The Unbearable Lightness of Being Niels Bohr

Two waves and a particle walk into a bar...

I was not familiar with Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation of the behavior—or misbehavior—of tiny little bits of things. I just thought the notion that "nothing exists until somebody observes it" sounded loony.

But now that I have had a chance to study the subject a little, and perused the theories of Niels Bohr, and Max Planck, and some of the other heavy hitters in the wave-versus-particle smackdown, I’m slightly better informed. Of course, it still sounds loony, but I’m warming up to it.

Max and the others are an impressive bunch, but Niels is way more fun.

According to my sources, the debate about whether elementary particles of matter really are particles or are in fact waves seems to have driven poor Niels to distraction; so, in order to stifle the debate—and probably to stifle some of the voices in his head—he came up with a couple of clever dictums.

Niels’ Greatest Hits #1: “When it looks like a particle, it is a particle. When it looks like a wave, it is a wave.”

That’s a nifty way to dispose of the argument, even though it smacks of—to say the least—an uncharacteristic abandonment of scientific rigor on the part of good old Niels. Uncharacteristic for a scientist, anyway. Rather than press on trying to solve the wave-versus-particle conundrum, he finally upends the apple cart and says: “It’s neither! It’s both! Whatever!” Not that I blame him.

Niels’ Greatest Hits #2: “It is meaningless to ascribe any properties or even existence to anything that has not been measured.”

This one is breathtaking; no wonder Niels got the big money. It combines a deft handling of the aforementioned with some kick-ass audacity. “Measure this, pal,” says Niels, knowing that it can’t be done. Brilliant! Furthermore, saying that nothing is real unless it’s observed is just a baby step from: “Nothing exists unless I say so.”

Frankly, I like it. It nourishes my pretensions to godlike power. Behold! I bring things into existence by the merest glance. Before me, nothing! Without me, nothing!

After me... well, I don’t know. If I bring things into being by looking at them, do I therefore render them nonexistent by looking the other way? Can I ignore things into oblivion? Once I bring a thing into being by observing it, do I need to appoint someone else keep an eye on it, lest it suffer from neglect and disappear?

Still left hanging is the question regarding how, if a thing didn’t exist before I cast my sacred visage its way, I managed to observe it. How did I know to look there? Damn, I’m good. Man-gods like Niels and me are amazing! I am in awe of my own divine powers.

When Nature Blows

"...thousands of people simultaneously went bug-eyed and slack-jawed over the following theretofore unpredictable consequence of a big-time hurricane..."

Yesterday, Barack Obama visited the "victims" of the Iowa floods. Wasn't that special? I hear things went well, inasmuch as nobody asked him anything like the following questions:

1. Where the heck is FEMA?
   
2. When do I get my check?
   
3. What stadium should we hole up in?
   
4. How long will it be before we start to cannibalize one another?
   
5. Where are all the movie stars to lend their support?
   
6. Did the Republicans blow up the levees?
   
7. Is it true that George Bush hates rural Midwesterners?
   
8. Where will we be housed, more or less indefinitely, at taxpayer expense?
   
9. Why us? Good God, man, why is it always us?
   
10. What's the best place to start looting?

Instead, they listened politely as Obama speechified; then they got back to the business of drying out anything that was still wet, and generally getting on with their lives.

Those fools! Where is the outrage? Where are their demands?

*************

I lived through Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which, according to Wikipedia, was "...the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin." Hurricanes (like hurricane Katrina, for example!) usually give plenty of warning. We knew for several days that Wilma was coming, and that it would hit Monday morning.

So... Sunday I went out and 1) bought enough ice to fill all the coolers, 2) topped off the cars with gas, and 3) got some cash from the ATM. I already had a box in the garage marked “hurricane,” with batteries, battery powered lights, and a little battery powered TV, plus some small propane tanks that are part of the camping gear. I checked and had a full tank of propane for the grill. All that took less than an hour.

I like to procrastinate as much as the next fellow, but even I was able to manage that level of preparation.

Then the storm hit, and thousands of people simultaneously went bug-eyed and slack-jawed over the following theretofore unpredictable consequence of a big-time hurricane:

The power went out! The electrically powered gas station pumps didn’t work, so no one could buy gas who hadn't bought it already. The few enterprising gas stations with owners who eventually hooked up to generators were so popular that people sat in lines for as much as 12 hours at a time–and sometimes they still didn’t get gas, and had to return the next day for another long wait. There were occasional fistfights, and police had to manage the traffic.

