Evaluation of an unknown person through listening to him speak.

 

 

I tuned in to NPR mid-September, 2002, and chanced upon an interview in progress. It was not an antagonistic interview—that is, the interviewer was not making the least attempt to challenge his interlocutor, or to oblige him to defend his views or positions from an even mildly adversarial confrontation. Rather, the interview was a friendly one; indeed, the relative positions of the interviewer and the interviewee were those of a student and teacher, or acolyte and guru. The questions were soft ball opportunities for the person being interviewed to hold forth in his opinions. This sort of interview is marginally useful to enable a listener more clearly to comprehend the positions taken by a subject since ideally he may organize and expand upon his thesis without interruption. However in this case it was not useful in that there was usually little in the way of coherent or logical argument presented; since there was no challenge, the subject meandered at will.

As to this particular interview, I was unfamiliar with both voices, recognizing neither man. I was familiar, however, with the positions taken. They were left-radical chic.

The interviewer would ask such questions as “Is the problem with Western culture (i.e., America) systemic?” and his professorial subject would slowly, carefully, in a rather becoming hesitating manner and a resonant, aged voice hold forth at some length on that topic. He was interesting to listen to; he kept it simple. After a while, I could see a rhetorical pattern: he would begin on the path, so to speak, and then veer off in a circuitous diversion that from time to time would cross, intersect or veer tangent to the main path. He would do this “loop about a line” pattern for a while, not saying much but rather effortlessly talking around the topic and finally come back to the interview by making a point, a statement, or an opinion, and then stop. For example, to the question posed above, he meandered over a rather large amount of terrain, making several egregious accusations of conscious, deliberate, vicious perfidy on the part of America in general, Americans as a group, and certain segments of the American population (businessmen mostly) in particular, and then he abruptly ended with the flat statement a propos of little in the preceding monologue, “Yes, it is the profit motive”, “it” being the problem presumably. Now, any well educated economist of any school will tell you that the profit motive by itself is morally neutral at worst, and at best is historically accreted with moral strictures culturally or legislatively applied, but none of that made its way into the monologue.

For, you see, there was no argumentation in any of this interview. There was no rational logic here, no statement followed by evidence, point or counterpoint, alternative view or even a stalking horse to demolish. There was only this: an ability to articulate simply and elegantly common beliefs and misconceptions in a compelling way, combined with a long and ready list of accusations of bad behavior on the part of my ancestors. There was nothing logical or even scholarly about it, but consisted of elegant circumlocutions followed by an unsupported opinion or a mere common assumption, often provably erroneous—but with nobody present to point out the error. Anyone seeking understanding would have found only a severe disjunction between reality and rhetoric—in other words, faulty opinions stated as fact.

My judgment after a while was that this was no great or even good mind at work, no profound thinker at all but a huckster, a pandering rhetorician.

Only at the end of the interview did I learn that the identity of this guy was Howard Zinn.

So of course I immediately corrected my opinion, to bring it into line with that of my academic colleagues, for whom Mr. Zinn was massively articulate: I now stand corrected, and have been much happier for all these succeeding years.

 

 

The story of the astronauts who were stranded.

 

 

This is the story of the astronauts who were stranded in the space station after Challenger blew up. Upon hearing of the loss of seven of his friends and colleagues, one of the astronauts—who have reputations for being all business—actually did break down in tears. And in the weightlessness, tears don’t fall, they just puddle up and flood the eyes; he shook his head to clear his eyes and the tears floated around next to his face and head. It was a surreal and sorrowful moment.

There were two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut. They realized that the shuttle would be grounded for a long time—a year, perhaps two—and ground control said as much, telling them that they’d have to stay for the long haul. So they undertook a path of making the best of it—making the space station “home”. Yet, meanwhile, the ground crew were cudgeling their brains for a way to get them back to Earth. So the two parts of the mission were on two different paths.

Finally, ground determined that they should use the Russian Soyuz that was docked on the space station like a life boat. These non-reusable craft are crude and even while not in use (i.e., tethered to the ISS) have a rather short shelf life. This one was approaching its useful life’s end so the decision quickly emerged to use it now rather than to leave the men in space for another year.

There is a peculiarity to the Soyuz which reflects its totalitarian (Soviet) origins: once launched, neither ground control nor flight crew have any control over the thing; it is entirely automated. Also of note is that the US hectored the Russians to at least update the computers but even those were not flight tested …how could they be? The Soyuz being a one-off one way unit!

