campaign.
"The man kicked me out of a seat in a conference room once and I've been butt hurt ever since. True story."
Yes we know who you are. You got the "high foot". The "low foot" would have hurt more.
It's not a good thing that Ed did that to you, but many of us also wanted to attend that meeting (that were not invited), so we had to walk away when the room was packed. I don't think Ed's kicking you out was personal.
Sorry,
the "high foot" would have hurt more than the "low foot" !
Next time bring gum for everybody.
It hurts to read any of the "high-foot" papers.
You guys at LLNL at all about yourselves. Get a LIFE.
What happened to the Equation of State (eos) fiasco Livermore?
Moses typified the Livermore management style which has no place outside that square mile of irrelevance.
July 29, 2015 at 3:30 PM
Yup. How many of you remember his eminence Dr. Lowell Wood?
Lowell Wood's nickname was the "round mound of sound".
As far as the EOS fiasco is concerned. Livermore never retracted the 6-fold compressed D2 papers, even after the results had been disproven by Sandia Z machine experiments.
A more recent disaster was the diamond ramp wave work. For about a decade, LLNL claimed it was getting ramp wave data just as good, or better, than the Z machine. They used a diamond as an ablator to drive tantalum, for instance, to high pressure. In these experiments they claimed they saw a phase transition at about 3-4 Mbars. Again, just like the D2 work, this was disproven on Z. After an internal review, it was concluded that diamond had failed as an ablator material and there were other problems. One of these problems was the fact that laser driven shock work cannot be modeled. Another problem is that the technique is not really ramp loading as large shocks are introduced into the sample.
Some of the results and conclusions are described here:
http://www.trivalleycares.org/new/Path%20to%20High-Z%20on%20NIF%20-%20A%20Working%20Group%20Summary%206-13-2013.pdf
All this doesn't matter, of course. NIF is a big ticket item with tons of sunk costs. It will continue indefinitely.
Makes one wonder how they figure on using NIF for programmatic weapons work when their EOS is all bad. Is 420 legal in Calif?? Because someone high up in WCI must be smoking some J.
Verdon supporting the NIF EOS work is far worse than his support for LIFE. LIFE was a crapshoot contingent on ignition but EOS is supposed to be their bread and butter. To get that wrong is truly shameful. He should be embarrassed.
The only thing that NIF has been useful for is a background scene in a Star Trek movie.
The EOS disaster isn't as bad a the Moses-Hurricane break even scam.
Some of the LLNL manufactured press is truly nauseating, particularly the Mount Everest comparison:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/experimental-highlights
This self-congratulatory comment was in Popular Mechanics:
But with our bootstrapping breakthrough, we actually swung the pendulum the other way. When I originally published the paper on it, the paper's reviewers actually thought I was downplaying our findings too much. But I think it was the right thing to do, and even our critics said, wow, it looks like they've made some real progress and are also embracing a cultural change.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a10297/has-fusion-finally-solved-its-hype-problem-16675762/
They had to say that stuff, and Omar did exactly what he was supposed to do: Change the conversation, and show some sort of progress without the old Moses/Lindl/Edwards troika pulling the carriage. So now there is money, Moses is gone and mostly disgraced, Lindl is in exile, Edwards is sent back to weapons in a diminished role, and other people are running the show. Perfect recipe for a recovery from the NIC disaster, if it holds together.
I guess that's why the head of the Sandia pulsed power program voted with his feet and went to Livermore to become NIF director. Under the astronaut, of course.
Moses typified the Livermore management style which has no place outside that square mile of irrelevance.
July 29, 2015 at 3:30 PM
Yup. How many of you remember his eminence Dr. Lowell Wood?
August 6, 2015 at 4:13 AM
Is Bruce "God"win still at LLNL?
Lowell Wood is a smart guy, he could be called on the save the planet ! I'm not joking.
July 29, 2015
Why is Adam Rowen no longer the manager of the Materials Chemistry department at Sandia National Laboratories? does not have a Ph.D. ?
Ed did real and lasting damage to GMT in his short time there. It will be interesting to see what GMT does to recover, if it can.
GMT needs money right now, more than anything. Ed was pretty good at rounding up money in DOE world at least, so he must have done a lot of internal damage to the GMT effort to offset that and drive them to fire him anyways.
"Ed did real and lasting damage to GMT in his short time there."
Any evidence to back up that assertion other than hearsay ?
Maybe its not as easy to bring in GMT funding as it was to drain or subsidize NIF on the backs of other LLNL programs, or is that hearsay too?
In the immortal words of some unnamed prophet, "the cheese stands alone."
As Tomas Dias de la Rubia once said (before his firing):
"In queso emergency, I pray to cheeses"
Why was Tomas fired, or were the terms of his departure just speculation?
As Tomas Dias de la Rubia once said (before his firing):
"In queso emergency, I pray to cheeses"
August 17, 2015 at 5:23 PM
Ai cabron Rubia!
"Ed did real and lasting damage to GMT in his short time there."
Within the first three months of Eds arrival three of the original GMT staff had left. Two other staff members that had been with GMT for four years also left. Some retired but all left due to changes Ed instituted that showed little respect for the GMT staff or any understanding of telescope design or observatory operations.
The experience lost will be hard to replace as these people each had perhaps 20 years of experience in telescope design and construction and had a deep understating of the design and proposed operations of GMT.
The changes to the telescope and operations plan that Ed produced will need extensive review if they are kept. The original design had already been through a number of reviews.
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