michio kaku gordon kane - phi kappa phi - founded in · pdf file1/26/2001 ·...

WILLIAM A. HISCOCKFrom Wormholes to the Warp Drive: Using Theoretical

Physics to Place Ultimate Bounds on Technology

MICHIO KAKUM-Theory: Mother of All Superstrings

GORDON KANEAnthropic Questions

Peering into the Universe:Images from the Hubble Space Telescope

J-M WERSINGERThe National Space Grant Student Satellite Program:

Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly!

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Columns:

2 A Note from the Editor

3 Forum on Education & Academics (Paul Trout)

4 Forum on Business & Economics (Eileen P. Kelly)

6 Forum on Science & Technology (Douglas Larson)

8 Forum on the Arts (George Ferrandi)

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Big Space Little Spacefall10

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From Wormholes to the Warp Drive: Using TheoreticalPhysics to Place Ultimate Bounds on Technology

William A. Hiscock

M-Theory: Mother of All Superstrings

Michio Kaku

Anthropic Questions

Gordon Kane


The National Space Grant Student Satellite Program: Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly!

J-M Wersinger

2002

Letters to the Editor

Book Review: Marcus Chown’s The Universe Next Door: TheMaking of Tomorrow’s Science. Reviewed by Pat Kaetz (39)

Poetry: “Eclipse” by Fredrick Zydek (5); “Physics Professor Killedin Coffee Shop” by David Citino (15); “October Dragonfly” by LeeSlonimsky (25); “End of Season” by K.E. Duffin (38); “Einstein’sCross” by Peter Huggins (41); “The Pleasures of Coffee Together”by Walt McDonald (43)

Letters to the Editor: 42

PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM, Volume 82, Number 4

2 Fall 2002

James P. Kaetz

William Hiscock leads off byexploring the plausibility of some ofour most cherished science fictionconceits: wormholes, warp drive, andtime travel. Professor Hiscock showshow physicists use such extreme con-cepts to push their theories to theirlimits, to see just what is possible andwhat is not. His verdict? A definitemaybe, though not likely, for most ofour science-fiction fantasies.

Next, Michio Kaku helps usunderstand one of the most excitingrecent developments in the quest forthe Unified Theory: M-Theory. M-Theory is an extension of string theo-ry, which has fallen in and out offavor with theoretical physicists forseveral decades now. As ProfessorKaku explains, M-Theory may beable to unify the various competingversions of string theory, as well asother, similar theories, and at somepoint lead to the completion of ourunderstanding of the way the universeworks on its most fundamental level— if we are indeed clever enough tofigure it all out.

Gordon Kane looks at some of the“anthropic” questions that peoplehave been asking, in particular theidea that somehow the fact that weare here observing the universe meansthat it was designed to result in ourexistence, with the implication thatsome being or thing had to do thedesigning. Professor Kane discussessimilar questions that have beenanswered by our expanding knowl-edge of the way everything works,and posits three questions that scien-tists are still exploring and hope toresolve some day.

IN THIS ISSUE

Modern physics is mind-bending.Black holes, wormholes, quan-

tum uncertainty, superstrings, the BigBang, time travel, multiple worlds,multiple universes — the conceptsdiscussed by our authors in this issueare sometimes almost impossible toaccept, given that they often seemcounter to our limited perceptions ofreality. Even something as well-testedand experimentally proven as the factthat time slows the faster one travelsis hard to grasp, especially for thoseof us who can never hope to under-stand the complex language of mathe-matical equations that physicists useevery day.

Still I love to read about the dis-coveries that continue to revolutionizeour view of the way reality works. Inthis issue we wanted to have ourauthors talk about both the large andthe small of it: from cosmology onthe grand scale to the search for themost fundamental way the universeworks on the subatomic, quantumlevel, a level that we may never actu-ally “see” at all. In truth, of course,one cannot separate “big” from “lit-tle” in physics, because the search fora Grand Unified Theory involves try-ing to marry the bizarre world ofquantum physics with the slightly lessbizarre world of the universe that wecan see. Needless to say, any treat-ment of these fields can only scratchthe surface of the astounding thingsthat serious physicists are exploringeach day. But we hope that this issueprovides an interesting look into theirexplorations.

Next, we present a visual treat: aphoto spread of some of the amazingpictures captured over the past yearor so by NASA’s Hubble SpaceTelescope. With NASA’s permission,we have included extended explanato-ry text with the pictures. For me, see-ing these photographs always sparksa yearning to be able to visit theplaces that they record and makes mewish that “warp drive” were real.

J-M Wersinger then tells us aboutthe National Space Grant StudentSatellite Program, which involves stu-dents from the high school levelthrough graduate school in the plan-ning, fundraising for, building, andlaunching of satellites. The program’saim is to encourage these students tomajor in the sciences in an attempt toalleviate the shortage projected asmany Baby Boom-generation techni-cal professionals begin to retire. Theprogram embodies the ideas that weas Phi Kappa Phi members value, andwe are pleased to let our membersknow about it.

APPRECIATIONS

First, we want to thank Professor J-M Wersinger of the Physics De-

partment here at Auburn Universityfor sitting down with us to makesome invaluable suggestions abouttopic areas and about possibleauthors for this issue. He also tookthe time to write about the studentsatellite program.

Also thanks go to Steve Roy ofthe Marshall Space Flight Center andto Ray Villard of NASA for informa-tion and permission related to theHubble Space Telescope photos fea-tured in the issue.

Most of all, thanks go to colum-nists Paul Trout, Eileen Kelly, DouglasLarson, and George Ferrandi for theirwonderful work the past three years.In this issue they write their finalcolumns, and we cannot possiblythank them enough for their effortson behalf of the Forum and theSociety itself. We will miss them all.

Enjoy the issue!

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Paul Trout

People who ideate or theorize for aliving do not always understand

the real world. So, even the most well-intended ideas and theories can havedreadful consequences.

That is why it is not anti-intellec-tual to have a healthy suspicion of theideas and theories championed byacademics and intellectuals. In fact,some intellectuals themselves haveurged us to do so, such as JulienBenda (The Treason of theIntellectuals), Raymond Aron (TheOpium of the Intellectuals), AlastairHamilton (The Appeal of Fascism: AStudy of Intellectuals and Fascism1919-1945), John R. Harrison (TheReactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia), GarrettHardin (Filters Against Folly: How toSurvive Despite Economists,Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent),Alain Finkielkraut (The Defeat of theMind), Heather MacDonald (TheBurden of Bad Ideas: How ModernIntellectuals Misshape Our Society),and Mark Lilla (The Reckless Mind:Intellectuals in Politics).

This is also the message ofTheodore Dalrymple’s Life at theBottom: The Worldview that Makesthe Underclass (2001). What sets thisbook apart is that it was written notby a member of the Theory Class, butby a physician/psychiatrist who worksat a hospital and a prison located inone of Birmingham’s worst slums.Decades of experience, both inEngland and Africa, have enabledDalrymple to see how certain theoriesand ideas play out in the lives of realpeople.

The violence, crime, neglect andabuse of children, nihilism, and dumb

despair that Dalrymple encountersday after day are not, to his mind, theeffects of economic poverty. TheEnglish welfare state provides hous-ing, food, medical care, and evenentertainment (half of the London“poor” have satellite dishes).

Dalrymple argues that the peculiarsqualor of the English underclass ismore the result of bad ideas and poli-cies trumpeted by the intelligentsia:“Like so many modern ills, thecoarseness of spirit and behaviorgrows out of ideas brewed up in theacademy and among intellectuals —ideas that have seeped outward andare now having their practical effecton the rest of society.”