As I say, the power went out. Therefore refrigerators and freezers were not functioning. After the first couple of days, a government agency was handing out bags of ice at various locations. People stood in lines for endless hours for their allotment of exactly two bags. Most of them had walked to get the ice because they happened to be the same people who hadn’t put gas in their cars prior to the storm. Then they walked home again. Before they got home, the ice had turned to water. Astonished, many of them started the whole process all over the next day, and the day after that, each time with—brace yourself—the same result!

Did I mention that the power went out? Generators were a hot commodity. Home Depot had them, in very limited supply. Three hundred people would begin to queue up four hours before the stores opened. The first thirty or forty people got generators. The rest went home and came back the next day, when (it was rumored) there might be a delivery of a few more.

Still, everybody handled the entire crisis with seamless grace and aplomb, compared with what happened in New Orleans.

In Praise of Macintosh

"[Microsoft] Windows is like the earliest Ford automobiles: you can have any operating system you want, as long as it’s bleak."

Having worked for so long on a Macintosh, a far superior (and, admittedly, slightly more expensive) computer, I have been spoiled; and have lost touch with you afflicted proletarians, toiling under the grim and unforgiving aegis of the Microsoft Death Star.

It is easy for us, the enlightened and blessed minority, to forget what it’s like out there for the vast majority of the oppressed masses, cringing virtually every moment of your waking lives under a cruel lash of conformity and enforced dysfunction.

It’s not your fault: with no chance to compare that which is imposed by your Dark Overlords with that which is freely chosen—the dull and monochrome of Windows versus the full spectrum of freedom, light and color that is the Mac—how are you to know any different? Totalitarian regimes of every age have kept their subjects in the dark, shut off from any alternative way of being.

(Windows is like the earliest Ford automobiles: you can have any operating system you want, as long as it’s bleak.)

I didn’t want to feel superior. I have always been an enemy of class distinctions, even—no, especially!—in an instance like this, when I am comfortably ensconced in the bosom of the advantaged stratum. To the ramparts! Side by side with our disadvantaged brethren!

It’s not as if your cruel masters in Redmond haven’t made valiant efforts to at least make their flagship product SEEM friendly and, well, sensible—even sort of comparable!

Look how closely (if clumsily) the desktop on your computer has impersonated the one on mine: drop-down menus—check; mouse and pointer—check; desktop “icons”—check. 

These impersonations have been cleverly instituted and insidiously established by the faceless operatives of the Dark Side—gradually, with as little fanfare as possible, so that even the most observant of observers might easily forget, by and by, where those innovations originated; and might come to concur with the Bill Gates character in the film “Pirates of Silicon Valley” that all ideas, and especially the ones that have accumulated to make up the design of my desktop (and later, yours) are just “out there somewhere”—a part of the atmosphere we all breathe—and belong, therefore, to everyone, and thus to no one.

Blizzards of legal action have been triggered by the imitation of such desktop items as the Macintosh “trash can” (on a Windows desktop, the ‘greener-than-thou’ “recycle bin”); and the switch of the default orientation of external drives, new files and the like from the right side of the desktop (Macintosh) to the left (Windows). Whoa! I bet nobody saw that coming. “Whatever do you mean? That’s COMPLETELY different and therefore original!”

The “desktop,” by the way, is itself an innovation of the Mac, “adopted” elsewhere in due course.

But let’s not split more hairs.

Here we have scratched at the surface, literally—the part of the computer we all see every day. Let’s not carry on and dissect the whole of it—including what’s under the hood—and worry over who developed what, and who “borrowed” from whom. I think that pattern has already been established. To go further can only engender ill feelings.

Yours, I mean. Not mine. I’m happy with my computer. :)

Welcome (Sort of) to AmeriKa

"We don’t know how the finest minds of the United States Congress were so fiendishly beguiled; [perhaps] some sort of brain-altering hypnotic trance..."

Dear Sir,

My wife and I are immigrants and have just completed our interview for naturalization. We hope to be sworn in, in due course, as citizens of this Great Country and be able to vote in the Nov. Presidential election. We have just been told at an Independence Day gathering that Pres. Bush has found a way to sign legislation into law, circumventing Congress, and has in fact passed several such laws (although no examples could be given). We find this very alarming. Is it true?

