The Fall of Empire- America as Rome- Talking to the Police

The other day at work I had a particularly stupid woman say to me that she wasn't worried about the government looking into her private life. She had nothing to worry about because "I've never done anything wrong." You have to realize that this woman is someone who believes that the world was created in six twenty-four hour days, thinks that a hotel she stayed in once near the equator proves corolis force because two sinks in her bathroom drained different ways, and has been a nurse for over thirty years without knowing what the different sounds a lung makes on auscultation are. The infuriating thing about this moron is that she talks to everyone in a condescending tone without realizing that she is little more than an idiot. Making what Harlan Ellison said about arrogant stupidity all the more relivant.

("There's nothing worse than arrogant stupidity;
arrogance you can tolerate,idiocy you can get around,
outsmart,
but both together are inscrutable," he said.)

I've debunked her ideas about coralis force by siting Snopes.com without depending on the common sense argument (Common sense is not so common.- Voltare) that her two hotel sinks would have to straddle the equator perfectly to display such a thing even if the laws of centrifugal force didn't apply. I've read medical texts to her about lung sounds only to be told that the words "didn't mean that" even though they were plain. Yet here I am again trying to reason with a person who is, obviously, immune to logic. Thus is the fate of someone with more than a high-school-dropout mentality attempting to live in modern America. Every day you have to "suffer fools gladly" in spite of the fact that they are FOOLS.

But on the subject that innocent people are protected by our American system, I defer to a person who is far more aquainted with the workings of the law than I am. Here is what a law professor has to say about talking to the police. Listen to it and remember it if you have any dealings with the law. I've been a police officer and I can tell you that if you think the cops are looking for the guilty you are as naive and gullible as my friend at work.

MOVIES- The Man with the Initial for a Name

The postman brought me the movie W. from Netflix today. It has to be Oliver Stone’s best film in years. It’s much more a straight biography than I expected. It isn’t a polemic and it isn’t played for laughs. But it isn’t a whitewash either. I’m sure that Bush’s hardcore supporters will find plenty to dislike but as far as being a movie biography it’s an entertaining and engrossing look at one of the most important and divisive presidents in history.

Much of the credit goes to the cast. Josh Brolin is simply spot-on in the lead role. So much so that while looking away from the screen during one of the documentaries included in the supplemental materials I was surprised to look back and find it was actual film of President Bush rather than a scene from the movie that I was hearing. Richard Dreyfuss is the second immediate standout as Cheney. He underplays, as does most of the cast. It’s a good choice. The public personas of most of these people are so cartoonish that had they been played as broadly as they appear on Meet the Press the movie would have quickly devolved into caricature. Dreyfuss is arguably a more believable Cheney than Cheney is. I never got the idea that Dreyfuss was auditioning for the role of the Penguin in the next Batman movie, while I always got that feeling from the actual vice-president. Toby Jones, who is fast becoming one of the finest character actors working today, is somehow sympathetic as Karl Rove. Thandie Newton might brush more closely against that cartoon boundry, but again, the actual Condoleezza Rice is such a cartoon that to do anything less might have rendered the character unrecognizable. As it is, I defy you to recognize her from other things you might have seen her in- INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK, CRASH, or MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II. If you saw JEFFERSON IN PARIS you might recognize her as Sally Hemmings but here she disappears into the role. Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld, Jeffery Wright as Colin Powell, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, all are simply wonderful. Even the small roles stand out. Ioan Gruffudd, Colin Hanks (son of Tom Hanks), and even Daily Show alumni Rob Corddry never hit a wrong note in their brief time on screen. The only gripe I might have is with the portrayal of President George H. W. Bush by James Cromwell, who normally I find inimitably watchable. It’s not that Cromwell does a bad job as an actor, it’s just that every other person makes it a point to at least attempt to vanish into their well known roles and Cromwell doesn’t seem to even bother to try.

If the movie has an agenda, it only presents in subtle ways. I don’t for a minute think that Stone isn’t aware of these little digs but considering his reputation for bombast I’m still amazed at the restraint. The way Bush eats by stuffing his cheeks full and chewing with his mouth open, or cuts down a tree by sawing the chain saw back and forth (a good way to get your leg cut off), or considers confidence superior to ability. Especially revealing is the portrayal of Barbara Bush. Whitewashed and airbrushed the way the public personas of all the Bush family were, most people still think of mother Bush as being some sort of kindly grandmother. Only if you have done extensive reading do you start to realize what a vindictive, mean, aristocratic old bitch the portly matron actually was. Here you get just a hint but even that is such a rare glimpse into her real character that it is very telling.

All in all, the movie is one of the best of the last year. It keeps you watching, it tells you something you may not know, and it doesn’t stray too far from what seems to be objective (as far as such things go in the public forum) truth. Veracity is paramount if you’re going to make a biographical movie about a sitting president. Everybody knows how these people look and sound. Likewise, being careful not to take liberties with rumor or innuendo is very important. It could easily have been a hatchet job. The movie is anything but that. Instead it seems to give real insight into a man who changed the presidency and the country, who presided in a time of American crisis unknown in recent history.

“Faith frees me. From my past, myself, from the expectorations of others.”

SCIENCE- Paul Dirac and the Big Number Theory

So what did Dirac do that was so all fired great? Some mundane stuff like predicting the first antimatter particle. (Though he didn’t think of it as a particle, he called it a “hole in the Dirac Sea”. Didn’t like poetry my ass.) But the thing I’ve always thought was the coolest thing Dirac ever came up with is called the BIG NUMBER HYPOTHESIS.

