Access to brilliance

We take so many things for granted that really ought to astound us.

On my daily trips to Santa Fe over the past two months my wife and I have been listening to Teaching Company tapes and CDs – lectures by the best college teachers in the nation. At the moment we are listening (in turn) to lectures on the Great Ideas in Psychology, Great Literature of the Western World, The British Novel, and A History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts. When I drive alone I have been listening to lectures on Particle Physics and on the evidence for Dark Matter. My daughters and granddaughters are currently watching Teaching Company videos on Modern Astronomy and Cosmology by one of the nation’s leading astronomers. From time to time during lunch we watch a DVD series on Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance by a wonderful art historian from the Smithsonian Institution.

These lecturers are all brilliant, among the very best lecturers to be found in the entire country, or even perhaps in the Western World (the psychologist, for example, lectures at Oxford). I would consider that a few of them are no doubt in the genius range of intellect.

It occurred to me the other day that until recent times, most people in the world never met a genius in their entire life. In most of the world this is still true. Now, through the marvel of books and tapes and videos we can listen to and learn from four or five geniuses a day if we are so inclined. We ought to marvel at our good fortune, though in fact most of us not only take if for granted, but don’t even take much advantage of the opportunity.

More’s the pity.

PS – If you have never heard of The Teaching Company, I encourage you to visit their web site at http://www.teach12.com/ and see what a wealth of wonders is available.

Washington accountability

One of the noticeable characteristics of America’s government in recent years is that there is little or no accountability in Washington. When government officials violate the law, nothing happens. No heads roll. Nobody goes to jail. Nobody get fired. Nothing – nada – happens!

I note that FBI Director Muller testified to a Congressional committee on March 5, 2008, that in 2006, for the fourth year running, the FBI improperly and illegally accessed the telephone records, credit reports, and internet traffic of Americans, using national security letters (basically a request backed up with no legal or valid warrant). He had made essentially the same report to Congress the previous two years. Yet nothing has happened.

I note that Representative William Jefferon (D-La) is still in Congress, even though in 2005 the FBI recovered almost $90,000 in marked bills from his home freezer as part of a sting operation, for which he was indicted in 2007 on 16 criminal counts.

I note that Vice President Dick Cheney has refused to abide by Executive Order 12958 as amended by Executive Order 13292, which requires executive branch officials to submit annual reports to the Information Security Oversight Office to ensure that classified information is properly secured, and yet there seems to have been no consequences.

Here in our town of Los Alamos, Former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Peter Nanos, in a gross overreaction and with DOE concurrence, closed down the entire Laboratory in 2004 for seven months, at a cost to the taxpayers in excess of $360 million, over what turned out to be a simple clerical error (the two “missing” bar codes had never be put on anything). This despite the fact that it was clear within a few days of the event that it had been a simple clerical error. Yet no one in government (or in the University of California, who managed the lab, or in the direct laboratory management) was ever held accountable. Indeed, the DOE subsequently even awarded the new contract back to essentially the same management team that had made this blunder.

Watch the news and you will see similar violations almost every week, and nothing ever happens!

Why do we, the American people, let this go on? Does anyone care? Does anyone even notice?

Recommended: Where Is Everybody?

There are roughly 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe, each containing an average of about 100 billion stars. Given the truly vast number of stars, it is almost inconceivable that life, and even intelligent life, is unique to our little planet, though of course intelligent life may be very thinly scattered throughout these galaxies.

Astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake noted this, and even generated the “Drake Equation” to estimate the number of intelligent, communicating species one might expect in the universe. Under reasonable assumptions it ought to number in the hundreds, if not thousands. In the summer of 1950, the great physicist Enrico Fermi, discussing this with his colleagues over lunch one day here in Los Alamos, posed the key question: Where is everybody? If there are supposed to be so many intelligent communicating species in the universe, why don’t we see any evidence of them? Known ever since as the “Fermi Paradox”, this question has sparked decades of serious thought.