—Two New Citizens (maybe)

***

Dear Two New Citizens Maybe:

Sadly, it is true.

Thank you for your query. There are, as you probably know, many benefits to American citizenship, not least among them access to federal government jobs, and the right to get your whole family admitted to our shores, and likewise to get them set up with cushy government posts. What a country!

However, all is not rosy here in the so-called Land of the Free, thanks to George W. Bush and his cruel minions. You have been let in on a little secret that many long-standing citizens of this country still do not know: Bush has, indeed, found a way, as you write, to “sign legislation into law, circumventing Congress,” and he has in fact “passed several such laws.” The fact that “no examples could be given” is merely an indication of the depth and breadth of this sinister conspiracy to first destroy our Constitution and then blow up the world.

We first began to realize the power of the Bushies to influence events when they somehow persuaded the majority of Congress to vote for the “liberation” of Iraq. Liberation! What a laugh! More like, “oil grab for Halliburton”!

We don’t know how the finest minds of the United States Congress were so fiendishly beguiled (although our best guess is some sort of brain-altering hypnotic trance imposed by means of laser beams and subliminal messages broadcast on C-Span).

The important thing is that we know it WAS done; and furthermore, that it was not a “one-off” event, because every time a vote has come up in Congress to continue to fund this illegal war of genocide against the freedom fighters of Al Qaeda, the vote has ultimately gone Bush’s way. Coincidence? Not likely.

Setting aside the issue of HOW these evil pranks have been played, there remains the question of WHY. Are Bush and his foul cohort simply evil beings?

We’re thinking: yes! They’re Republicans, after all, which means they are all sexually repressed, moralizing, war-mongering, Bible-thumping retards with one brain between them (Karl Rove’s).

Stupid but devious, Bush’s vile toadies are running things now, and none of us are safe. They are spying on us all—listening to our phone calls, intercepting emails, snooping in our library records, and probably reading our very thoughts somehow.

They torture prisoners by squirting water in their noses; imprison enemy combatants without as much as a by-your-leave; and carry on their wicked foreign policy as if all the problems in the world were caused by terrorists and assorted foreign troublemakers, instead of the real source: the Dark Lord Dick Cheney.

It’s a grim picture, to be sure. But even a vicious parasite like George W. Bush can’t hold on to power forever. Come November, a new breeze with blow across this country, and it will carry with it a message of Hope and Change, Change and Hope as it purges the foul, stale stench of Republican chicanery from our weary midst.

And you, new citizens, will share in a new kind of Amerika. Welcome!

Man Versus the Asteroid

"...we are incapable of 'raping' the environment; the most sinister effect we can have... is to pester it a little, and briefly at that."

[The following is a response to this article.]

Jan— Thanks for sending me your paper, “Global Warming is a Controversial Political Football.”

I am at a disadvantage, not having been able to read either Jack Rabideau’s or Jon Frangipani’s articles, but as you can see, that significant handicap doesn’t prevent me from barging into the discussion anyway.

You write that nowhere in Mr. Frangipani’s article, to which Mr. Rabideau’s article is apparently a response, is global warming mentioned. It is worthy that you point that out, if for no other reason than to frame the terms of the discourse; furthermore if Mr. Rabideau wrote primarily about global warming in response to an article on another subject, he has done you and his other readers a disservice—a 'bait and switch.'

I'm pleased that you agree that “He [Mr. Rabideau] is correct about the Earth’s ability to rejuvenate and rehabilitate itself.”

I concur that the Earth will be just fine, by and by, without us (unless the asteroid strikes!) and can easily slough off any effects, negative or otherwise, of our brief sojourn here. I would say further that we would be hard pressed to have ANY impact that would outlive us for long.

One example: we only recently, in the scheme of things, discovered the pyramids of Chichén-Itzá and Teotihuacan, which the Mayans and their predecessors surely thought were destined to last forever, but which nature promptly proceeded to wreck and then hide from prying eyes for about a millennium.

Your generous assessment of some of Mr. Rabideau’s salient points (“allow me to first debate in favor of Mr. Rabideau’s point of view”) reflects well on you. However, you show your teeth a bit in your reference to “…we humans with all our pollution and raping of the environment…”

I have to say we are incapable of “raping” the environment; the absolute most sinister effect we can have on the Earth, assuming we really put our devious minds to it, is to pester it a little, and briefly at that—and furthermore, that whatever temporary ill effects we may have can be effects that only annoy and even maybe endanger us, but not the planet.

