Fabiola Gianotti, Person of the Year

          Time magazine (Dec. 31) has named Fabiola Gianotti one of its five Persons of the Year for her work in discovering the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).  This is the boson that has been called the "God particle" because it explains the origin of matter in the universe.  Gianotti and her physicist colleague, Joe Incandela, have, as Time puts it, "nailed the particle that gives other fundamental particles their mass."
          Apparently proof of the Higgs boson's existence is quite a relief for several reasons.  First, basic particles do not necessarily have mass; the photon, for example, which is the basic quantum of light, has no mass.  So physicists can breathe easier now that they have confirmed in the lab what they (and everyone else) can see quite clearly but hadn't been able to exactly explain until now.  Mass exists—and now we know why—or rather how—matter was and is created.
          Physicists are relieved too because now they don't have to explain the absence of mass.  That condition would have been hard to square with what we can see in the real world.  If there had been a universe without mass, quantum mechanics would have been forced to explain how something (a universe) could be made of nothing (particles without mass).  That's a tough one. 
          Finally, the Higgs boson has provided the last piece of the puzzle known as the "standard model," which is an even trickier concept than the business of creating mass.  Time puts it this way:  "The so-called standard model of physics, [is] the grand framework that ties together the universe's three great forces--the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism--and governs the behavior of sub-atomic particles."  By confirming the standard model, the Higgs boson has shown that the last fifty years spent looking for it have not been a stroll down a dead end street.  
          Persons of the year aside, it's absolutely breathtaking to contemplate everything that is going on within every atom every minute of every day, stretching back in time to the origin of the universe some 13.5 billion years ago.  It's astonishing there can even be something called "the behavior of sub-atomic particles."  And we have Fabiola Gianotti (and Joe Incandela) to thank for proving the Higgs boson actually does exist, thereby showing not only how particles get their mass, but also confirming one of the predictions of the so-called “standard model” originally posited in the 1960s.  Everything is now locked neatly into place.  
           Unless or until, that is, Ms. Gianotti looks even deeper into atoms to discover new facts that create new mysteries that will launch the next generation of quantum mechanics in a new direction that will take another century or so to examine and re-examine before a new theory emerges that will in turn launch new investigations with new problems to resolve.   Which the next generation after them will address.  It’s the way of science, the way of the world, the way of homo sapiens:  rational man.  It's humankind at its very best.

Everything Changes, Except. . .

         One of the boring truisms observed by everyone at one point or another is that everything changes.  The only thing you can be certain of is that nothing stays the same.  When the thought first hits us, we feel we've struck upon one of the great liberating truths of the ages, but we soon figure out that all we have stumbled upon is another cliché.  Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
          When you look at the number of variables that go into any presidential election, for example, like the one just past where Pres. Barack Obama ran against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, you might recall the unknown quantities:  the Christian right vote; the black vote, the women vote, the Latino vote, the white male vote, the young vote, the old vote, the Mormon vote, and probably a dozen others.  It was a handicapper's nightmare.
          Then there were the issues:  the economy, the wars, Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, taxes, the real estate collapse, the loss of jobs to China and other countries.  Who was "right" or "righter" and how often?  The entire mix of variables that make up the present and that will combine into an unpredictable future that will in turn become a future present (and so on dizzyingly ad infinitum)--all somehow sort themselves out through time, and, in this case, on November 6, 2012, Pres. Obama handily defeated Gov. Romney.
          And suddenly, just like that, the shimmering, never-certain future becomes part of the solid, never-changing past.  What's more, the constancy of history is a blessed relief after long and tiresome question marks about the future.  One of the ways this has been expressed, the best way in my reading, was by the Roman poet Horace (first-century BCE), who wrote "Happy the Man":

                    Happy he, and happy he alone,
                    is the man who can call today his own,
                    the man who, secure within, can say:
                    Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

                    Whether fair or foul or rain or shine,
                    all my days, in spite of fate, are mine.
                    Not even Heaven upon the past has power:
                    What has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Those last two lines are magnificent, proud and humble and brave all at the same time, "I have had my hour."  Nothing will ever change that--or the implied obligation to use each one wisely.

