Scientists who opposed the wave of mysticism and irrationality washing over their field were often hindered by their own acceptance of their opponents’ basic premises. Consider the efforts of Albert Einstein to uphold the existence of an objective reality:
The belief in an external world independent of the observing subject lies at the foundation of all natural science. However, since sense-perceptions only inform us about this external world, or physical reality, indirectly, it is only in a speculative way that it can be grasped by us.
If even the champions of “objective reality” acknowledged the impotence of reason, the battle was lost before it had begun.
I was depressed to see how so many scientists joined forces with their own destroyers. In a 1914 speech to a lay audience, Nobel Laureate physicist Wilhelm Wien proclaimed: “…causality… has nothing to do with the business [physics].” By the 1920’s the list of the advocates of acausality sounded like an honor roll of German physics. They included among them Nobel Laureates like Max Born and Otto Stern, and (for a while at least) Erwin Schrödinger. These scientists were not some marginal or fringe group. They represented the mainstream of Weimar physics. They were among the leaders and innovators in the coming discoveries. Non-objective philosophy and in particular, the rejection of causality were firmly entrenched well before the discoveries of the 1920’s.
Professor Graf was simply wrong. The anti-causal thinking came before the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. It was the cause, not the effect. Quantum mechanics was the end result of a Beer Hall Putsch that, unlike the Nazi’s failed attempt, succeeded in overthrowing the basic principles of science years before the discoveries of quantum mechanics were alleged to have demanded the change.
I thought I was going to have to wait a year or two for quantum mechanics to start showing up in my classes, so I could really begin to understand it. Boy, was I wrong! Professor Gomulka was reviewing the advocacy and lobbying that led to the Preserving Our Planet’s Future Act. “American’s were whipped up into a fury at the 9/11 attacks,” he explained. “They were ready to do something, anything to strike back. That’s when a few of the surviving congressmen bundled together some of the most progressive environmental policy concepts – ideas that had previously gone nowhere. Repackaged as a tribute to the late President Gore, Congress enacted those policies by acclamation. That’s a prime example of exploiting current events and the spirit of the moment to achieve policy goals entirely unrelated to the events themselves.”
Ryan raised his hand, “Professor, the Gore Tax has devastated our economy. Coal and oil workers lost their jobs, and with gas over $5 a gallon, everything that has to be transported becomes more expensive.”
“Carbon taxes, Ryan,” Professor Gomulka corrected him, “not ‘the Gore Tax.’ That’s reactionary rhetoric, and I will not tolerate hate-speech in my class. I’d like you to deconstruct that term in a one-page essay for Monday morning, focusing on how that right-wing propaganda only serves to avoid and redirect genuine interrogation of critical environmental issues.”
Ryan had been getting lots of Professor Gomulka’s special essay assignments.
“In answer to your question, though,” the professor continued, “it all boils down to quantum mechanics.”
Say, what?
“Everything is interrelated and connected to its polar opposite. As soon as we’re born, we begin to die. To achieve peace, we must use violence. There’s no utopia without a downside. To save the planet’s future, we must destroy the personal futures of some among us. For every positive, there is a negative, and we cannot have the one without the other. We must embrace the contradiction, because it is fundamental to reality itself.
“Niels Bohr called this ‘complementarity,’ the natural harmony of reality manifests itself in contradiction, and when we have found what appears to our limited minds to be a contradiction, we are actually looking at a fundamental truth. Quantum mechanics swept away causality and certainty, and demonstrated that we can only look at the world in a probabilistic fashion.
“The duality inherent in quantum mechanics carries over into politics. One man’s positive is another man’s negative. Assessing political policy as either positive or negative is the act of a naïve amateur. You have to look at politics through the filter of quantum mechanics, like Saul Alinsky did in his Rules for Radicals.”
I thought about what Professor Gomulka had said through the filter of Newtonian mechanics: action-reaction. I had to admire the evil genius behind the Circle’s plans. They certainly derailed electromagnetics. How much of the anti-causal, anti-logic thinking of the 1920s was their handiwork? Were the anti-causal interpretations of quantum mechanics just intended to confuse scientists and throw them off the track? Or were these interpretations specifically designed to give the likes of this Alinsky and Gomulka the means to justify and evade the contradictions and consequences of their political policies?
Amit was too busy working on his hotel network security app to review what I’d found and discuss it. He’d licensed his software to another small hotel chain, and he was busy trying to fix compatibility issues in time for a hot date with Ashley he had planned for the evening. Jennifer had declined to make it a double date, citing homework. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was done with my classes. I thought I’d head to the physics building to put in a couple hours at the mirror lab, work on some homework, and maybe find Professor Graf. I got the kiln warming to slump a glass plate.
I found Professor Graf in her office and started asking her further about complementarity.
“Honestly, I don’t think many physicists care about the philosophic details,” she explained. “The equations work. When someone starts talking about philosophy, we tell them to ‘shut up, and calculate.’”