The Soyuz is also very small, tighter than the Apollo. It will hold three, but in small, cramped plastic bucket seats with the knees drawn up to the chest—a bad posture indeed for the purpose.

But away they went. Orbited Earth a couple times and then the retro-rockets fired automatically. But they fired late—by about a second. Not something that a passenger would notice, but it put the Soyuz in a flight path the problem of which I’m not clear on. I don’t know if the late ignition put them in an attitude that would make the Soyuz “skip” off the atmosphere like a flat rock on a pond, and carom back into space; or if it just meant that the eventual descent to earth would be into the Indian Ocean or something dreadful like that. Soyuz are not supposed to “splash” down. They are not designed to float. They are designed to smack into the ground, not the water.

So far, nobody knew there was a problem because the capsule has no readouts for the passive passengers to look at; and Russian ground had no telemetry, or radio, or anything except some sort of animated illustration on a screen. One astronaut by the window, and the Russian in center seat by now were remarking that there certainly did seem to be a lot of flame coming off the heat shield. Suddenly the Soyuz’s computer realized the error and automatically fired the “Go Down Now” rocket. This is the emergency back up. It was like being fired out of a shotgun, straight down at the steppes of Kazakhstan.

The G-forces mounted. Now, here these guys are, having spent about a year in zero gravity; they are not in the same top physical shape they were in when they left Earth. They are in a weakened condition. And now they are hurtling toward Earth and both rocket thrust and natural gravity are increasing. The Russian amused himself by counting up the G-forces as they mounted: 2 Gs, 3 Gs, 4, 5… In the end they had nearly 8 Gravities pressing on them—at least a thousand pounds. They could feel their tongues falling back into their throats, their rib-cages being compressed by their doubled-up knees, unable to breathe, the blood pooling in the backs of their skulls, hard to stay conscious. This went on for a very long time.

Then the parachute deployed, and they got some relief while the capsule swung on its tether and lost much of its frantic speed. Eventually it hit terra firma with a resounding smash—bone jarring, I would think. The Russian was slow to sever the ‘chute connection and the wind of the steppe grabbed it and pulled the capsule over onto its side. They lay there for a while feeling gravity and looking out the downward-facing window at the green grass beneath, and out the upward-facing window at the blue sky. Finally the Yanks prevailed on the Russian that they should open the hatch and they crawled out onto the sweet smelling, sun-warmed steppe of Central Asia. With not a thing in sight.

Meanwhile, Russian ground control was trying to calm down the head of NASA who was there for the landing. Except there was NO landing. “They’ll be here in just a moment!” they said but the minutes turned into hours and eventually it was assumed that the Soyuz was lost and her crew killed. The second catastrophic event for NASA—doubtless would mark the end of the American space program for years. Much gloom and grief.

Meanwhile, our plucky space boys have had enough of laying in the fragrant grass on their backsides staring into the Space they’ve just left. The Yanks, that is. Not the Russian. He didn’t want to be the one knuckle-head actually doing anything unauthorized when the retrieval crew showed up. He had absolute totalitarian faith (or actually, fear of not demonstrating faith) in the system.

But the system had NO idea where they were or even if they were alive. So the Yanks started doing stuff. One set out to turn the parachute into a tent for the night. The other crawled back into the Soyuz to hoik out a beacon and its antenna and set it up—got its aerial pointed up at a satellite orbiting even farther away than the Space Station they’d just left, and bounced a signal off of it—by following the Cyrillic directions that came with it!

In the meantime, the Russian did get in the spirit of things—he dug out the double-barreled sawed-off shotgun from under the seat and fired off flares and loads of buckshot in a futile effort to signal their presence—in an area not only devoid of any human life, but of any human presence in the last hundred years. (The shotgun, by the way, was standard issue for the Russians after an early Soyuz went down off-target into a forest and the cosmonauts had to abandon their fire and retreat back into the cramped and cold capsule after wolves approached too aggressively…. Gotta love them Russians!)