For Dalrymple the most toxicnotion brewed up by academia is thatof “relativism,” the flattening of alldistinctions, the programmatic refusalto judge or evaluate. A relativisticmindset now characterizes most socialinstitutions, from education (whereinvented spelling is given as much sta-tus as correct spelling) and music(Mozart is placed on the same planeas Fatboy Slim), to the justice system(that is increasingly hesitant to blameimmigrant Muslim fathers for abusingdaughters who offend the faith).

Relativism is a particularly inca-pacitating doctrine for those with fewresources to raise themselves otherthan willpower and good habits. Ifthere is only difference, not better orworse, then there is nothing to choosebetween “good manners and bad,refinement and crudity, discernmentand lack of discernment, subtlety andgrossness, charm and boorishness.”Aspiration is pointless because there isnothing better to aspire to.

Morally tolerant of all kinds ofmischievous and self-destructive be-havior, relativism provides a license forthe pathologies that make underclasslife so miserable — impulsiveness, violence, crime, sexual promiscuity,ignorance, and moral passivity. Itencourages criminals to see theircrimes not as the result of their baddecisions, but instead as the result ofabstract and impersonal social forcesthat they are helpless to oppose.Violent male offenders demand thatDalrymple “do something” abouttheir “anger-management syndrome,”and then revile him when they againbeat their girlfriends senseless.Because moral relativism enervateswill, it condemns the underclass tomaterial, mental, and spiritual misery.Ostensibly compassionate, relativismis really quite cold-hearted.

“Where knowledge is not prefer-able to ignorance and high culture tolow, the intelligent and the sensitivesuffer a complete loss of meaning. Theintelligent self-destruct; the sensitivedespair. And where decent sensitivityis not nurtured, encouraged, support-ed, or protected, brutality abounds.”Decades of experience have convincedDalrymple that cultural and moral rel-ativism “is as barbaric and untruthfula doctrine as has yet emerged fromthe fertile mind of man.”

Why can’t academics and intellec-tuals who advance this fashionabledoctrine see this for themselves? It isin part because they are too removedfrom those actually affected by suchnotions, and in part because they havelittle incentive to find fault with ideasthat make them feel and appear ideal-istic, sensitive, and ideologically cor-rect. Ideas have us, as much as wehave ideas.

When cornered by the harsh reali-ties of lived experience, intellectualsprotect their sense of righteousness byresorting to the same strategies thatothers use to fend off uncongenialtruths: wishful thinking, willful blind-ness, outright denial, tendentious his-torical comparisons, and distortion ofthe moral significance of what isbefore them.

Intellectuals, wrote Orwell, shouldpoint out obvious truths and exposethe smelly little orthodoxies that con-tend for our souls. At the very least,they should be suspicious of their own

Smelly Little Orthodoxies

PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM/Vol. 82, No. 4 3

(continued on page 7)

Eileen P. Kelly

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Business Ethics — an Oxymoron?

Enron. Arthur Andersen. WorldCom.Global Crossing. Merrill Lynch.

Recently a new business scandal seemsto surface each day. The current volatil-ity of the market reflects the apprehen-sion, the sense of betrayal, and the lackof confidence that investors have inmany large corporations and their man-agements. Massive accounting fraudsand continuing restatements call intoquestion the accuracy of financial state-ments of numerous public corporationsand the corresponding veracity of statedrevenues and profits. Even companieswith sterling reputations are now oftensuspect.

DO BUSINESSES HAVE ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES?

Abasic sense of trust and fair play isan essential cornerstone of any eco-

nomic system, especially a free-marketsystem. In the absence of such trust,chaos reigns. Clearly the ethical bank-ruptcy of some corporate leaders hascaused considerable disruption in themarkets. Fortunately, the fundamentalsoundness of our financial system haswithstood the onslaught. The currentwave of business scandals involves not only outright criminal activity, butalso a grayer area in which companiesmet the letter of the law, while theybreached the ethical expectations ofmany stakeholders.

The subject of business ethics is onethat has a long history of debate inbusiness, academic, and public circles.Views vary on the extent of ethicalresponsibility that businesses shouldexercise. The minimalist position, longespoused by Milton Friedman, holdsthat the only ethical responsibility abusiness has is to make a profit within

the confines of the law. In a free-market society, this single-mindedpursuit of profit making is ultimatelyin the best interest of society becausemarket forces will maximize the eco-nomic well-being of society’s mem-bers. Furthermore, Friedman arguesthat corporations are legal, notmoral entities, and hence have noethical obligations.

The opposing, and more preva-lent, viewpoint holds that corpora-tions do have a responsibility to actethically beyond mere legal compli-ance. The modern world is a societyof organizations, according to PeterDrucker. Organizations, especiallylarge corporations, exercise enor-mous power that shapes the worldand affects far more than those in aproximate relationship with theorganization, for instance, employ-ees, suppliers, creditors, and inves-tors. Corporations owe an ethicalresponsibility to all of their stake-holders and have a duty to be goodcorporate citizens. Essentially, corpo-rations derive their legitimacy fromsociety. When they undermine thatlegitimacy by acting in ways con-trary to the interests of society, theycan lose that legitimacy and ulti-mately the business itself, as exem-plified by Arthur Andersen.

PROMOTING ETHICALBEHAVIOR

Modern businesses operate in aconstantly changing and

intensely competitive global environ-ment. Furthermore, they facetremendous complexity and diversityin employees, customers, and mar-kets. Given this complexity and

diversity, ethical behavior probablywill not occur spontaneously. Themanagement of a business thus has aresponsibility to foster the climate andconditions that are supportive of ethi-cal behavior. An ethical corporate cul-ture requires commitment, awareness,and oversight.

The commitment of top manage-ment is fundamental to the promotionof ethical conduct in an organization.Management must go beyond payinglip service to an official company codeof ethics. The conduct of top manage-ment itself underscores the seriousnesswith which the rest of the companyshould take ethical behavior and setsthe tone for a corporate culture thatmakes ethical behavior a key priority.Nothing sends a clearer message toemployees than when top manage-ment itself engages in unethical behav-ior. Accountability and responsibilityfor promoting an ethical organizationshould rest in a top manager insteadof being placed on the shoulders of alower-level employee. A number ofcompanies have instituted the role ofChief Ethics Officer at the upper-man-agement level to address this issue.

While some areas of ethical trans-gressions in business are obvious,such as engaging in fraud, other areasare more ambiguous. Promoting ethi-cal behavior necessitates makingemployees aware of ethical issues inthe first place. Companies can do thisby establishing an effective ethics pro-gram. Such a program makes supervi-sors and employees aware of thevalues of the business, its ethicalexpectations, and the repercussions oftransgressions. Some companies havea written code of ethics in conjunctionwith policies and codes of conductthat are given to all employees. High-risk areas, such as purchasing or sales,may require even more detailed codesof conduct. However, written ethicalguidelines alone are insufficient.Supervisors play a key role in inter-preting and overseeing ethical policiesin their areas. Additionally, formalethical training in which employeesare exposed to practical ethical dilem-mas confronted in their respectiveareas of business — for example, ven-dors expecting kickbacks — can helpclarify the company’s expectations.

