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October 21, 2008

Signs of Times

The US presidential election is exactly two weeks from today, and the McCain-Palin team seems to be down in the polls. But you would never guess it if you lived on my street. After I had put up my sign a few weeks back, five more McCain-Palin signs have popped up. That is a lot for one street, and a part of me wants to take credit for setting a precedent.

Meanwhile, the only Obama sign that used to be on our street got stolen. This is a rather unfortunate development, and I would like to as person(s) who perpetrated this senseless act of vandalism to return the sign to its rightful owners. No questions asked.

October 18, 2008

Paul Kengor

Last week Paul Kengor came to visit Wabash. He is a professor at Grove City College, and a prolific writer. Last year I read his book "The Crusader," which tells the story of Ronald Reagan's deliberate and sustained efforts over the years to undermine the Soviet communism and bring an end to the Cold War. It is a very good and readable book, and you can read my Amazon review here. The other books that Paul has written include "God and George W. Bush," and "God and Hillary Clinton." The latter one, despite what some may think, is not all that thin of a volume.

Paul's talk mainly focused on the material that he covered in "The Crusader." After the talk there was a Q&A session and I asked a couple of questions of my own. I was interested in finding out what he thought about China, and here I was a bit disappointed with the answer. Paul claimed that China is not so much of a problem, and that Reagan would probably not deal with China in the same way as he had dealt with the Soviet Union. He based this argument on a claim that China is not an expansionistic power that is trying to impose communism on the whole world. This is highly debatable, and probably more a function of China's current relative weakness. There is no question in my mind that given an opportunity, China would be as aggressive, if not more so, as the good ol' Soviet Union. Furthermore, this assessment of the difference between China and USSR also undermines one of the central claims of "The Crusader:" communism is an intrinsically evil system and it's our moral obligation to try the best we can to help those who are suffering under its repression to get out of it.

 

At the end of his talk Paul gave an interesting assessment. He reflected on the fact that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president ever since the popularity polls have been conducted. However, he asserted that if Bush's plan to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East brings fruit in a long run, then his achievements will be comparable to those of Reagan vis-à-vis the collapse of European communism. But unlike Reagan, who had Gorbachov as an equally important collaborator in this monumental endeavor, Bush will rightfully deserve sole credit for the role he plaid in his historic transformation. Needless to say, the final chapters in that undertaking are still in the process of being written. Let us just hope that it will not be too long before we can read them in full.

October 16, 2008

Nobel Prize in Physics

The first part of October has always been exciting time for the Physics community and for the scientist in general. That's when Noble Prizes are announced, and each year Nobel Prize serves as a pretty reliable, albeit imperfect, indicator of where the field currently stands or what has been recognized as a seminal achievement form the years past. This year the prize went to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago for the fundamental contribution to our understanding of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, and to Makoto Kobayashi, of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, and Toshihide Maskawa, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. The last half of the 20th century has been characterized by an increasing understanding of how symmetry plays a fundamental classifying role in our understanding of how the world around us works, and the most interesting questions in Physics are those that explore the discrepancy between the underlying symmetry of nature and its apparent absence in what we actually observe. This, in a nutshell, is what it means for a symmetry to be broken. For instance, we strongly believe that all laws of Physics should be the same whether we go up or down, left or right, forward or backward. That is what we mean by living a in a three dimensional space. And yet, on the surface of the Earth, it makes a lot of difference whether we move on the two dimensional surface or try to get off and move upward. Driving 100 km in any direction is not much of an achievement. Many people drive as much in a single day for their commute to work (I do). And yet, moving 100 km upward will take us to the edge of the outer space, and it's a completely nontrivial feat of science and engineering. So we see that on the surface of the Earth the third dimension (up-down) is completely different from the other two. The three dimensional symmetry is broken. The cause behind the breaking of this symmetry is the Earth, or more precisely Earth's gravitational field. For the longest time we believed that this sort of symmetry breaking is due to very special conditions that we have chose on a macroscopic level, and that the fundamental laws of Physics are not susceptible to it. This all changed in the second part of the 20th century when it was discovered that even the most "fundamental" laws of Physics are in fact a broken version of some other laws.

What intrigues me, and what keeps me going in my own line of research, is the idea that all of the particulars of nature, all of the initial conditions that we observe and all of the special and unique natural laws that seem to govern the Universe, are in fact a broken remnant of some vast and awesome symmetry. I believe that some outlines of this symmetry are already manifesting themselves, but a lot more work needs to be invested before a coherent and concrete model can be put forward. Until that happens, I am grateful that the Noble committee has put forward the ideas of broken symmetry back into the Physicists' spotlight.