Unfortunately, her office hours were about to begin for her pre-med physics students, and they were already lining up outside her office door. She’d reformed the pre-med physics curriculum to make it align with the MCAT exam that pre-med students have to take to get into med school. In addition to the usual stand-alone multiple-choice questions, the MCAT had essays about topics in physics and associated multiple-choice questions based on the content of the essays. She had reworked all her homework and exams to match the MCAT format. Professor Graf was very popular with the pre-med students, and her section of the class was full to overflowing – students in other professors’ sections would attend her class instead. She had an exam coming up soon, and the hallway outside her office was getting crowded. I wouldn’t be getting any time with her that afternoon.
Fortunately, I discovered Professor Chen in.
“Peter!” he greeted me cheerfully. “What brings you in this afternoon?”
“Just making another mirror and catching up on homework,” I explained. “You?”
“This satellite gamma ray data is extraordinary,” Professor Chen explained. “Professor Graf got the ephemeris data synched up and worked out the geometry, so we can correlate the time and orientation of the gamma ray observatory with specific locations on the ground.”
He motioned me over to look at his screen and typed “1022,” and a map of the Earth refreshed with different coloring. There were hot spots seemingly all over the place, but the strongest concentration appeared to be in central Africa.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a bright spot over central Africa.
“1022 kilo-electron-volts is the energy associated with the annihilation of an electron and a positron,” Professor Chen explained. “We’re seeing the creation and destruction of antimatter.”
“Antimatter exists in nature?” I hadn’t heard anything like that before.
“It’s another new discovery. Professor Graf figured it out. These hits correlate to thunderstorms. Apparently, the electric fields get so intense they actually generate an electron-positron pair. We’re seeing the gamma rays from the annihilation of antimatter – natural antimatter being created in storms high up in the atmosphere.”<
br />
“Wow,” that sounded incredible.
Professor Chen typed “622” and the map refreshed yet again. He zoomed in the field of view. “Here’s a map of Europe showing the locations of 662 keV hits.” I must have looked puzzled. “That’s the energy of the gamma ray emitted by cesium-137 when it decays,” he clarified.
I looked at the map. There was a particular hot spot in Eastern Europe, no, further east. The Ukraine? Wispy tendrils of seemed to flow from that source. “Chernobyl?”
“Exactly!” Professor Chen said triumphantly. “The half-life of cesium-137 is thirty years, so over half the cesium-137 released in the accident is still there, in the soil, taken up by plants. Chemically, it tends to displace potassium. This is an unprecedented level of detail. No ground-based survey even begins to come close!”
Professor Chen slowly scrolled his map to the east. “What’s this line here?” I pointed to a disconnected line of hits in central Russia.
“The Kyshtym disaster,” Professor Chen explained. “Another major Soviet nuclear accident. It happened in 1957. Huge release of cesium-137 and strontium-90. The cloud didn’t get up high into the atmosphere, so it wasn’t as widely distributed as Chernobyl. Now we can see it from space fifty years later.”
“This is amazing.” I could understand his enthusiasm. “You can see a nuclear accident fifty years later from space.” I looked closer. “These fainter collections of dots. Are they even older accidents?”
“It’s hard to tell from this data,” Professor Chen pointed out, “because of the decay process. A tiny concentration could be from a little cesium-137 released recently, or from a big release a long time ago. There’s a certain background noise from nuclear testing fallout most everywhere. In any event, Professor Graf and I are submitting a rapid communication to Geophysical Letters on these preliminary results – the first detailed global survey of radiation data, not to mention the discovery of antimatter being created in the atmosphere. There’s so much more, though, we can pull out of the data. If we compare the maps of different isotopes, we can actually date when the releases occurred.
I wasn’t following. “How does that work?”
“When uranium fissions,” Professor Chen explained, “it splits into two parts, one a bit larger than the other. You get a radioactive isotope with an atomic mass around 95 and another one around 137. Some of the isotopes, like Iodine-131, decay very quickly. Its half-life is 8 days, so in a few months, there’s very little left. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years. By comparing the concentrations of the fast-decaying isotopes to the slow-decaying isotopes, you can get an estimate of how long ago the source event occurred.”
I think I actually understood that. “I see.”
“Do you have plans for winter break?” Professor Chen asked. “We have lots of data, and we can afford to pay to have you help go through it.”
“I can certainly work through some of the break,” I replied. I wanted to get some quality time in the library running down leads, anyway. “Can you answer a question for me? I’ve been asking Professor Graf for help in understanding how quantum mechanics and electromagnetics work. She’s pointed me to the Schrödinger equation, to the Dirac equation, and to Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics. In each case, though, the math always includes charges. Is there a formulation more basic than that? An equation to describe just photons, without reference to any charges?”
Professor Chen raised an eyebrow. “That’s an interesting question. You can’t get photons of electromagnetic energy without some kind of accelerating charge. I’m not sure you actually can consider it in isolation.” He looked thoughtfully. “I suppose you could use the my-your-anna equation.” He wrote it out for me: Majorana. Then, he searched online a bit. “I found a few references for you,” he said, copying and pasting links into an email. “Complicated stuff. You might not be able to understand it all just yet, but it’s good to try.” I asked him to send the references straight to the printer to avoid leaving any sort of email trail.