When implementing an effectiveethics program, vigilance and over-sight are essential. Periodic audit and

4 Fall 2002


compliance measures must be done bysupervisors and others responsible forethical oversight for the program tohave any meaning. Disciplinary actionsmust be taken where necessary. If co-workers see colleagues, or worse yetmanagement, violating the ethics codewith impunity, the ethical climate willquickly disintegrate.

Ultimately businesses do not existin a vacuum where economic forcesalone prevail. Rather, they exist in soci-ety and must meet the needs of thatsociety, economically and otherwise. Ifthey do not, at best they warrant sanc-tioning by society and increased gov-ernmental regulation. At worst, thefundamental existence of the businessis threatened.

In response to the title of this col-umn, no, business ethics is not an oxy-moron. Despite the current mediascrutiny and the ethical bankruptcy ofsome corporations, clearly not all busi-nesses, or even the majority of them,are engaging in criminal or unethicalbehavior. The entrepreneurial activityof business is an essential and noblepursuit. It provides the economic foun-dation and the fundamental basis ofsurvival for society’s members. In themodern world, business activity pro-vides the means by which we feed,clothe, and shelter our families. It pro-vides health care for our sick, entertain-ment for our leisure, and many othernecessities of life. With that noble pur-suit, however, comes a responsibility forbusinesses to operate in an equallynoble manner.

Eileen P. Kelly is a professor of managementin the School of Business at Ithaca College.

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS

ECLIPSE

The moon, that pale porcelain dropof timidity floating like a fragilebubble through our history, has morethan one trick up its sleeve.

It can take heaven’s glitteringhardware and submerge it in night,blot out the sun and place shadowwhere light once danced into a billion

varieties of green, and reminds ustime stands still for neither bladesof grass nor raging suns. This gentlemirror knows how to have its way

with things — the sky transformsin its hands, the good red earthslumps into darkness, night creatureswaken when it should be day.

What deep lessons does this teachthe sea? Its tides are already giddyfrom the pull of this light eater,this surprise packed little celestial dot.

An eclipse is the kind of proofa planet needs once its occupantsreplace their need for wonderwith the quest for cold ready cash.

FREDRICK ZYDEK

Fredrick Zydek is the author of four collectionsof poetry: Lights Along the Missouri, StormWarning, Ending the Fast, and The ConceptionAbbey Poems. His work appears in The AntiochReview, The Hollins Critic, MichiganQuarterly Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest,and other journals. Formerly a professor of cre-ative writing and theology at the University ofNebraska and later at the College of SaintMary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isnot writing. Most recently he has accepted thepost as editor for Lone Willow Press.

FORTHCOMINGISSUES

CANCER RESEARCH

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

Winter 2003

Spring 2003

6 Fall 2002

Tourism and the Road to Oblivion

We usually think of our nationalparks as unspoiled sanctuaries

where natural wonders, hallowedground, and historical artifacts arepainstakingly preserved for presentand future generations. As vestiges ofan unbounded North Americanwilderness, many national parksevoke thoughts of tranquility, visualbeauty, and nature in its primevalstate. The author Edward Hoagland,writing about national parks on theNational Park Service’s seventy-fifthanniversary, called them “enclaves ofgreenery, history, and dignity.”

But anyone who has visited anational park recently — in particularthe more popular ones such asYellowstone, Yosemite, GrandCanyon, and the Great SmokyMountains — probably had an expe-rience that he or she could just as eas-ily have had in a densely populatedurban environment. Conditions thatwere once completely foreign tonational parks are now the norm:traffic gridlock, mobs of people, over-crowded park facilities, road rage,noise and air pollution, litter, crime,tacky souvenir shops, fast-foodrestaurants, diesel-spewing garbagetrucks, shopping malls, and gun-tot-ing security officers.

The problem of urban blight innational parks is attributable, in part,to the rising flood of park visitors. AtOregon’s Crater Lake National Park,for example, the number of visitorsrose from about 3 million during thepark’s first forty years of existence(1902-1941) to more than 8 millionbetween 1970 and 1982. Visitationfor all national parks, totaling around300 million in 1990, is expected toexceed one-half billion by 2010.

But the problem cannot be blamedentirely on mere visitation. Lurking inthe background are various interestgroups whose sense of values aboutnational parks is not consistent withthe stated objective of the NationalPark Service, that is, to “conserve thescenery and the natural and historicalobjects and the wildlife therein and toprovide for the enjoyment of the samein such manner and by such means aswill leave them unimpaired [emphasisadded] for the enjoyment of futuregenerations.” What these groupsvalue most are money and politicaladvantage. What they generally havein common is a willingness to turnpriceless national treasures into coldhard cash. At Crater Lake, privateenterprise charges exorbitant pricesfor overnight rooms in the park’snewly renovated grand lodge; oper-ates several fifty-passenger tour boatsthat prowl the lake, possibly damag-ing its rare and fragile limnologicalfeatures; and pushes rubber toma-hawks, fast food, and cheap trinketsat honky-tonk concession stands.Additionally, the park is pressuredfrom all sides by relentless culturalexpansion, including logging and min-ing operations, ski resorts, highways,real-estate developments, and“improvements” to commercial facili-ties inside the park.

Although Washington’s Mount St.Helens National Volcanic Monumentis not a national park, it was estab-lished by Congress in August 1982with roughly the same purpose inmind: “to protect the geologic, eco-logic and cultural resources . . . allow-ing geologic forces and ecologicalsuccession to continue substantiallyunimpeded [emphasis added].” Thevolcano’s catastrophic eruption in

May 1980 obliterated old-growthforests, triggered massive landslidesand mudflows, and filled nearby lakesand rivers with giant logs and volcanicdebris. As destructive as it was, theeruption also provided a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to study the post-eruption recovery of forest, lake, andriver ecosystems that had been sudden-ly and totally destroyed.

The monument, managed by theU.S. Forest Service, encompasses about175 square miles comprising most ofthe volcano’s blast zone. Congressdirected the Forest Service to “permitthe full use of the Monument for scien-tific study and research” and “preventundue modification of the natural con-ditions of the Monument.” The ForestService itself proclaimed in its 1981final environmental impact statementfor the monument that “an unparal-leled opportunity to study the dynam-ics of geological force and biologicalresponse was created by the eruption.Successive generations will witness therestoration of natural selection.”

Shortly after the eruption, dozensof scientists fanned out across the vol-cano’s blast zone, establishing long-term baseline-research sites tosystematically measure and documentecological recovery in the wake of vol-canic destruction. Since 1980, scientistshave revisited the sites regularly totrack revitalization. Of particular inter-est is the so-called Pumice Plain, a vastarea of volcanic deposits lying betweenthe mountain’s crater and Spirit Lake(see photo on page 7). Here, scientistsare studying the adaptive response ofpioneer organisms capable of survivingin this seemingly uninhabitable envi-ronment. The research continues, withmuch yet to be learned.

Unfortunately, despite the explicitcongressional mandate for scientificresearch, science has been largelybrushed aside in favor of developingthe monument for tourism and relatedeconomic development. Since 1982,the Forest Service has spent about $2million on the monument’s science pro-gram, nearly all of which went foradministrative costs including salaries,travel, overhead, and vehicle expenses.Actual research received only a fewthousand dollars per year. Most scien-tists obtained funding from othersources such as the National ScienceFoundation. Indeed, funds for lakeresearch were so scarce that most of

Douglas W. Larson

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the work was done by volunteer sci-entists.