Dirac was a born mathematician. In fact he once said that “getting beauty in one's equations” was the path to progress. Often he found himself playing with numbers and equations for the simple joy of it; the way a gifted pianist might sit and noodle at the keys. And just like that pianist might stumble onto a classic melody, Dirac stumbled onto one of the great mysteries of the universe. A mystery that is sometimes pointed to as evidence that the universe is a constructed thing.

In other words- evidence of God.

He realized that the ratio of the electromagnetic force and gravitational force between a proton and an electron was on the order of 10 to the 40th power. That’s a 10 with 40 zeros after it. A big number. Human beings have a hard time comprehending large numbers so we look for things to compare them to in order to get a sense of scale. What do you compare such a number to in a person’s experience? It’s a big number, so how about all the grains of sand on the beach? Problem is that it wouldn’t even be close. All the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world? That’s about 7.5 x (10)18th grains of sand.

http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html

which is still only (10)-21st of Dirac’s number.

So all the sand on all the beaches on the entire earth is such a pitifully small number in comparison that it can’t help us. What else might he compare it to?

How about the ratio of an electron to the radius of the Universe? That’s got to be a pretty big number. The calculated radius of an electron is (10)-15th and the radius of the universe is about 10)23rd resulting in a final ratio of (10)40th.

Wait. That’s a really good comparison. In fact it’s within the same order of magnitude. It’s unusual to find anything that matches up that closely when dealing with numbers of this size.

So, The relationship between the interactions of protons and electrons is about the same as the relationship between the size single electron and the size of the universe. Interesting.

What else might be a number that big? We’ve compared two of the four basic forces of the universe and we’ve compared a unit of distance. So, what about time? The universe has given us a fancy stopwatch in the form of the speed of light so let’s compare the length of time it takes a photon to travel the length of the radius of that electron we measured earlier and the length of time that the universe has existed since the big bang.

And guess what. That turns out to be about 10)40 as well!

Things were starting to get really weird.

What about a comparison of the mass of a proton to the mass of the universe? Well that doesn’t wind up being on order of magnitude of 10)40 instead it winds up being roughly the square of 10)40. That’s a little odd too. How about the number of elementary charged particles in the universe. That also winds up being about 10)80, the square of the number that kept cropping up.

By now Dirac was getting pretty excited. As he started comparing the fundamental constants of the universe the number 10)40 just kept cropping up. I’m sure he was beginning to feel a little like Jim Carry in the movie THE NUMBER 23. He figured that anything with this close a correlation must be important. But the connections were so odd. Why would the age of the universe and the size of a proton be related? Dirac continued to fool around and eventually figured out that all this could be the result if the Universal Gravitational Constant varied with the age of the universe. So he immediately set out to do what physicists do when they hit upon a new idea. He built a universe around it.

In 1937 Dirac published his paper on the Large Number Hypothesis and the possible Cosmology it implied. The problem was that his cosmology didn’t seem to support the big bang and for the next 20 years big bang was to become all the rage in cosmology. So most physicists said yes, that’s interesting, but it’s just a coincidence. Scientific numerology, it was called.

But the story didn’t end there.

SCIENCE- Paul Dirac and the Big Bang Theory

I occasionally catch an episode of The Big Bang Theory on television. (I've loved Chuck Lorre since Cybil.) It’s a little broad for my tastes but I respect the fact that they seem to go out of their way to get both the geek references and the pseudo-scientific double talk in the ballpark of plausibility. But I wonder sometimes if the biggest joke in the series is intentional or not.

You see, I’m convinced that the tall skinny geek is modeled on 20th century physicist Paul Dirac. (I confess that I don’t watch the thing enough to know the names of the two main characters. For the purposes of this post I will refer to them as the tall skinny geek and the whiny Roseanne alumnus.) Even in the time of Einstein and Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Oppenheimer, Paul Dirac stood out as an intellect (he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize with Schrödinger) and also somewhat of a character. He was tall and slight, considered extremely shy and a little socially awkward. Someone once joked that 90% of his vocabulary was “yes”, “no”, and “I don’t know”. He once introduced his new bride to a friend by saying “This is [Hungarian physicist Eugene] Wigner’s sister, who is now my wife.”

At another time he was talking to a colleague (either Rudolf Peierls or Peter Kapitza, depending on who’s telling the story) who’s wife was in the room knitting. After watching her for a while he tells her that “There is a topologically inequivalent way of doing what you are doing.” Of course she asks him what he’s talking about and he shows her an alternate knitting stitch. The woman then informs him that what he’s doing is called purling.

Replying to a student who had told him “I don’t understand the second equation.” He once said “That is a statement, not a question.”

Dirac kidded Robert Oppenheimer about his love of poetry. He once said, "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

But there are two Dirac stories that make me sure that the tall skinny geek on The Big Bang Theory is based on the erstwhile physicist. The first is when someone making small talk with him at a banquet mentioned that the weather was blustery. Dirac got up and left the dinner table only to return in a few minutes to say that, yes, he had checked and it was indeed windy outside.

The second story could have come straight from the show itself. Dirac once postulated that there must be a optimal distance from which to view a woman’s face. Not so close that minor wrinkles and blemishes are too apparent or that the face is distorted but not so far away that one bit of the important detail is lost. After explaining his theory at a party once, another physicist asked him how close he had ever BEEN to a girl.

Holding his hands a couple of feet apart he said, “About this close.”

Maybe I’m just projecting Dirac onto the tall skinny geek. I don’t think the whiny Roseanne alumnus is actually a caricature of Einstein (though the hair is suspicious). It’s not likely that the creators of the Big Bang sitcom purposefully styled the character on an actual person. But the parallels are there. Even down to the character’s inherent sweetness. Niels Bohr said that of all the people in physics, Dirac had the purest soul.