We live in a highly competitive technological world, in which science has assumed a major role. However, public school funding is mainly based on the average attendance in all classes - not on core academic programs. As a result, classes for easy credits have seriously damaged science education. The number and quality of science courses in public schools have been greatly decreased. This causes the loss of scientific know-how and skilled personnel in the most important fields of technology and medicine.

A century ago, instead of careful analysis of the systematic errors, scientists accepted a temporary solution to explain why the earth appears not to rotate around the sun in the Michelson-Morley experiments. Because many prominent physicists, including Michelson, have opposed this temporary solution, there is an attempt to politicize this scientific issue. Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of a broader problem and carries a warning that we ignore at our own peril.

Short-term solutions, which would be very expensive to correct, are now commonly implemented; these include time/memory consuming operating systems – a major factor in electronic hazardous waste increase, gravitational theory, which does not lead to attraction between material bodies, and inherently unsafe nuclear reactors. Such a reactor is the Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR) - a key element of the New Nuclear Initiative. In addition to being very expensive and requiring decades to develop, the ABR could lay the groundwork for a Chernobyl type disaster.

In order to address the need in educational changes, the WETC will create a science laboratory based extensively on commercial equipment available almost at any school. For example, a TV satellite dish will be used for radio astronomy observations and a cathode ray tube to analyze the passage of particles through matter. Prototypes of many important experiments and designs could be made with such apparatus. Unlike the earth-orbiting GPS clocks, cosmic masers can serve as natural frequency standards for many applications without fear of terrorist attacks. Since multiple scattering of muons is selective to high-Z materials, muon’s radiography or lifetime measurement systems could be used for the detection of explosive or nuclear material.

The educational program consists of class meetings and group projects. Our first project in ultrasonic NDE of composites developed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory has received a NASA award and U.S. patent. A control system concept based on this multiplexed ultrasonic technique would play an essential role in the hydrogen production unit design. A next project is quasi-digital educational radio telescope for continuum and spectral line (18 and 21cm) observations.