Meanwhile, as scientists struggledover the years to piece together thestory about post-eruption ecologicalrecovery, the Forest Service budgetedhundreds of millions of dollars fortourist facilities inside and around themonument. Visitor centers were con-structed at Silver Lake, ColdwaterLake, and Johnston Ridge at a cost ofnearly $30 million. These sites werelinked to Interstate Highway 5 by anew highway (State Highway 504)costing more than $200 million.Another $100 million was spent onadditional road construction, view-points, parking lots, and miscella-neous recreational facilities.

The monument has since become atheme park, attracting more than amillion tourists per year. And they aretreated to more than a glorious viewof Mount St. Helens: Coldwater Lakeis stocked with rainbow trout andopen for angling. Concessionaires,operating out of trendy visitor centers,peddle food, souvenirs, books, video-tapes, clothing, and trinkets moldedfrom Mount St. Helens ash.

Recently, Governor Gary Locke ofWashington approved a $350,000study of a project to extend StateHighway 504 across the entire monu-

ment. Seven miles long and costingabout $20 million, the extended high-way will be a constant source of air,water, and noise pollution in thevicinity of Spirit Lake. Worse, it willbisect the Pumice Plain, threateningthe area’s rare ecology and destroyingprecious baseline research sites.

The chief proponents of this high-ly controversial project include formerand present commissioners of fivecounties surrounding the monument.The commissioners, none of whomapparently give a hoot about researchof the monument’s fragile and recov-ering ecosystems, view the road as ashort-cut for tourists, log trucks,recreational vehicles, and 18-wheelersbound for the “timber-depressed ruralareas” east of the monument.

The Washington Department ofTransportation (WDOT), while tryingto appear impartial, disingenuouslylisted four “potential benefits” of thehighway extension: (1) Provide a newentry into the monument; (2) createnew economic activity in timber-depressed rural areas; (3) improveresponse time by police, fire, andother emergency support agencies;and (4) save time and fuel for touristsand area residents. But the public,clearly troubled by the monument’scommercialization, was not con-

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

creedal passions and be tough-minded, as Dalrymple is, whenanalyzing ground-level realities.Because no wind tunnel existsfor pretesting social policies,looking at consequences is theonly way to determine what really flies.

Paul Trout, an associate professor ofEnglish at Montana State University-Bozeman, has published work in TheChronicle of Higher Education, TheWashington Times, the ChristianScience Monitor, Change, Cresset,Soundings, Chronicles, and else-where. He is the assistant editor ofThe Montana Professor, where heregularly publishes on higher educa-tion topics.

(continued from page 3)

vinced: Responding to a WDOTrequest for public comment, morethan 75 percent of the respondentsexpressed strong opposition to thehighway project.

Thwarted by the lack of adequatefinancing, scientists now face theadditional difficulty of protectingtheir research areas from disturbancescreated by construction activities andswarms of tourists. Human entryinterferes with the natural process ofecosystem rehabilitation, damages ordestroys research sites, and generallyobstructs efforts to maintain long-term scientific databases that docu-ment ecological recovery.

But tourism, not ecologicalresearch, is where the money is, afterall. Bulldozers will take care of theresearch sites, burying them under theroad to oblivion.

Douglas W. Larson is an adjunct professorin the Department of Biology at PortlandState University and a water quality con-sultant. He spent fourteen summers con-ducting limnological research at CraterLake National Park, and studied the limno-logical recovery of Spirit Lake and otherblast-zone lakes at Mount St. Helensbetween 1980 and 1994.

Mount St. Helens, Washington, circa 1980. Spirit Lake (foreground) is partly covered withlogs blown into the lake from surrounding old-growth forests. The Pumice Plain liesbetween the mountain and Spirit Lake, a distance of about five miles. Photo by RobertHeims, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Dear Chris Johanson:

I’m writing because I have wanted to send you a package for a while now

— a package with the pictures and scribblings I make after I see your work in

magazines or in galleries. But you are ever elusive — quite the slippery fish,

you, with no permanent address and such fly-by-night wanderings from gallery

to gallery.

So I invent you a mailbox here and put this note in it. Some things I would

like to say:

1. You are one of my favorite artists. Does this seem big to you? It is big to

me. I have been living in New York for one year now. One bruised and ten-

der year. A very good year for trying to figure out what is important . . . .

2. Thank you for bringing your mountain to Manhattan Island. On my way to

it, a little girl was asking her dad what was mother-of-pearl, anyway. I did

not hear her — really hear her — until I had passed them on the street,

taken a right into the gallery, and ducked into your cardboard mountain.

Your shanty cardboard house of a mountain, dark brown like kids’ cup-

cakes with a whitely painted peak. There were a few quiet drawings inside.

One was an ink drawing of a star with lots of jaggy spokes. That was when

I really heard her ask him. And I heard another girl then, too, from months

before on the A-train coming from St. John’s Cathedral, asking her dad

another question. She was asking him what was infinity. He did not look up

from the newspaper when he told her that was how much he loved her, so

he never saw the sideways suspicion she was shooting at the abstractness of

his answer. And then I heard myself talking to my own dad, also months

before, telling him about the footprints of a chicken embedded in the side-

walk near my house in Brooklyn. I was trying to explain to him how surre-

al this seemed — such a rural residue in such a dramatically urban

landscape. He said, “stupid chicken.”

3. There is a story about a man who left a goodbye note to the world saying

he would walk through his city, from his house to the bridge, and if a single

person smiled at him or looked him in the eyes, he would not jump . . . .

We are implicated in each other’s lives. We are responsible for each other’s

humanity. The delicate rawness of your drawings reminds us that we are

each alone in here, right along with everyone else. We can make things go

George Ferrandi

Forum on

8 Fall 2002

either way. Your work talks about our tendency to arbitrarily divide the

world into good or bad, odd or even, streets to park on or not to park on,

and it makes us laugh at the ridiculousness of these — our own — ideas. It

acknowledges the difference between what we say to each other, and what

we know without saying.

4. I read that Chris Ware desires a deadness in his drawings so that the text

has real work to do. I wonder if you want something like this, too, and if

you would call it a “deadness.” There is such an unchecked honesty in your

words — in the voice of your text. I remember one scratchy figure, centered

on the paper and facing forward. The words said something like “this is

any person at any of many crossroads.” And the simplicity of the image and

the complexity of that idea collided in my head. I know that this is the way

the very best cartoons work; the words and image depend on each other for

completion in a way that makes the art exist even more in the mind of the

viewer than it does on the actual page.

That piece exists and re-exists for me now, like much of your work, as I

move around in the city. It exists especially in the places that people go on the

train — not their physical destinations, but the alone-in-a-crowd places where

their faces fall quiet and their eyes shift from the floor to the nothing just

above the floor that happened to them yesterday. It exists in the vapor-thin

lady with the tadpole-transparent skin and silver heels sharp as her eye shad-

ow, and also in the European man with dreaming eyes, whose nose is made

redder by the darkness of his hair. And in his girlfriend who, just as the doors

suck shut, I notice has been noticing me noticing him. It is barely perceptible,

in any describable way, but somehow still very much possible to tell who is

happy and who is heartsick and who among them is at any of many cross-

roads.

Thank you for the drawing. I send good feelings to you, too.

George [email protected]

THE ARTS


George Ferrandi is a multi-media artist and foundingmember of “Cloud Seeding: Circus of the PerformativeObject” (www.cloudseedingcircus.com). She is a formerassistant professor at the University of Florida and iscurrently living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

Drawings by Chris Johanson, used by permission.