Soon a rescue plane—actually a search jet—heard the beacon and used it to home in on the trio. So contact was made and Russian ground and NASA notified, much to the relief of the grieving wives one might assume. But it was another four hours before the helicopter could get to them and pick them up. Four hours. They were, as it happened, hundreds of miles away from their landing point, in the middle of one of the most remote areas on the planet. They had come from one of the most high-tech environments ever devised by man; they were in constant, intimate contact with their colleagues and REMFs on the ground. Now they were slammed into an area that had NO technology at all, in any direction for several days’ march. They used their four hours to come to terms with their successful return, their peaceful location, which despite its remoteness felt very much like home, in contrast to the Space Station circling but a few hundred miles above, and coming to terms with their imminent return to what by now was a Vodka-induced uproar back at Russian ground control and the press of the press, and all that. The spotlight. But they lived through it.

Cool story, huh!

A short history of the science of astronomy.

 

There is an old joke regarding the structure of the universe. A student asked a wise person what carried the world through space. The answer was that the world rested on the back of an enormous tortoise. When the student asked, “What does the tortoise walk upon?” the answer was, “Another tortoise.” When the student inquired further as to what that tortoise walked upon the reply came, “Silly boy, it is tortoises all the way down.”

We really don’t know when people began to notice the night sky at all, let alone observe it systematically. By the time prehistory was transitioning into the historical era (that is, with the invention of writing), a great deal of observation was being passed down orally regarding the movement of the heavenly bodies including the sun and the moon and the fixed points of light and the wandering points of light (there were five of them, apart from the moon and the Sun), that all had their separate cycles during the day and the night, during the months and the year, and that they coincided with the seasons of the year somehow.

Humans were able to increase the systematic study of these phenomena with the advent of writing about 6,000 years ago, although it is the case that some astronomical records are preserved from stone-age, preliterate cultures in the form of pictures on cliff faces. There is even a stone observatory at Fajada Butte in the Four Corners area of the US, date unknown. Like the much larger Stonehenge (c. 2500 BC), it was accomplished without writing, and erected in stone. It throws spears of light from the sun and moon upon spirals pecked into a cliff face behind it. The glints of light mark the solstices and equinoxes, and the 19-year lunar cycle. This stone observatory is an even more sophisticated bit of stonework than Stonehenge, by the way, for it measures the solstices and equinoxes not at sunrise and sunset but at high noon which is a much more difficult engineering problem. So it is not absolutely necessary for a culture to have writing in order to advance a long way in the study and measurement of the cycles of the heavens. But writing does give an advantage.

Mesopotamian cuneiform writing was used to record astronomical observations—there is a clay disk with writing along angled lines and constellations scribed into it, for example, which is an obvious star chart.

Observers in China and India were not far behind them. The Babylonians were the first to be able to predict eclipses, which if you think about it is a pretty sophisticated bit of observation, but it requires only observation of the two largest bodies in the sky—the sun and the moon—a great deal of continuous observation, record keeping, and patience.

The Babylonians were also able to use their observations to create a calendar much like the one we use today.

Primarily, however, the sky and the movements of the lights in it were objects of reverence, and people’s observations were largely translated into a set of religious beliefs, practices and customs, as well as the planting and harvesting of crops. All through this long period from prehistory through the advent of writing and record keeping, the main assumption was that the Earth remained stationary and all the heavens including the Sun revolved around the Earth at the center. This is the Earth-centered, or geocentric model of the universe. This was the obvious interpretation of all the observable cycles; it held throughout millennia. But that was about to change.

About 2000 years ago, at about 300 BC during the Greek Seleucid Empire, Babylonian astronomers achieved the pinnacle of their studies. (Let us stop here a moment. The implication—the reality—is that after this pinnacle, there was a decline. Progress is not the norm in the world. Flows and ebbs are the norm. You and I have been fortunate to live in a period of flow, of increase in knowledge, capacity and wealth, but if the lessons of history apply to us as they have to our ancestors, our own period will (not may, but will) be followed by a period of decline. Much will be lost. Your future progress is not assured. Enjoy.)

During this apex of Seleucid astronomy, someone dug up an old record from an earlier Greek period, an old guy named Philolaus from around 400 BC. This Greek thinker had suggested that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, but he could not figure out what was and so his theory languished. During the Seleucid era, a guy named Aristarchus, who was from the Greek island of Samos, started with Philolaus’ idea and, combined with his own astronomical observations, made the suggestion that the Sun was at the center of the universe, and the Earth circled around it. This is the heliocentric theory. Not only that, but Aristarchus also was able to figure out that the wandering points of light—the planets—also circled the sun just like the Earth did. What’s more, he was able to put the five visible planets in their proper order. This was about 300 BC. The Babylonian Seleucus found Aristarchus’ model to make the most sense, but neither man could overcome the nearly universal resistance to this revolutionary idea, and it not only fell from favor, it fell into obscurity. More famous Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle who preceded Aristarchus, and the Egyptian Greek Ptolemy who succeeded him, assumed the geocentric model and for two millennia the world including the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church continued in error.