Having said that, I do agree with you: We ARE stewards, of a sort, of the tiny sliver of Earth’s crust upon which we fancy ourselves holding sway; but remember that we have taken on that responsibility voluntarily, with the best of intentions, and deserve full credit for it. All those who curse mankind for its very existence (the most rabidly “environmentalist” of the environmentalists) should try to bear that in mind.

You write: “I can not find anything wrong with having compassion and acting responsibly when it comes to the environment.” I can’t either. And I challenge anyone to present a cogent argument to the contrary.

Where people differ is in the emphasis. Is this given thing a big deal, or just nature doing what it will? Is that other thing not to be bothered about, or is it an existential foreshadowing of planetary doom?

In whose estimation—and when—does a “concern” become a “crisis”? A local event, like the water in the Everglades, doesn’t cut much ice on, say, most of the continent of Africa, since every day is Earth Day when you wake up on earth, scratch at it all day for enough food to stay alive, and then sleep on it again that night.

Here again, the “developed” countries take a beating they don’t deserve. Because environmental stewardship is an ethical construct to which only the denizens of the “developed” countries have given any thought, to their—our—everlasting credit.

Everlasting, that is, until we go extinct, or the asteroid hits.

Women Entombed

Entombed is, I think, precisely the right word to describe the condition of women under the authority of the Islamic “fundamentalists” in those parts of the world where Shariah law holds them in its grip—entombed in their houses, and entombed in their head-to-toe shrouds.

Where, on the subject of such women, are the voices of that significant faction of the Left, the feminists? Is the enslavement of some women acceptable to that faction? How about the rest of the package: genital mutilation, forced marriages replete with beatings and all manner of other abuses, “honor” killings, and stoning for (suspected) adultery? Do the feminists of the West simply regard such atrocities as part of the “culture” of Islamic societies and thus somehow beyond serious reproach?

Did Western women deserve their own emacipation from tired old restrictions, their individuality encouraged and cherished, their hopes nurtured and celebrated and regarded as a birthright—but not those other women? Some of us were under the impression that the aspirations of the feminists were universal (they kept telling us just that)—that all women sought the same degree of liberation, and deserved it, and had it coming.

The feminists evidently fought battles and scored what they regarded as victories not for WOMEN, but for SOME WOMEN. Women like them: women in the West—that is to say, women who had the good fortune to be born somewhere other than under the grim and suffocating cloak of Islamic tyranny.

“Sexism” is a word we used to hear with great frequency—as defined in the West as describing something akin to the malediction that “women don’t belong in ________ (fill in the blank)”. But if some males in the West harbored “Neanderthal” notions of women’s “place,” even the least evolved among us were absolute pikers compared to those who believe that:

“Allah made women deficient in religion, in intellect, and in emotions…” 

“…the righteous women are devoutly obedient…” 

“Scourge them and beat them…”

Those are just a few tidbits describing the attitudes of half a billion men in the so-called Muslim world, give or take a few (and of an increasing number of Muslim men in the West as well). There is of course a great deal more—a whole host of strictures regarding the insufficiency of women to conduct their own lives without brutal and uncompromising supervision.

Aforementioned are clitorectomies (too clinical a word for removing what are regarded as the dangerous parts of a female with a sharp rock or a piece of glass) without benefit of either anesthesia or antiseptics; forced marriages, often to much older men, and just as often to complete strangers, who are enjoined to “scourge them and beat them” if they displease in any way; “honor” killings, wherein a selected (male) member of the family is tasked with murdering a wayward female relative who has deviated from the “true path”—that is, from her prescribed obligations under the cruel rubric of medievalist dogma.

What have the feminists of the West to say about these lively activities? Is a pass given to such atrocities because they happen “over there” and are therefore none of the business of the inhabitants of the West? Wither the universal sisterhood? Did it never exist?

If not, then fine. But if Western progenitors of women’s rights are going to keep to their own backyard and their own provincial concerns—their very own rights and privileges, and no one else’s—they should bear in mind that as goes the rest of the world, so goes their little corner, too, thanks to the languid attitude among the chattering classes in the West toward the encroachment of creeping Islamism, and its attendant and inevitable barbarities.