10 Fall 2002

ormholes. Time travel. The “warpdrive.” These staples of science fictionhave today become subjects of serious

study by theoretical physicists. Each of these con-cepts can be identified with mathematical solu-tions to the equations of Einstein’s theory ofgeneral relativity — the modern theory of gravity,in which the phenomena of gravity are explainedin terms of the geometry of curved spacetime. Bystudying these solutions in detail, theoreticalphysicists seek to better learn what bounds existon the behavior of matter and geometry in ourpresent physical theories. Such studies can yieldnew insights into the developing quantum theoryof gravity, and can also help establish ultimatelimits on technology — not based on the degreeof scope or difficulty of an engineering challenge,but by compatibility with our core understandingof the fundamental laws of physics.

“You cannot change the laws of physics, Captain.”— Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, U.S.S. Enterprise, Star Trek

W

Three decades ago, adequate theories were firstdeveloped for three of the four fundamental forces ofnature: the so-called “strong” and “weak” nuclearforces, which operate on subatomic scales, and theelectromagnetic force, which is responsible for mostof what we experience in everyday life: chemistry,biology, and technology (non-nuclear). The theoreti-cal model of these three forces has been so successfulin matching experiments that it has been termed the“Standard Model” of particle physics. ProfessorHoward Georgi of Harvard has testified to therobustness of the model in saying, “Everything any-one has ever seen can be explained in terms of theStandard Model.” While there are some highly inter-esting aspects of the Standard Model in which newdevelopments in particle physics are still taking place(for example, the study of neutrino properties), thedevelopment of the Standard Model of particlephysics must rank as one of the premier scientificaccomplishments of the twentieth century.

The fourth fundamental force in nature, the gravi-tational force, remains in many ways an enigma.Gravity was the first force for which a detailed math-ematical theory was developed, by Isaac Newton,more than three hundred years ago. That theory isstill adequate for us to be able to successfully navi-gate our planetary spacecraft, such as Voyager 1 and2, around the solar system. Einstein developed ourmodern theory of gravity not because Newton’s theo-ry had been found to disagree with experiment, butbecause Newton’s theory was mathematically incom-patible with the dictates of Einstein’s special theoryof relativity, which requires that all observers mea-sure the same value for the speed of light, c, regard-less of their state of motion (this feature of naturehas been overwhelmingly confirmed by experimentand observation). Einstein’s new theory, completed in1916, is usually called “general relativity,” a namethat unfortunately obscures the fact that it is actuallya theory of gravitational interaction.

Einstein’s theory is widely regarded as one of themost beautiful in all of science. It describes gravity interms of the curved geometry of the four-dimensional(three space, one time) world that we inhabit.Physicist John Wheeler has beautifully summarizedthe content of general relativity in a sentence:“Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matterhow to move.” The first part of the sentence tells usthe origin of spacetime curvature. Matter (in anyform, including energy, as per Einstein’s famous E =mc2) is the source of gravity, causing the curvature ofspace (or “spacetime,” a shorthand for our four-dimensional world). The second part of the sentencedescribes how matter behaves in this curved four-dimensional world, namely that it follows pathswhich are the curved-space generalization of

“straight lines” — geodesics. The “great circle”route of an airplane flying from New York to Tokyois an example of a geodesic; it is not a straight line(which would pass through the solid Earth), but isthe shortest path connecting the two cities along thecurved surface of the Earth.

UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS

Despite the great strides that have been made inunderstanding the behavior of matter and ener-

gy at the fundamental level, many unresolved ques-tions still attract the attention of physicists. Perhapsthe greatest of these is the search for an understand-ing of how gravity fits together with the other threefundamental forces. It is clear that a truly fundamen-tal theory of gravity must be quantum in nature, andgeneral relativity is not. The contrast between theStandard Model, which is built on the foundation ofquantum field theory, and general relativity, whichhas been tested with a high degree of accuracy but isstill inadequate because of its classical nature, hascaused many to term the theory of quantum gravityto be the Holy Grail of theoretical physics. However,despite decades of effort, little is truly clear about thenature of quantum gravity. Should gravity be able tostand alone in a quantum theory, independent of theother fields that constitute nature, or can gravity beunderstood only in terms of a unified theory thatattempts to handle all aspects of matter and its inter-actions at once? M-theory (sometimes called “thetheory formerly known as superstrings”) is a boldattempt at a theory of everything, solving the prob-lem of the quantum theory of gravity by merging allmatter and interactions into a single theory in whichthe fundamental objects are not point particles, butare higher-dimensional objects such as loops of“superstring.”

In ordinary matter, quantum effects become quiteevident when one reaches the atomic scale, at rough-ly 10-10 meters. Today’s high-energy particle acceler-ators allow us to study the behavior of matter andenergy at scales as small as 10-17 meters, where theexistence of particles such as quarks, gluons, and Wand Z bosons, which are completely invisible backup at the atomic scale, are evident. Quantum gravi-tational effects are expected to become importantwhen one reaches the Planck scale, about 10-35

meters. If superstring theory describes nature, this isthe size of a typical loop of superstring material. Thelarge difference in scale between the Planck scale ofsuperstrings and today’s experiments — some eight-een orders of magnitude, a billion billion — is onereason why it is so difficult for physicists working onsuperstring models to make experimental predictionsfrom their theory that can be tested with our presentlevel of technology.

FROM WORMHOLES TO THE WARP DRIVE


The even larger span between the scales at whichquantum effects become evident in matter, and thePlanck scale of quantum gravity, twenty-five ordersof magnitude, is a realm in which the semiclassicaltheory of gravity may be a good tool to help usunderstand how gravity and quantum physics are tobe married. In semiclassical gravity, the gravitationalfield is still treated classically, being described by thecurved spacetime of general relativity. The matterthat creates the spacetime curvature, however, istreated using quantum field theory. The resulting the-ory cannot be ultimately acceptable because it mixesclassical and quantum physics, but it should be avaluable tool and an approximate description of thebehavior of nature over length scales (and energyscales) that reach down towards the realm wherestring theory may provide an ultimate exegesis.

PUSHING THE LIMITS: BLACK HOLES AND WORMHOLES

Theoretical physicists expand their understandingof the strengths, limits, and behavior of a partic-

ular theory by “pushing” the theory to its limitingcases. For example, we understand general relativitymuch better by studying the properties of black holesolutions to the Einstein equations than we would ifwe restricted attention to the tiny differences betweenthe predictions of Newtonian gravity and general rel-ativity for, say, planetary orbits. These tiny differ-ences provide valuable experimental tests of generalrelativity, given that we do not have any black holesin our near neighborhood that we can study indetail; but understanding the full range of behaviorallowed by the theory is best enhanced by examiningthe nature of its predictions for situations that are farfrom “normal” — for instance, for black holes, andmuch more speculative solutions to the equationssuch as those called “wormholes,” the “warp drive,”and those which lead to the possibility of time travel.

Each of these concepts can be identified with par-ticular spacetime geometries, and hence with mathe-matical solutions to Einstein’s theory of generalrelativity. In fact, any four-dimensional geometry fora spacetime can be termed a solution of Einstein’stheory — the question physics must answer iswhether the matter necessary to curve spacetime intoa particular “shape” is of a form compatible withnature as we understand it. If one postulates a space-time geometry with some exotic property (for exam-ple, a wormhole), then it is likely that “exotic”matter is necessary to generate that geometry. By“exotic matter” we mean matter that has propertiesnot usually seen in ordinary situations — such asnegative mass or energy densities. Such properties areso far from those exhibited by normal matter that we

must seriously ask whether such behavior is compat-ible with the quantum field theory description ofmatter in the Standard Model. This then provides alink between extreme quantum behavior of matterand exotic geometries, and hence insight into thepossibilities of quantum gravity.