Just to give you some context, Columbus, when he sailed, believed this model.

It wasn’t until the first quarter of the 16^th century, in 1514 to be exact, that the heliocentric model re-emerged into the thoughts of astronomers. The first was Nicolaus Copernicus from Poland. He had come across the writings of Aristarchus and those, combined with his own observations, led him to propose a clearly demonstrated sun-centered model. He wrote this out for himself, and shared it with only a few friends. He knew that were he to challenge the Church-sponsored Earth-centered model, he would be accused of heresy and forced to recant, or be executed if he did not. His paper languished in obscurity for 30 years until, close to death and more or less no longer subject to the tender mercies of the Vicar of Christ, he published the work, and so started what we now refer to as the Copernican Revolution, probably the most important contribution of the era.

The Church was slow to react. Copernicus passed on, and his paper, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, circulated narrowly among the few who could comprehend his science. Sixty years later, however, the Church was forced to respond to this fundamental challenge. By this time, new advances had extended to the science of optics, and in about 1608 the fabulous contraption known as the telescope was invented (nearly a century after Copernicus). At first, this instrument was used by traders and speculators keeping watch from the hillsides and towers overlooking the Italian port cities, watching for the arrival of cargo ships. The telescopes gave them advance notice of impending arrivals, and through coded flags the amount and nature of the cargoes, and thus an advantage over those who were watching with eyes only. We probably should not be either surprised nor offended that this important instrument was used at first to make money in commodity markets rather than to advance science, but so it was.

In any case, the Italian astronomer Galileo realized the potential of a magnifying instrument for his own studies, and promptly made one of his own, and turned it upon those curious things in the heavens which had captured the imagination of mankind since before history began. And for the first time, mankind could begin to see the true nature of these things. The moon revealed its mountains and plains, and became an object of mere matter rather than a heavenly orb. So with the planets, particularly Mars with its curious markings. Jupiter ceased to be merely a point or disk of light, and clearly was seen to be a sphere, just like the moon. Venus, similarly revealed as a sphere, also went through phases just like the moon. And since the only thing that could illuminate it was the Sun, it was abundantly obvious to any schoolboy that it must orbit the sun, just as the moon orbited the Earth. Moreover, Jupiter was seen to have its own set of little points of light attendant upon it, soon to be calculated as multiple moons, orbiting the planet. The Copernican model, up to now safely hypothetical, was now proven by the sheer weight of visible observation. Galileo published a short treatise of his observations and conclusions, The Starry Messenger, followed by other papers which even more pointedly confirmed the Copernican model.

The Church was thus challenged in one of its central assumptions—that the Earth was the center of God’s Universe, and Man the center of His attention. To have the Earth relegated to a secondary position replaced by the Sun was heresy. The Church of Rome had to respond. Finally in the early 1630s, after about 20 years of studied silence, it called Galileo to account. He was allowed to explain and his explanation was rejected; he was convicted of heresy. The Church was gracious—it offered him a choice: He could be stubborn in his adherence to a belief contrary to Church doctrine and be tortured for the good of his immortal soul and executed for the good of the Church, or he could admit his error, recant his studies, and be allowed to live albeit under house arrest. Can we blame him for not wanting to suffer pain by the thugs of the Vicar of Christ? He was nearly 70 years old. He gave in. The Church maintained the error of millennia through threats of force and violence, in the name of the Prince of Peace.

But the Church could not suppress the grinding of glass. The science of optics grew apace; glass became more pure, grinding techniques became more precise, telescopes became larger and sharper. And math became more supple in its predictive capacity. It took more than another hundred years, but eventually the planet Uranus was discovered with a telescope, and seen obviously to circle the Sun. Sixty years later, the planet Neptune was discovered through the means of mathematical calculations based on observations of gravitational fluctuations in Uranus’ orbit.

