Another Interlude: What do Gravity Waves Mean?

Just read the typically excellent articles in Science News on the recent confirmation of gravity waves. The merger of two black holes that triggered the waves that reached earth some 1.3 billion years later converted three solar masses into sufficient energy to send a tiny but measurable ripple to the two LIGO detectors. The total energy released “exceeded that of all the stars in the universe combined.” But as SN notes, the gravity waves did not travel through space – as does light – but as a wave in the fabric of spacetime itself traveling at the speed of light.

It is worth pondering the fact that gravity and light – both seemingly very different types of elementary vectors – both travel at the same finite speed. What is it about the universe that is revealed by the cosmic speed limit of 186,000 miles per second that even gravity obeys?

I've previously suggested that the speed of light measures “our awareness of the distance traveled within spacetime” and that “the speed of light may actually be the speed of consciousness.” At the speed of light, time stops. Someone surfing a photon would be everywhere that photon would ever be at the same moment. We experience the universe as spacetime. We move through it while, in a sense, the universe itself must exist all at once outside space and time. Lots of scientists are looking at ways to use string theory or supersymmetry, positing extra dimensions and multiple universes, to try to explain our universe through what might seem an updated version of efforts to find how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Regrets to St Thomas, whom I follow in the thought that when you reach the end of reason, it's a finger pointing to god.) But these efforts beg a question: whatever theory they come up with, why would the cosmos be that way? Reality may not be an infinitely peel-able onion. The fact remains that we live in a universe where even gravity takes time to travel as perceived by us. (I suppose a surfer riding that gravity wave would also be everywhere that four-dimension wave would be at the very same moment.)

Why ask what all this means? The notion of deriving meaning from the fact that we exist and in a world that seems perfect for us is basic to humanity. But beyond this, facing up to these questions may be the way forward to a new science. This would not mean abandoning quantum physics and relativity but thinking our way through them without trying to find dancing angels.

Premature Globalization

Globalization has come too early in humanity's history and gone too far. It is unsustainable with burdens and benefits distributed too unevenly to provide a basis for global stability. Globalization of the market has concentrated wealth in some places at the cost elsewhere of erratic consumer- and export-driven growth that distorts economic development and entrenches poverty. Free trade has meant cross-border transfers of jobs that have left many struggling to make ends meet in the “new economy” while helping others in low wage markets to enter the cycle. The resultant distortions have thus both concentrated and generalized inequality. Globalized media greatly magnifies the perception of inequality by delivering clear images of what is available elsewhere thus potentiating large-scale population movements. Globalization in the 21st Century benefits only some at the cost of the many who have been encouraged to believe that they too benefit from the increased availability of cheaper goods that they can't fix but must constantly buy anew. The majority of humanity still must struggle to attain or maintain a decent living for themselves and their families and a future offering hope for their children.

Within countries, those who directly benefit from the various facets of globalization face a rising tide of political opposition. In what may turn out to be a seminal offering, Peggy Noonan in a recent WSJ piece outlines an important distinction between what she calls the "protected" and the "unprotected." Taking this concept perhaps a little further than she would, the protected are those who make public policy or have purchased the people who do. Through their decisions and predominant political power, the protected impose mechanisms, processes and conditions that provide them direct benefit. The unprotected are those who must survive in the world that the protected make for them. The protected live the good life secure in their own communities. Because they are mostly insulated from any negative effects of their policies, they feel they can inflict anything on the rest. The unprotected live with none of these advantages and all of the fallout. Populist political movements from the left and the right have arisen in may places as the unprotected have lost their patience with traditional politics and politicians. In the US that includes Trump and Bernie Sanders, in Europe populist parties from France to Poland threatening or wresting political power from the “centrists.”