Next, one may ask whether the exotic geometryis stable — would small changes destroy the exoticstructure, for example, by closing off a wormhole. Insome cases, the small change necessary to drive theinstability is provided by quantum mechanics, againproviding a link between these exotic spacetimestructures and quantum aspects of gravity. A pencilbalanced on its point is an example of a mathemati-cal solution of the laws of mechanics that is unsta-ble; the smallest motion will cause it to fall in onedirection or another. The goal is to continue to makethe model of the geometry more realistic, addingmore aspects of physics to its description and deter-mining whether the original exotic geometry is com-patible with this more realistic treatment. If physicsrules the feature out, then no amount of clever engi-neering can hope to turn science fiction to fact; onthe other hand, if no incompatibility with knownphysics is found, then it might be possible for futureengineers to create such geometric structures inspacetime. It is important to note that the work ofphysicists does not aim to place limits on the poten-tial scope of engineering, except where violations ofwell-tested and accepted laws of physics are in-volved. Simply because an engineering solutionmight involve energies and scales many orders ofmagnitude beyond what earthly technology canachieve today does not daunt the inquiring physicistat all.

An example of how such a study proceeds is pro-vided by the story of how the present interest inthese concepts largely began — surprisingly enough,with science fiction, namely the writing of the novelContact by Carl Sagan. Sagan asked Kip Thorne, theFeynman Professor of Physics at Caltech, for adviceto help ensure that the method chosen to transportthe novel’s heroine across the Galaxy would not bescientifically ludicrous. Thorne suggested replacingthe notion of diving through a black hole as a portalto distant realms with the idea of using a wormhole.

A black hole is a spherical region of spacetimesurrounded by an “event horizon,” which functionsas a one-way “gate.” Anything that crosses the eventhorizon into the black hole — rocks, spaceships,light itself — cannot escape the black hole. In thesimplest model of a black hole, where the black holehas no spin or electric charge, any matter falling intothe hole is inevitably crushed into a spacetime singu-larity, where the gravitational tidal forces are infi-nitely strong. There is no escape. The notion that


12 Fall 2002

black holes might provide “tunnels to elsewhere”first arose in the 1960s, when physicists found that ifa black hole had an electric charge, or if it was spin-ning, matter (for example, a spaceship) falling intothe hole could avoid being crushed into a singularityand would eventually emerge from the confines ofthe hole into “another universe.” This “other uni-verse” might be identified with a distant region ofour own universe, which led quickly to science fic-tion authors using black holes as interstellar short-cuts through spacetime.

However, the physics did not stop there: throughthe 1970s, work by a large number of physicists(including Nobel Laureate SubrahmanyanChandrasekhar) showed that the “tunnel” structureinside such models of black holes is unstable, bothclassically and quantum mechanically. By includingmore physics in the model, we find that the tunnel isclosed off, replaced by a singularity as in the simplerblack hole case. Thus, by studying these exotic mod-els of black-hole interiors in greater detail, the “sci-ence fiction” aspects were actually ruled out whennature was examined more closely.

For this reason, Thorne suggested that Sagan usea wormhole in his novel, rather than a black hole. A“wormhole” is, as the name suggests, a topologicallydistinct route between two locations which are the“mouths” of the wormhole (think of an actualwormhole which has two ends on the surface of anapple). A priori, the distance through the wormhole,from mouth to mouth, could be either longer orshorter than the conventional distance traveledthrough ordinary space (or over the surface of theapple). For the purposes of science fiction, worm-holes that provide shortcuts through spacetime are ofcourse preferred. Unlike a black hole, wormholes donot generally possess event horizons, so no “one-waygates” in spacetime are involved.

The serious study of wormhole geometries in gen-eral relativity began in the late 1980s when Thorneand his students, and subsequently many other theo-retical physicists, showed that wormholes inevitablymust involve “exotic matter.” In order to hold the“throat” of the wormhole (between the two mouths)open, there must be some form of matter or energypresent that has negative mass or energy. Every formof classical matter known to physics has positivemass, hence the term “exotic” for this alternate pos-sibility. This is where the truly interesting researchquestions begin, for when one combines a quantumdescription of matter and energy with curved space-time, it is known that situations involving negativemass can arise. This phenomenon has even beendemonstrated in the laboratory, in the Casimir effect,a very weak attractive force that exists between twouncharged parallel plates made of electrically con-

ducting material. This force exists due to the nega-tive energy in the volume between the two plates,which is caused by the conducting plates eliminatingsome of the usual vacuum modes between them.While this is an example of how quantum effects cancreate an effective negative mass, it is a very weakeffect — the negative mass is small in magnitude(much smaller than the mass of the plates) and occu-pies a very small volume of space.

For wormholes, the key question still being inves-tigated today is whether any plausible configurationof quantum fields in curved spacetime could createsufficient negative mass to hold open a macroscopicwormhole — one large enough for a starship, a per-son, or even a single atom to pass through. So far,the evidence suggests that it is highly unlikely suchstructures could exist: strongly negative mass such asthat required to hold a wormhole open has neverbeen observed and is considered unlikely to exist(even antimatter has positive mass). The final wordhere has certainly not yet been written; our under-standing continues to improve as new models incor-porating more particle physics are examined.

Physicists are also interested in microscopicwormholes, much smaller than a proton, down atthe scale of the Planck length. These might play animportant role in quantum gravity, where spacetimeis often viewed as a foaming sea of tiny wormholes,forming and disappearing every instant. Another sig-nificant problem for anyone enthusiastic aboutwormholes is the “worm” problem: how do you cre-ate a wormhole? Perhaps a small, quantum worm-hole (if they exist) could be caught and expanded touseful size. This important question has not yet beenaddressed in any satisfactory manner.

WARP DRIVES

The “warp drive” is another example of an inter-esting geometry that is yielding new insights into

general relativity. In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre, at thetime a graduate student at the University of Wales inCardiff, published a mathematical description of aspacetime geometry that embodies the propertiesusually associated in science fiction with a “warpdrive.” In this geometry, a “starship” can apparentlytravel faster than the speed of light, traversing inter-stellar distances of many light-years in an arbitrarilyshort time — both as measured by those on the star-ship, and those at the destination. I say “apparent-ly,” because the starship never exceeds the speed oflight as measured by a local observer — thus, thebasic tenet of Einstein’s special relativity is not violat-ed. The motion of the ship occurs because the space-time in front of the starship contracts while thatbehind the starship expands, transporting the star-



ship forward. Further study has shown that suchsolutions are probably all unphysical, for several reasons. The foremost difficulty was noted byAlcubierre in his original paper: such solutionsinevitably involve a large concentration of negativemass, which appears to be just as implausible in thiscontext as in the case of wormholes. Still, researchcontinues in this area, as there are enough significantvariations on Alcubierre’s original idea to keep theo-reticians busy for some time to come.

TIME TRAVEL

Is time travel possible? Ignoring the pedestrianeveryday progression of time, the question can be

divided into two parts: Is it possible, within a shorttime (less than a human life span), to travel into thedistant future? And is it possible to travel into thepast? Our current understanding of fundamentalphysics tells us that the answer to the first question isa definite yes, and to the second, maybe.