It was about this time that even the heliocentric model fell into question, with the realization that the sun itself was not the center of the larger universe but rather it, too, along with its system of planets moved through space in relation to the rest of a swirling spiral of stars called even by the ancient Greeks the Milky Way. They called it that because in the dark night sky of ancient times, with no light pollution, the heavens in the deep of night pop out to an observer in a breathtaking river of undifferentiated light—it seemed to stream with spilled milk. They could not grasp it for what it was, but they named it nonetheless.

The Church in the meantime has had to make its accommodations with the undeniable realities exposed by science. It has done so quietly, abandoning its usual threats of force and violence. Those two means of convincing people are not gone, however—they are still used frequently by various States, but at least the Church may now be counted upon to behave more in keeping with the admonitions of Christ, at least in respect of its relationship with science.

In the 1920s there came to a head one of those differences of opinion among the astronomical community (some might call it a petty squabble, given the behavior of some of the participants) regarding the nature of the Milky Way. Clearly it had limits, an edge, boundaries within which its vast swirling arms kept. This, we knew beyond doubt, was The Universe. That was It. The End. We knew it All. This massive spiral of stars, with its splotches of nebulae and its swirls of dust and gas and its aching fields of endless stars, unimaginably huge, was finally known to be That Which Is. And beyond that? Nothing? But wait! What’s this little dab of gauzy light, this little oval of bright mist? Is it just one more unremarkable nebula with which the Milky Way is strewn from one end to the other, each one more dramatic and fantastic than the next, extending in their various convolutions within the spiral arms across many degrees of arc in the sky (the full moon only covers a half a degree of arc). Or could it be… something else? Something… outside the Milky Way? This question generated furious debate among otherwise nerdy guys who could not get a date with a girl if their lives depended on it.

The Church had no opinion.

Within 5 years the debate was settled and Science had done it without burning anybody at the stake although a lot of egos were smashed and careers ended. That little wisp of mist, as delicate and insubstantial as a patch of glitter from the wing of a moth on black velvet was resolved into a vast, second, insanely distant spiral galaxy just like the Milky Way. It had arms, it had its own nebulae, it even had its own satellite dwarf galaxies just like the Milky Way has the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Today we know this as the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor.  

 Subsequent observations revealed a larger neighborhood of similar bodies, vastly distant, yet gravitationally locked with one another in their own orbiting spiral dance. This illustration (not to scale) is now what we call the Local Group:

And this is but a part of a larger structure, a grouping of galaxies, 
of which this is but a part of an even larger conglomeration of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster, which is itself but one of many galactic superclusters as seen here.
And this is not the end. It is just what we can see.

As to that, all these masses of galaxies, all this star stuff, all this matter, all those atoms which seem to be endless, countless, impossibly vast now are considered to comprise but 4% of the true measure of the Universe. The rest? Well, uh, we can’t see it. It is inferred. It is as if you were to stand on one hill and observe another distant hill. You can see the trees on that hill bending and waving, so even though there is no breeze where you stand, you can infer that there is a brisk wind at work over there; you cannot see the wind, but you can see its effects. The same holds true with the universe. We cannot see this other matter—or more properly this other non-luminous part of the universe—but we must infer it is there because we can observe its effects, largely gravitational. But for now, it is a mystery.

You’d think, therefore, that we would label this unseen stuff “Mystery Matter”, but no. These days we must not allow the universe to be mysterious. We call it “Dark Matter”, dark because we cannot see it, not because it has anything to do with Darth Vader. By the way, this matter is accompanied by Dark Energy as well. The comparative amounts are as follows: The visible (luminous) universe, 4%, comprised of 3½% intergalactic gas, and 0.5% stars; Dark Matter, 23%; Dark Energy, 73%. How are we to think of the above picture of the giant superclusters of galaxies as only one half of one percent of the apparent universe? The mind boggles.

And so here we are. Welcome to a rather larger world than our ancestors knew. I’m 65 years old now as I write this in 2012. When I was a 10 year old boy, we knew about the nearest galaxies. When my father was a 10 year old boy in 1920, the argument about other galaxies was just starting but was not resolved. When his father was a ten year old boy in 1883, even the nature of the Milky Way galaxy was not entirely known. So we are looking at a mere three generations during which advances in understanding about the universe grew exponentially, in the face of millennia of error.

Don’t assume such progress must continue.

And oh by the way, you will note that at the end of this enormous expansion of our understanding of the universe, we suddenly are in a place where we are absolutely certain that we know absolutely nothing of fully 96% of the universe. For all we know, it could be tortoises, all the way down.