The root problem could be termed premature globalization. It might seem that the tying together of the world's economies might have been the result of some inevitable natural force. But the lowering of trade barriers and opening of borders has been the result of a myriad of political decisions by the protected. They have been able to move jobs to places with lower labor costs and to “import” – through legal and “illegal” migration – cheap labor to where they need it. Free trade always means that jobs move from one place to another. All those Chinese “lifted” out of poverty through years of high growth have come directly from jobs moved from America and elsewhere. The benefit to the unprotected – including the many in the developing world not able to compete with China or the West – has been slim and often fleeting. But as a friend has noted, free trade is only Pareto-optimal if the gains are broadly shared. The gains have not been broadly shared but the costs have.

Who benefits from free trade: the owners of capital and their public servants. They reap the profits and gain extra from buying favored treatment (openly or through corruption). Also, the local political elites of developing countries who monopolize power and skim off what comparatively little wealth trickles in from the global trade channels. Some from supplying raw materials (often mined or grown in ways wasteful and injurious to the environment and local populations), some from importing those planned-obsolescence consumer goods. (I freely admit to “benefitting” from the endless series of iPhones.) In America, they use their advantage to win favorable tax rates (or move operations elsewhere) while pushing to reduce “wasteful” government expenditure on things like infrastructure, healthcare or social welfare.

The primary role of government should be to ensure that all citizens can earn a basic living while helping them provide a suitable and nurturing environment for their children. This means the economy needs to provide a range of jobs from the highly skilled to the basic to mirror the natural mix of abilities and interests. Taking just the United States, over the last decades the Democrats and Republicans both have failed to meet this test. They have pushed the “benefits” of free trade at the cost of millions of jobs lost. Their mantra has been the benefits of those cheaper consumer goods and the possibility of newer jobs in the advanced economy. Even before the 2008 financial tsunami, those newer jobs were hard to find and most were lower pay.

When I was a lad in the 1950s and 60s, my parents raised five children on the salary of a truck driver plus the occasional factory employment of my mother. Try raising five children today on a working stiff's salary, even if both parents work. (How many political hacks rail against abortion but don't care a whit about how to pay for raising those children once they are born?) The protected also benefit from cheap imported labor, often forced to work off the books or as “contractors” without benefits. They do the jobs “Americans won't do.” Translation, they do the jobs Americans won't do at wages too low to allow a decent living.

Globalization would work well in a world of less pronounced inequality. But we have been pushed into it prematurely. The world of the 21st Century perhaps just does not produce enough wealth to share sufficiently for most people to have a decent life where they were born. Thus the wave of refugees – who come from the ranks of the unprotected whether because of conflict or poverty – overwhelming the gates of Europe or trying to somehow get through Mexico to the US. Maybe the only recourse is for societies that can afford to go it alone to raise the walls, close the doors and pull those jobs back to the homeland by ending free trade. Leave China to deal with its population without the benefit of those jobs imported from America. This is the appeal of the Trumps. It's hard to argue against and certainly the same old refrains from the protected – Democrats and Republicans – have lost their popular appeal. No matter who wins the American presidency or how hard Europe tries to prevent migrants from trying to cross, the unprotected are not likely to be denied forever.

The rise of the unprotected

In Europe breaking (on TransConflict), I suggest that the renewed flood of refugees this year will tear up the reality of a border-less EU while raising a popular political backlash from the populist left and right.  As noted there, Peggy Noonan in a recent WSJ piece makes an interesting distinction between the "protected" and the "unprotected."  Taking her concept perhaps a little further than she does, the protected make public policy (and/or influence how it is made through money) while the unprotected are those who have to live in it (with no real influence over how its made). The protected make the decisions (directly or indirectly), living the good life secure in their own communities. Because they are mostly insulated from any negative effects of their policies, they feel they can impose anything on the rest. The unprotected live with none of these advantages. Noonan credits the rise of Trump in the US with his understanding that the unprotected have given up hope on the usual politics and politicians.  But this also explains the rise of populist parties in Europe where the unprotected live with insecurity and enforced austerity.

