To be fair it should be noted that Samuel Bodman, the current Secretary of Energy, is probably not a fool even though he doesn't have a nobel prize. He does hold an Sc.D. in chemical engineering from MIT and was a prof there, though this may be negated a bit by a long career in finance.
In 1965, he completed his ScD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the next six years he served as an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. But after 1972 he seems to have avoided any hands on work in the field focusing on:
"From there, Secretary Bodman went to Fidelity Venture Associates, a division of the Fidelity Investments. In 1983 he was named President and Chief Operating Officer of Fidelity Investments and a Director of the Fidelity Group of Mutual Funds. In 1987, he joined Cabot Corporation, a Boston-based Fortune 300 company with global business activities in specialty chemicals and materials, where he served as Chairman, CEO, and a Director. Over the years, he has been a Director of many other publicly owned corporations."
So clearly he is intelligent, has management experience, and a reasonable if dated science background, but WTF is he doing overseeing the department of energy?
I'm not totally sure that the talent set to win a Nobel Prize is the same as the talent set for being Secretary of Energy. I hope he's had some economics training.
I don't know, we haven't had much experience with actually qualified people holding positions of power near the highest office of the country. I see this as a minor triumph for meritocracy.
Smart people tend to be quick and adaptable learners, so the biggest problem I can see is him burning out because he has to work with the US bureaucracy.
What makes you think that a physics nobel qualifies Chu to be Energy secretary?
I'm reminded of the book "The Best and the Brightest" - it documents their failure.
In other news, the US energy problems are not technical in nature. Technologists tend to overstate the importance of technology, despite being surrounded by evidence that it isn't all that important.