Islamic fundamentalism is coming; indeed in some parts of Europe and North America, it is already here. Honor killings, to take one stark example, have occurred with ever-greater frequency in Canada and the United States in this, the 21st century.

It will happen again—as will many more incidents of the same sort. So the question remains: whither the sisterhood? And for that matter, wither the men of the Left, who marched in solidarity with the feminists, and called themselves feminists, too?

If the feminists of the West don’t care about women elsewhere—and evidently they don’t—what will it take to energize them to what will soon enough become their very own cause? Will they not protest, at last, until their own entombment is upon them?

My Fellow Americans

An Open Letter to Two New American Citizens

Well, now look what you’ve done. Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourselves into.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s start at the beginning:

I know where you two are from; everyone else might as well know it, too. South Africa! Afrique de Sud! Land of vast wine farms, thanks to the French. Land of row upon row of citrus trees, thanks to the Dutch. Land of tea time and parliamentary impulses, thanks to the Brits. A far-flung outpost of the British Empire. If Australia is the Wonder Down Under, you are expatriates from the Wonder Not Quite So Far Down Under.

Boers, you are. Dutchmen, perhaps, if you’ll pardon my saying so. And worse: beneficiaries of the stain of—Apartheid!

You BASTARDS! Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just that I’ve heard a lot about you people over the last few decades, and none of it has been good. Never mind that you were born into that system, and didn’t have much to say about it. As you will soon see, that kind of excuse doesn’t cut any ice around here.

Which brings me to your newly acquired citizenship. You thought being responsible for Apartheid was rough. Now you’ve taken on the mantle of American citizenship, which makes you complicit in so much more. To wit:

1) GENOCIDE AGAINST AMERICA’S INDIGINOUS PEOPLE! You are Americans now. You may as well have personally passed out smallpox-infested blankets to the Indians (sorry, I mean the 'Native Americans').

2) SLAVERY! As American citizens, you may be tempted to protest that you sacrificed 600,000 lives in a civil war to end slavery. Don’t give me that guff. For all the textbooks know, you invented slavery. Hang your heads in shame.

3) CAPITALISM! Just because your so-called “free market system” has made you an economic powerhouse and the envy of the world, and just because wherever people emulate that system they prosper, there are still poor people on the planet, so obviously your fancy-pants capitalism doesn’t work.

4) GLOBALIZATION! You’re Americans now, and it’s all your fault that societies on the other side of the world aren’t nearly as quaint as they used to be. Maybe they liked being impoverished and without hope. Who are you to say? Whose business is it of yours to go barging into their countries, offering them jobs and technology and “outsourcing” your prosperity?

5) FOREIGN AID! Sure, it sounds nice that you give more aid to other countries than anyone else. But who says they want your lousy aid? Sure, they accept it, and maybe it saves a few hundred thousand lives every year; but have you thought about the impact it has on their self-esteem? Didn’t think of that, did you, cowboy?

I’ll stop there. There is plenty more for you to feel guilty about, but as just-minted American citizens, you can only absorb so much at a time. When you're ready, all you have to do is turn on the news to learn much more about how bad you really are.

Having said all that…

Now that you really are Americans, I can let you in on a little secret: all that stuff is rubbish.

The best thing about being Americans is... we're better than everybody else. It’s true!

We invented everything. (Go ahead, try to think of ten things we didn’t invent.)

We rule the planet through commerce and culture. We’re the economic engine that runs the world, and everybody everywhere wants to get on board.

We have the mightiest military the world has ever seen (and it has seen quite a few). Our enemies fear us; our friends rely on us. We can be anywhere in four hours, if we’re not there already.

People envy us and even hate us; but the ones who can afford it can’t wait to send their kids here to get an education. We have a problem keeping people out of our country. (Most other countries have a problem keeping them in.)

We write more books. We read more books. We know more. We are smarter, richer, and better looking than everybody else.

And we owe all that to people like you.

America is made up of people like you—people from somewhere else. We are all from somewhere else. This country is made up of people who wanted more, and had the courage and determination to go find it.

Your average Ivan or Ng or Pablo—or Johannes—doesn’t pick up and leave his country of birth, no matter how unhappy he is. He’s too frightened, or lazy, or complacent. It takes a special kind of person to do what you did—what all Americans have done since the beginning. Those are the kind of people we want here. Risk-takers. Dreamers. Hard workers. People like us.

People like you. Welcome, my fellow Americans.