I headed back to the mirror lab and reviewed the papers Professor Chen printed until it was time to check on the kiln. After I loaded up a glass plate, I studied papers on the Majorana equation a while and finally set them aside as too complicated. I made a bit of progress on my homework, but I was too stressed to concentrate. Even my usual pick-me-up of a frosted orange at the Varsity held no appeal.
Something I didn’t understand was happening behind the scenes of my academic dishonesty hearing. I’d thought that Professor Muldoon’s complaint would be heard by the Student Honor Committee. Instead, the Office of the Dean of Students had escalated my case straight to a hearing in front of some professors and a new dean. I hadn’t been able to find out much about this new dean.
Finally, I shut off the kiln to allow the kiln and the glass plate to cool, before heading home. Amit didn’t show up. “Nailed her,” he proclaimed proudly when I saw him the next morning. He recounted the particulars of the seduction in uncomfortably exquisite detail. Jennifer was not happy that Ashley and Amit had taken over the room for the evening. “She ended up sleeping in another friend’s room,” Amit explained. “You should have come with me and volunteered our room to do ‘homework’ with Jennifer. You might have scored, too!” My stress level was too high to care about Amit’s antics, or even girls for that matter.
I showed up to my hearing at the appointed time and took a seat outside the closed room. Professor Muldoon was already there. He glared at me when I arrived, then turned away, studiously ignoring me. I heard noises from inside: crying and sobbing. The doors opened and a weeping girl walked past me. An older woman, maybe her mother, had her arm around her. She’d been expelled.
“Your turn,” Professor Muldoon said calmly not deigning to look me in the eye as he walked past me to enter the hearing room.
I followed, taking my place at the table.
The hearing was a bit like a court, except I wasn’t allowed to have a lawyer. That didn’t seem particularly fair given that Professor Muldoon probably had way more experience at these things than I did. The dean began the hearing and asked Professor Muldoon to explain the complaint.
“This is my Linear Circuits midterm test,” he said, handing out copies to the dean and the other professors at the head table. “No student has ever completed my Linear Circuits midterm in the allotted time. The best score I’ve ever awarded was in the high eighties, and the last student who accomplished that was Roger Thorn.”
The name meant nothing to me, but apparently that impressed the professors.
“Here we have Mr. Peter Burdell, whose records lie before you: a student who’s currently managing a “C” in Introduction to Computer Programming, which is the easiest joke of a programming class this institution offers. Mister Burdell,” he said as if “mister” were a term of contempt, “turned this in to me and walked out five minutes before the end of the allotted time. I often have students so demoralized by the difficulty of my tests that they give up. I encouraged Mister Burdell to take the full allotted time.
“‘I’m done,’ he said, strutting out of my classroom.
“To my surprise, I saw that he had actually completed the exam. To my further surprise, once I graded the test, I discovered that every problem was correct, in many cases with just the answer and a few scribbled numbers. I myself can only barely solve the test in the allotted time. There is no way a student could have done so.
“It was clear to me that Mister Burdell must somehow have acquired either an advance copy or the solution key to my exam,” he continued. “The average on the test was a 53, and the high score was a 76. Were I to allow Mister Burdell to profit from his dishonesty, it would distort the curve and be unfair to the rest of the class. I generously offered Mister Burdell the option to take a zero on the test. He foolishly refused. I must, therefore, insist that he be expelled from this institution.” Professor Muldoon sat down.
“Professor Muldoon has levelled some rather serious accusations at
you Mr. Burdell,” the dean began. “Before we hear what you have to tell us, I want to explain a few things to you.” The dean looked at some notes, clearly reading a prepared statement. “This panel reviews cases of academic dishonesty. Too many times each year, we meet with students who insist that it was the first time they ever cheated, that they thought they could get away with it, that they didn’t think they were hurting anybody by their actions.”
I was appalled. I hadn’t yet presented my side of the story, and the dean was busy lecturing me on the evils of academic dishonesty as if I’d already been found guilty.
“…When you cheat, you’re really cheating yourself. Cheating not only gives you a grade you have not earned, but in a class in which grades are curved, your actions lower everyone else’s grade,” he droned on. “Degrees from Georgia Tech are a precious commodity, and cheating to obtain a false advantage shortchanges your fellow students. It cheapens the diploma so many work so hard to earn. It’s the same as stealing something of great value. Now,” he finally concluded, “do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, rising to my feet. “I agree completely with what you just said.”
“You acknowledge your guilt and accept responsibility for your actions?” the dean asked.
“No, and yes, respectively, sir.” I said.
The dean looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I do not acknowledge any guilt,” I clarified, “because I did not engage in any academic dishonesty, and I do accept responsibility for my actions. Always. Please pardon my ignorance, but is there someplace on the agenda of this hearing where I will be allowed to present my side of the story?”
“This is not an adversarial proceeding in the formal sense,” the dean said. “Think of it more as a counseling session in which members of the university come together to discuss academic dishonesty. If you have something to contribute, we will listen to you.”
A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth Page 9