Here in the US, the protected are oddly enough taking on one of their own, Donald Trump.  He has cleverly rode -- enabled even -- a wave of angst from the unprotected to the lead in the Republican Party race for its presidential nomination.  The party grandees (and their moneyed supporters) are now taking unprecedented measures to try and cut him down.  They claim he is not a true conservative.  By this they mean he does not follow the mantra of any government is bad government, any taxes are bad taxes and any social welfare program is bad social welfare.  The "true conservatives" -- funded by the very rich contributing hundreds of millions of dollars -- don't need government.  They simply want to control it and use it for their own ends, including cutting tax rates on them and ensuring little money is "wasted" on the unprotected.  These folks don't like Trump.  He does not seem to share their reluctance to use government for certain ends.  While he wants to abolish "Obamacare" he also says he will "broaden healthcare access, make healthcare more affordable and improve the quality of the care available to all Americans."  On taxes, he would abolish most tax exemptions and "loopholes" for the rich and for corporations.  This almost sounds socialist.

Given Trump's anti-immigrant position and over-the-top rhetoric, he is not everyone's cup of tea.  But he has tapped into the same popular sense of having been left out that Bernie Sanders has. This all suggests a wave of revulsion against the rule of the protected that may sweep over the November elections and change the landscape or simply run aground against the rocks.  The protected will pull out everything they have to stop Trump.  Sanders they will leave to Hillary while burnishing their Bengazi/email knives for her.

Deep Time: Take Two

It's hard to fully comprehend the depth of time past. The universe came into existence some 13.8 billion years ago (BYA). The earth was formed around 4.5 BYA. The first signs of life – simple microbes – appear about 3.5 BYA. But as presented in a wonderful book about just how complex and essential they are – Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul Falkowski – microbes are anything but simple. Microbes – bacteria and archaea – are prokaryotes, single cell life without a nucleus or organelles. Everything else – single cell or multi-cell plants and animals – are eukaryotes: cells containing a nucleus and organelles such as mitochondria. The prokaryotes developed the ability to extract energy from the chemical environment and, eventually, from the sun. It took another two billion years for them to evolve into complex cells: the eukaryotes.

Two billion years is a long time. Why did it take that long to go from bacteria and archaea to the first eukaryotes? The machinery to convert chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide or ammonia, and then the much harder task of using sunlight, to fuel life would have taken a long time to develop. But not just that. Extracting energy from the environment meant a complex process of freeing electrons from chemical bonds, transferring those electrons around within the cell and using them ultimately to create other chemicals that would store those electrons (i.e., serve as “food”) to provide energy for cellular processes. Photosynthesis is an even more complex process that uses sunlight to crack electrons from water and combine them – through intermediate steps – with carbon dioxide to produce carbohydrates and, as a waste product, oxygen. This complex machinery had to evolve step by step through the repeated random changes in DNA and RNA as winnowed through natural selection. (A good part of the first billion years after the formation of earth would have been used for the construction of the RNA/DNA mechanism itself.) As Falkowski argues, the processes for producing and consuming biologic energy work as tightly as a complex and precise system of interlocking gears: one out of place and the whole won't work. All the parts of the machinery had to come on line more or less at once or it would not function. Somehow, the machinery evolved anyway, implying that a lot of time was required for vastly more failures – in which the resulting organism from random mutation simply died – than successes.

That the machinery was there to be evolved – that the givens of the universe allowed such a thing to come into existence – is also worth pondering. As is the fact that we would not be here otherwise.

Broken Symmetry – An Interlude on Potholders and the Big Bang

Was working on finishing a potholder recently – on one of those old-fashioned hand looms – and ran out of the colors I needed to finish it in my preferred manner. I usually like to do symmetrical color schemes where warp and woof mirror each other. But this time, though I thought I planned it out properly, I came up short on a key color. I thought of trying to hide the misalignment by using a near match but that didn't seem right. I eventually decided to just break the symmetry in a way that suggested a kind of purpose. It later occurred to me that this might have been at work at the Big Bang as well.