Symmetry

           I like order.  Not excessively or all the time, but on balance, I like to see orderliness whenever it shows itself.  I admire form.  I am pleased by the firmness of structure.
          Now, having said that, I must also say that there isn't as much of that firm structure in my life to suit me.  I tend to be excessive about most things, never moderate or balanced.  I notice order in my life more by its absence than its presence.
          And then, to annoy me further, there is Werner Heisenberg's 1927 "uncertainty principle," which has taught us that order is an illusion, both in quantum mechanics and cosmology, the largest and smallest of scientific investigations.  Whatever order we once thought we observed in nature and hoped to duplicate in our lives is, in cold brutal fact, little more than wishful thinking.
          Which is one reason we like art and music and poetry so much.  Poetry, Robert Frost once remarked, is a "momentary stay against confusion."  That's what we like about it.  It imposes order on chaos.  For the time you spend in a Robert Frost poem (though clearly not in all poems) you can look forward to the blessed relief of a sturdy substructure holding the whole thing up.  No wonder he and all the formalists will never go out of style; they're like classic tweeds or pearls with a black dress.  Elegant. 
          All this old-fashioned, formalist thinking came to mind on page 49 of the September 2012 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, where there is a poem by Amit Majmudar called, "Pattern and Snarl."  It's an Italian sonnet (invented by Petrarch 800 years ago), one of the most rock-ribbed (not to say rigid) of poetic forms, and one that the New Formalists love to spin out just to prove that old forms can fit nicely with new realities, if you want them to, and if you're poet enough to pull it off.
          Majmudar's sonnet is not about a person or about love or about death, but it's about the idea of orderliness itself.  The opening eight lines set up the problem:  "Life likes a little mess.  All patterns need a snarl."  He thinks about that idea for the opening eight lines that set things up, and then he resolves the problem in the six-line conclusion:

                     What is it about order that we love? This sense,
                            Maybe, that a secret informs the pattern?

                                Is it a toddler's joy in doing things again?
                         Is it the entropy in us that warms to pattern?

               I never intended this line to rhyme on again again.
        Then again sometimes it's the snarl that adorns the pattern.

          The joy of this poem is in its reminder that life likes a "little mess," a "snarl that adorns the pattern," which all by itself is an insight worth having, but Majmudar delivers it in a tight pattern that is itself slightly snarled, thus duplicating the message in the form, which raises the achievement tenfold.  The poem explodes into a gorgeous but miniature fireworks display.
           In the end, we get an irresistible poem about the dual realities of loving patterns and living with snarls.  My problem exactly.   

         

Spielberg, Day-Lewis, and "Lincoln": My (Re)View

          Steven Spielberg's just-opened treatment of the Lincoln myth stars Daniel Day-Lewis.  Both director and star are given to excess, so it may come as a surprise that this marriage is not a strained struggle of over-sized egos.  Instead, Lincoln is an important film that covers the political maneuverings that led to the passage of the 13th amendment outlawing slavery and takes place in about a thirty-day period in early 1865.  More, it is an eerily photographic treatment that seems taken out of the pages of Civil War photojournalism. 
          However, if Lincoln is an important and beautiful film, it isn't nearly as good as a movie.
          The chief reason for this is its unrelenting barrage of talk.  Tony Kushner's first version of the screenplay ran to an unheard-of 500 pages, which he whittled down to about 130 pages that unreel in two and a half hours.  The length would not have been a problem had it not been for a serious imbalance between talk and action:  there isn't much motion in this motion picture.
          Making matters worse for the audience is that the characters, although based on real people , are mostly unknown today.  We do not automatically know what their political positions were, what the congressional alliances looked like, or even why all the northerners did not have similar thoughts about a constitutional  amendment to outlaw slavery.  Nor are we in on the political dialogue or even the vocabulary of the time; the very words “Republican” and “Democrat,” and the parties they represent, are roughly opposite to their modern counterparts.  

           Lincoln's own political and moral positions are also hard to pin down because the film doesn't show how he had morphed from a Colonizationist (in favor of relocating slaves back to Africa) to the author of the Emancipation Proclamation and the engineer of the 13th Amendment.
           Not all of Kushner's words are political, however.  Just to break things up, there are occasional passages between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in marital strife--words about her madness, their dead son Willy, and their relationship.  The Abraham vs. Mary drama is loud, but not character-revealing.  One would have to go into the movie theater with knowledge of Mary Lincoln's fragile mental health and her conniving, free-spending excesses to make sense of it all.  And it is in one single scene, where the Lincoln marriage is shown at its worst, that we get Daniel Day-Lewis, who in the rest of the film is Oscar-good, resorting to the screaming school of overacting that mars his worst work, as for example in Gangs of New York.
          In short, Lincoln is too long, too wordy, too politically indecipherable, and it is hurt rather than helped by the beautiful photographic stills that don't take enough advantage of the cinema as a motion picture art form. The film may be personally inspiring, morally uplifting, historically accurate, and beautifully shot, but as a movie, it's too talky and preachy.  Amazingly, Spielberg has managed to make Lincoln the man and Lincoln the movie both tiresome and boring.

