The report that the public favors the economic stimulus package now before the congress shows how great is the popular understanding of complex issues. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp survey A slight majority of those surveyed, 54%, favor the bill while 45% are opposed. Sixty-four percent of those polled said the current bill being debated in the Senate would help the economy a lot or somewhat, while 36%  felt that the package would not help the economy much or at all.

A little later CNN released the results of another poll which showed that 52% of 1286 randomly chosen Americans thought that Friedmann’s equations decisively established an expanding universe. Only 28% were in favor of a static universe. The remaining 20% were either undecided or believed in non-standard cosmologies. A large majority, 85%, thought Einstein erred when he introduced the cosmological constant as a modification of his original theory of general relativity in order to achieve a stationary universe.

Soon to be released is a poll of Americans and Canadians which will ask whether the dual resonance model of string theory should be changed to to include any group of related superstring theories. They will also be asked if string theory should be ignored because it has not yet provided quantitative experimental predictions. Only Americans will be asked whether the current stimulus bills should include support for research on hadrons, 11 dimensional M theory, D-branes, quantum chromodynamics, and zero-dimensional horizons.

Vox populi