When the energy released by the Big Bang cooled enough to allow the appearance of charged particles, an equal amount of matter and anti-matter should have been created. But if that had been the case, the two would have combined in mutual annihilation. This obviously didn't happen since we are here. For some reason, the symmetry broke. So far, every measurement seems to confirm that particles of matter and their anti-matter counterparts are identical except for charge. So how did matter baryons come to outnumber anti-mater baryons and thus survive annihilation to form the observable universe? Now maybe – and here come the potholder point – there was simply not enough of something. Perhaps the very singularity that expanded into the Big Bang was already imprinted with some characteristic that meant less of one flavor of charged particle than the other, just as it seems different particles were imprinted with varying degrees of stickiness in the Higgs field?

The search for the physics determining the basic constituents and constants of the universe may simply have reached the point of having to think about these matters in a different way. 

                                                       The potholder in question

Gravity Waves, Relativity and Quantum Physics: Part I

The recent finding of gravity waves produced by the merger of two distant black holes has been taken as yet another confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. There have been various such confirming measurements, including the gravitational redshift and lensing of light and non-Newtonian, changes in the orbit of Mercury. But the deeper significance of this latest discovery lies in what it may say about the rival grand theory, quantum physics. The Standard Model of modern physics has proven remarkably good at accounting for the known elementary particles (fermions, hadrons and bosons). The measurement of the Higgs boson in 2012 was an astounding confirmation of our most basic understanding of the origin of mass. Despite the “spookiness” of some of the predictions of quantum physics – such as quantum entanglement – many of its strangest have been verified.

Indeed, the Standard Model is rather too perfect. It seems to account for most of the basic parameters of matter and energy including three of the four fundamental forces: —electromagnetic and the weak nuclear (unified as electro-weak) and the strong nuclear interaction (which holds together the atomic nucleus). But it cannot explain gravity, dark matter or dark energy (thus leaveing out 95% of what we believe to be the universe). In trying to extend its reach – to achieve a grand unified theory to include gravity –- physicists have so far failed to find the new phenomenon that would hint at new physics in the form of supersymmetry or string theory. The Standard Model explains what it does so perfectly that those seeking to take it further cannot seem to find any of the discrepancies that might point the way to a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

General Relativity, on the other hand, has been confirmed in every case. It provides a coherent theory of the universe as framed by spacetime and the speed of light. It does not explain the Big Bang or the menagerie of fundamental particles. Rather, General Relativity describes how mass interacts with space and across time. Mass deforms spacetime and matter and energy – including gravity waves – travel in straight lines along the bends. Einstein's famous equation – the E=MC² of Special Relativity – does not explain why mass and energy are interchangeable but provides a way to measure the transformation of one into the other within the limitation imposed by the speed of light (which cannot be exceeded).

Relativity is in essence a top-down theory. It begins with Einstein's grand view of the very nature of spacetime, the basic fabric of the universe. Quantum physics is more bottoms-up, seeking to discover the basic pieces of reality. Relativity is a complete and verified theory within its defined area. The Standard Model of quantum physics is incomplete within its domain. It may be that relativity is somehow the more fruitful way to think about the universe. For Einstein, gravity is not a force, as it was for Newton, but an artifact of mass bending spacetime. Quantum physics again treats gravity as a force and seeks to find its particle, the “graviton.” But what considerations may be drawn from looking at quantum physics in light of relativity, instead of trying to extend it to account for gravity? The key may lie in pondering more deeply mass, light and the role of the observer.

Mistakes Were Made II

The US is now in the process of choosing its next president. Everyone – in America and beyond – should insist that all the candidates clearly define their notion of national interest and explain how it addresses limitations as well as possibilities. Then the American people must choose very wisely. The 21st Century appears to be just beginning a wild ride.


Full piece in TransConflict.