The mechanism for traveling into the distantfuture is to use the time-dilation effect of special rela-tivity. Special relativity teaches us that time is notabsolute and universal for all possible observers: amoving clock will appear to tick more slowly thecloser it approaches the speed of light. This effect,which has been overwhelmingly supported by experi-mental tests, applies to all types of clocks, includingbiological aging. Departing from Earth in a spaceshipthat could accelerate continuously at a comfortableone g (an acceleration that would produce a forceequal to the gravity we feel everyday at the earth’ssurface), one would begin to approach the speed oflight relative to the Earth within about a year. As theship continued to accelerate, it would come ever clos-er to the speed of light, and its clocks would appearto run at an ever slower rate relative to the Earth.

Under such circumstances, a round trip to thecenter of our Galaxy and back to the Earth — a dis-tance of some 60,000 light-years — could be com-pleted in only a little more than forty years of shiptime. Upon arriving back at the Earth, the astronautwould be only forty years older, while 60,000 yearswould have passed on the Earth. (Note that there isno “twin paradox,” because it is unambiguous thatthe space traveler has felt the constant accelerationfor forty years, while a hypothetical twin left behindon an identical spaceship circling the Earth has not.)Such a trip would pose formidable engineering prob-lems: the amount of fuel required, even assuming aperfect 100 percent-efficient conversion of mass intoenergy, greatly exceeds the mass of a planet. But

nothing in the known laws of physics would preventsuch a trip from occurring.

Time travel into the past is a much more uncer-tain proposition. Many solutions to Einstein’s equa-tions of general relativity exist, including someinvolving wormholes in motion, that allow a personto follow a timeline that would result in her encoun-tering herself — or her grandmother — at an earliertime. The problem, as we have seen before, is decid-ing whether these solutions represent situations thatcould occur in the real universe, or whether they aremere mathematical oddities incompatible withknown physics. Much work has been done by theo-retical physicists in the past decade to try to deter-mine whether, in a universe that is initially withouttime travel, one can build a time machine — in otherwords, if it is possible to manipulate matter and thegeometry of space-time in such a way as to createnew paths that circle back in time. The main possi-ble roadblock to creating a time machine seems tobe a quantum instability of the spacetime — anyattempt to “turn on” a time machine would result inspacetime changing its geometry to prevent themachine’s operation. This instability was first discov-ered by Deborah Konkowski of the U.S. NavalAcademy and me in 1982. Once again, the questionof the possibility of time travel remains an open andan active area of research; there are serious questionsas to whether this quantum instability is truly strongenough to prevent time travel, and whether there arenot special quantum states that avoid the instabilityaltogether.

These concepts associated with science fictioncontinue to be useful areas of research for real, seri-ous theoretical physics. By studying these solutionsto Einstein’s equations, we can gain new insightsabout the ultimate limits of gravity and its relationto quantum-field theory descriptions of matter.

William A. Hiscock, a professor of physics at MontanaState University, is director of the Montana NASAEPSCoR Program as well as the Montana Space GrantConsortium. He has won numerous awards for histeaching and research, including the Wiley ResearchAward, the Phi Kappa Phi Fridley OutstandingTeaching Award, and the Cox Family Award forAcademic Excellence in Teaching and Research. He haspublished pedagogical and public outreach articles inthe American Journal of Physics, Scientific American(electronic version), Discover, Science Digest, andQuantum.


14 Fall 2002

Suggestions for additional reading:Gott, J. Richard. Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The

Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time. New York:Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’sOutrageous Legacy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,1994.

Visser Matt. Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein toHawking. New York: Springer-Verlag, Inc., 1996.

Weinberg, Steven. Dreams of a Final Theory. New York:Pantheon Books, 1993.



PHYSICS PROFESSOR KILLED IN COFFEE SHOP

An old story, for all the new waysof stringing out words in space.You’re in Starbucks. The instantthe cup is cool enough to lift to lip —your mind on the structureof the universe, say, nonzero constants,the hypothetical symmetry betweenfermions and bosons in the effortto unify the electroweak and strong forcesinto a single framework — just as youpurse your mouth, making an O,darkness enters your soul, a car careensthrough the wall and takes you out.Since the Big Bang, that car and your needfor caffeine have been hummingthrough nothing. This is the waythe world works. You walk in the door,take a seat, lift a steaming cup,make thoughts beautiful or sordid,and it comes — out of control the paperwill say next day, the octogenarian driverat the end of her own rope, butthere’s no way. You’ve proven againthe symmetry of the cosmos, matterto energy, carom of fragile skulloff fatal headlight, the last thoughtrequiring no thought at all.

DAVID CITINO

David Citino teaches at Ohio State University. He is the author of twelvecollections of poetry, including The News and Other Poems (Universityof Notre Dame Press), The Invention of Secrecy, The Book ofAppassionata: Collected Poems, and Broken Symmetry, named aNotable Book by the National Book Critics Circle. He writes on poetryfor the Columbus Dispatch, and is the contributing editor of a book ofprose, The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry(Oxford University Press).

Every decade or so, a stunning breakthrough in stringtheory sends shock waves racing through the theoreti-cal physics community, generating a feverish outpour-

ing of papers and activity. This time, the Internet lines areburning up as papers keep pouring into the Los AlamosNational Laboratory’s computer bulletin board, the officialclearinghouse for superstring papers. John Schwarz of CalTech, for example, has been speaking to conferences aroundthe world proclaiming the “second superstring revolution.”Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study inPrinceton gave a spellbinding three-hour lecture describing it.The aftershocks of the breakthrough are even shaking otherdisciplines, such as mathematics. The director of theInstitute, mathematician Phillip Griffiths, says, “The excite-ment I sense in the people in the field and the spinoffs intomy own field of mathematics . . . have really been quiteextraordinary. I feel I’ve been very privileged to witness thisfirst hand.”

And Cumrun Vafa at Harvard has said, “I may be biasedon this one, but I think it is perhaps the most importantdevelopment not only in string theory, but also in theoreticalphysics at least in the past two decades.” What is triggeringall this excitement is the discovery of something called “M-theory,” a theory that may explain the origin of strings. Inone dazzling stroke, this new M-theory has solved somelong-standing puzzling mysteries about string theory thathave dogged it from the beginning, leaving many theoreticalphysicists (myself included!) gasping for breath. M-theory,moreover, may even force string theory to change its name.Although many features of M-theory are still unknown, itdoes not seem to be a theory purely of strings. Michael Duffof Texas A&M is already giving speeches with the title “TheTheory Formerly Known as Strings!” String theorists arecareful to point out that this does not prove the final correct-ness of the theory. Not by any means. That proof may takeyears or decades more. But it marks a most significant break-through that is already reshaping the entire field.

16 Fall 2002

Michio Kaku

PARABLE OF THE LION

Einstein once said, “Nature shows us only the tailof the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion

belongs to it even though he cannot at once revealhimself because of his enormous size.” Einstein spentthe last thirty years of his life searching for the “tail”that would lead him to the “lion,” the fabled unifiedfield theory or the “theory of everything,” whichwould unite all the forces of the universe into a sin-gle equation. The four forces (gravity, electromagnet-ism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) wouldbe unified by an equation perhaps one inch long.Capturing the “lion” would be the greatest scientificachievement in all of physics, the crowning achieve-ment of 2,000 years of scientific investigation, eversince the Greeks first asked themselves what theworld was made of. But although Einstein was thefirst one to set off on this noble hunt and track thefootprints left by the lion, he ultimately lost the trailand wandered off into the wilderness. Other giantsof twentieth-century physics, such as WernerHeisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, also joined in thehunt. But all the easy ideas were tried and shown tobe wrong. When Niels Bohr once heard a lecture byPauli explaining his version of the unified field theo-ry, Bohr stood up and said, “We in the back are allagreed that your theory is crazy. But what divides usis whether your theory is crazy enough!”

