Could raining food willy nilly on the survivors of last week's devastating earthquake be a better way to help starving Haitians than an organized food drop?

On Monday the Department of Defense started dropping food in large boxes on cargo pallets with parachutes in a field northwest of the Port-au-Prince airport. The U.S. soldiers there tried to control the release of the food. Days before, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that dropping food indiscriminately without a central authority to distribute it would be "a formula for contributing to chaos rather than preventing it."

But that's just what physicist and scientific polymath Bill Wattenburg, formerly of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, thinks the military should do. He recalls how in the 1990s in Bosnia and Afghanistan the military distributed individual Humanitarian Daily Rations (known as HDR's) and 4-ounce water packets by simply dumping them out the back of cargo planes in cardboard boxes. The boxes opened in mid-air (the military called it "fluttering") and the plastic containers fell like gentle rain on the hungry population, which scooped them up.

There's a tiny chance that people on the ground could be hit by the food, Wattenberg concedes. His experiments suggest that the soft packages could "cause a bruise" after falling at a speed of 60 to 80 miles an hour. "But these people are dying of hunger," he says.

"It never happened in Bosnia, or in Afghanistan. If they want to save tens of thousands of lives, you have to do this," he adds.

Aided by physicists Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley, and Richard Garwin of IBM, Wattenberg has been calling everyone he knows in Washington to urge the Pentagon to change its strategy. Wattenburg says Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) has been receptive to the idea. The scientists's argument is simple: Sending large shipments of food to single places encourages "thugs" to steal and sell it, and distributing the massive packages puts soldiers in harm's way by requiring them first to maintain order.