Proposed resolutions have ranged from the whimsical “They are among us and call themselves Hungarians” (proposed by Fermi’s friend Leo Szilard, who along with Fermi’s other regular lunchtime companions Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Theodore von Kàrmàn, and John von Neumann were all born in Hungary.) to serious discussions about how long civilizations might last, how difficult is it for simple unicellular life to make the step to multicellular organisms, what special conditions must obtain on a planet for life to have enough time to evolve, and the like.

Physicist Stephen Webb. who is fascinated with Fermi’s paradox, has assembled into a delightful book (Where is Everybody, Copernicus Books, 2002, ISBN 0-387-95501-1) fifty solutions to the paradox that have been proposed at various times, along with serious but very readable discussions of each. The result is a wonderful and wide-ranging education spanning astronomy and cosmology, mathematics and statistics, the sociology of civilizations, the nature of life and evolutionary processes, and many other subjects. One can open the book at random and become fascinated with whatever discussion appears.

I heartily recommend this book to those who enjoy having their horizons stretched.

Carl Sagan

The brilliant astrophysicist Carl Sagan once noted

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

Another time he said

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

I think of his words when I hear politicians press for more subsidies for corn-based ethanol, since they apparently don’t understand the studies that show that producing ethanol from corn takes more energy than it produces, and most of that energy is in the form of polluting coal and scarce petroleum.

I think of his words when I realize that perhaps only one person in 20 who drives a car, uses a computer at work, watches television to relax, takes an aspirin for their headache, sends and receives email on the internet, cooks their dinner in a microwave, and keeps in touch with a cell phone has more than the most primitive idea how any of these things work. They might as well be alien artifacts as far as most people are concerned.

I think of his words when I hear a fundamentalist preacher deriding science and technology on his weekly television show, and then soliciting donations though his internet site. Or when I hear “intelligent design” proponents misuse and misunderstand the nature of scientific reasoning.

I think of his words when I read about people who are deeply concerned about the possibility that some genetically-modified foods might appear on their grocery shelves, but are at the same time completely ignorant of all the additives already in the foods they eat.

It seems to me that one of the very top priorities for this nation, for its very long-term survival, should be to make sure that as many of its children as possible get a good, solid foundation in basic science and technology, whether or not those are fields they eventually choose to enter. It is partly a matter of keeping our nation competitive in an increasingly educated and technology-driven world. But even more important, it is a matter of equipping people with enough knowledge to understand the technology they are using, and on which their very lives depend.

Recommended – Two Political Speeches

For those who are following the election campaigns, I recommend two recent speeches, one on race by Senator Obama and one on foreign policy by Senator McCain, both of which are outstanding.

The text of Senator Obama’s speech can be found on the web at Senator Obama’s website at http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords.

The text of Senator McCain’s speech can be found on the web at the New York Times site at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/us/politics/26text-mccain.html.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find any speech by Senator Clinton that approaches the standards of forthrightness and clarity of position demonstrated in these two speeches.

The Wrong Focus for our Anger?

I’ve mentioned Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason in a previous posting. Here is a paragraph in her book that especially struck me:

‘Out-of-power (In Washington) liberal intellectuals also have a good deal to answer for, and one of their most serious failures of vision has been a reluctance to acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance. Liberals have tended to define the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years and to see an outraged citizenry, ready to throw the bums out, as the solution. While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long term problem in American life. Like many Democratic politicians, left-of-center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible – not only about Iraq but about a vast array of domestic and international issues.”

It does seem to me that those who rail endlessly at the Bush administration’s errors – and there have indeed been many errors – need to stop and realize that this administration was lawfully elected by the American public. (Spare me more griping about how the first election was stolen – the unusually thorough after-the-fact reviews showed that Bush did indeed win, if only by the slimmest of margins.)

So instead of blaming the Bush administration, which is fruitless at this point, think about why at least half the American public voted this administration into office, and then returned them to office in a second election. Of course the Democrats have themselves to blame in part for the dismal lack of credible new ideas and the less-than-stellar quality of the candidates they put forth. Both those elections were the Democrat’s to lose, and they managed to lose them.

But I think Jacoby’s point is a valid one – the American electorate does indeed seem to be especially gullible these days. One might ponder why this is, and seek to change whatever of that we can, in ourselves, and in any arena in which we have influence.