Death, Curiosity, and the Ascent of Man

          Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 and on August 6th that same year, his successor Harry Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  Three days later a second bomb was exploded over Nagasaki.  Together these bombs effectively ended hostilities during World War II--but Franklin Roosevelt never knew who won the war or how it ended.            

          On April 14, 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant, thus ending the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated--without ever knowing how the post-war peace would work out, what America would look like after the long war that claimed 625,000 American lives, both Blue and Gray.

          My father died in 1970 without knowing if I would finish graduate school with the Ph.D. I was working on at the time and that I would finish seven years later. 
          This goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it points out that we are all destined to die without knowing the outcome of something important to us at the time of our death--and that used to trouble me no end.
          The more I think of it, however, the less it troubles me.  And the reason is because the history of mankind is different from and greater than the history of men.  Collectively we have come a long way--scientifically, technologically, and artistically--since our first ancestors began walking upright about six million years ago, just yesterday compared to the four and a half billion years the planet has been circling the sun.
          During our six-million-year history, we have made spectacular advances that have rightly been described as the Ascent of Man--and yes, thinking metaphorically is one of the advances of our species.  In spite of the daily headlines and those who see us as a depraved race of sinners, we should be proud to be human, proud of our species, proud to take our places on the planet for the few years we have. 
          So what does it matter in the end that we will not know at our deaths exactly how our children's lives will work out, what our reputations will be in the future, whether we will be remembered at all, or how long the republic will last.  This is our common destiny.  But in the larger view there is consolation in the knowledge that we have added a little of ourselves to the working out of human history, for every life in its own peculiar and tiny way changes the universe.   

          Seen from that angle, our lives have meaning, and it is our duty to do something with them, to make our contribution, no matter how small, to the Ascent of Man--even though we are destined to die without knowing how it will all turn out.  It is together, collectively, that we as a race of thinking men, homo sapiens, make our mark on the universe.  It's an uplifting thought, better than heaven.

Storm Tracker: The Ironies of Hurricane Sandy

            I’ve been keeping track of Sandy the Hurricane and the unnamed Nor’easter that have  been pounding the mid-Atlantic states with a one-two punch for several hours now.  It’s a record breaker—by storm surge, rainfall, damage, and duration.

            New Jersey, where I was born and raised and where I lived for sixty years, is taking a heavy hit.  And I am still worried about my children, their spouses, and my six grandchildren, who all still live there. 

            Last year they were hit with a hurricane named Irene which knocked out power for days on end and left a huge impression on my children in central and northwest New Jersey.  Sandy will be harder on them, at least twice as hard, if the early estimates are even half true.

            Irony is retired grandparents moving to hurricane-prone Florida and not having a single one seven years while normally hurricane-safe New Jersey has now had two.  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what God’s plan is.  Or how the vagaries of weather can figure into the Divine Plan at all.  It looks for all the world like there isn’t any plan. 

            In June, we did have a semi-hit when hurricane Isaac, which impacted downtown Tampa and the Republican National Convention, about an hour west of our home in central Florida’s Twin Cities, Zephyrhills and Dade City.  We seemed pretty vulnerable for a while.  But by the time Isaac got to Dade City, he was too tired to do much damage--and anyway, more irony, my wife and I were safely vacationing in New Jersey at the time. 

When Sandy caromed off Florida a day or two ago, leaving the East Coast of the state wet and windy, we in Central Florida merely cursed the occasionally brisk breezes we faced on the golf course.  “Is that a one or two-club correction?” we asked one another while we mumbled curses under our breath.

            Meantime, when all was counted up, New Jersey suffered $30 billion in economic losses, 346,000 homes damaged or destroyed, and 37 people dead.  Cleanup costs ran to an estimated $37 billion.  A national tragedy.