The trail leading to the unified field theory, infact, is littered with the wreckage of failed expedi-tions and dreams. Today, however, physicists are fol-lowing a different trail that might be “crazy enough”to lead to the lion. This new trail leads to superstringtheory, which is the best (and in fact only) candidatefor a theory of everything. Unlike its rivals, it hassurvived every blistering mathematical challenge everhurled at it. Not surprisingly, the theory is a radical,“crazy” departure from the past, being based on tinystrings vibrating in ten dimensional space-time.Moreover, the theory easily swallows up Einstein’stheory of gravity. Witten has said, “Unlike conven-tional quantum field theory, string theory requiresgravity. I regard this fact as one of the greatestinsights in science ever made.” But until recently,there has been a glaring weak spot: string theoristshave been unable to probe all solutions of the model,failing miserably to examine what is called the “non-perturbative region,” which I will describe shortly.This is vitally important because ultimately our uni-verse (with its wonderfully diverse collection ofgalaxies, stars, planets, sub-atomic particles, andeven people) may lie in this “non-perturbativeregion.” Until this region can be probed, we don’tknow if string theory is a theory of everything — ora theory of nothing! That’s what today’s excitement

is all about. For the first time, using a powerful toolcalled “duality,” physicists are now probing beyondjust the tail, and finally seeing the outlines of a huge,unexpectedly beautiful lion at the other end. Notknowing what to call it, Witten has dubbed it “M-theory.” In one stroke, M-theory has solved many ofthe embarrassing features of the theory, such as whywe have five superstring theories. Ultimately, it maysolve the nagging question of where strings comefrom.

PEA BRAINS AND THE MOTHER OF ALL STRINGS

Einstein once asked himself if God had any choicein making the universe. Perhaps not, so it was

embarrassing for string theorists to have five differ-ent self-consistent strings, all of which can unite thetwo fundamental theories in physics, the theory ofgravity and the quantum theory.

Each of these string theories looks completely dif-ferent from the others. They are based on differentsymmetries, with exotic names like E(8)xE(8) andO(32).

Not only this, but superstrings are in some sensenot unique: there are other non-string theories whichcontain “super-symmetry,” the key mathematicalsymmetry underlying superstrings. (Changing lightinto electrons and then into gravity is one of therather astonishing tricks performed by supersymme-try, which is the symmetry that can exchange parti-cles with half-integral spin, such as electrons andquarks, with particles of integral spin, such as pho-tons, gravitons, and W-particles.)

In eleven dimensions, in fact, there are alternatesuper theories based on membranes as well as pointparticles (called super-gravity). In lower dimensions,there is moreover a whole zoo of super theoriesbased on membranes in different dimensions. (Forexample, point particles are zero-branes, strings areone-branes, membranes are two-branes, and so on.)For the p-dimensional case, some wag dubbed themp-branes (pronounced “pea brains”). But because p-branes are horribly difficult to work with, they werelong considered just a historical curiosity, a trail thatled to a dead-end. (Michael Duff, in fact, has collect-ed a whole list of unflattering comments made byreferees to his National Science Foundation grantconcerning his work on p-branes. One of the morecharitable comments from a referee was: “He has askewed view of the relative importance of variousconcepts in modern theoretical physics.”) So thatwas the mystery. Why should supersymmetry allowfor five superstrings and this peculiar, motley collec-tion of p-branes? Now we realize that strings, super-gravity, and p-branes are just different aspects of the

M-THEORY: MOTHER OF ALL SUPERSTRINGS


same theory. M-theory (M for “membrane” or the“mother of all strings,” take your pick) unites thefive superstrings into one theory and includes the p-branes as well. To see how this all fits together, let usupdate the famous parable of the blind men and theelephant. Think of the blind men on the trail of thelion. Hearing it race by, they chase after it and des-perately grab onto its tail (a one-brane). Hangingonto the tail for dear life, they feel its one-dimension-al form and loudly proclaim “It’s a string! It’s astring!”

But then one blind man goes beyond the tail andgrabs onto the ear of the lion. Feeling a two-dimen-sional surface (a membrane), the blind man pro-claims, “No, it’s really a two-brane!” Then anotherblind man is able to grab onto the leg of the lion.Sensing a three-dimensional solid, he shouts, “No,you’re both wrong. It’s really a three-brane!” Actu-ally, they are all right. Just as the tail, ear, and leg aredifferent parts of the same lion, the string and vari-ous p-branes appear to be different limits of the sametheory: M-theory. Paul Townsend of CambridgeUniversity, one of the architects of this idea, calls it“p-brane democracy”; that is, all p-branes (includingstrings) are created equal. Schwarz puts a slightly dif-ferent spin on this. He says, “We are in an Orwelliansituation: all p-branes are equal, but some (namelystrings) are more equal than others. The point is thatthey are the only ones on which we can base a per-turbation theory.” To understand unfamiliar conceptssuch as duality, perturbation theory, and non-pertur-bative solutions, it is instructive to see where theseconcepts first entered into physics.

DUALITY

The key tool to understanding this breakthrough issomething called “duality.” Loosely speaking,

two theories are “dual” to each other if they can beshown to be equivalent under a certain interchange.The simplest example of duality is reversing the roleof electricity and magnetism in the equations dis-covered by James Clerk Maxwell of CambridgeUniversity 130 years ago. These are the equationsthat govern light, television, X-rays, radar, dynamos,motors, transformers, even the Internet and comput-ers. The remarkable feature about these equations isthat they remain the same if we interchange the mag-netic field B and electric field E and also switch theelectric charge “e” with the magnetic charge “g” of amagnetic “monopole”: E B and e g (In fact,the product “eg” is a constant.) This has importantimplications. Often, when a theory cannot be solvedexactly, we use an approximation scheme. In first-year calculus, for example, we recall that we canapproximate certain functions by Taylor’s expansion.

Similarly, since e2 = 1/137 in certain units and ishence a small number, we can always approximatethe theory by power expanding in e2. So we addcontributions of order e2 + e4 + e6 and so on in solv-ing for, say, the collision of two particles. Notice thateach contribution is getting smaller and smaller, sowe can in principle add them all up. This generaliza-tion of Taylor’s expansion is called “perturbationtheory,” where we perturb the system with termscontaining e2. For example, in archery, perturbationtheory is how we aim our arrows. With everymotion of our arms, our bow gets closer and closerto aligning with the bull’s eye. But now try expand-ing in g2. This is much tougher; in fact, if we expandin g2, which is large, then the sum g2 + g4 + g6 etc.blows up and becomes meaningless. This is the rea-son why the “non-perturbative” region is so difficultto probe, since the theory simply blows up if we tryto naively use perturbation theory for large couplingconstant g. So at first it appears hopeless that wecould ever penetrate into the non-perturbativeregion. (For example, if every motion of our armsgot bigger and bigger, we would never be able tozero in and hit the target with the arrow.) But noticethat because of duality, a theory of e (which is easilysolved) is identical to a theory of large g (which isdifficult to solve). Because they are the same theory,we can use duality to solve for the non-perturbativeregion.

S, T, AND U DUALITY

The first inkling that duality might apply in stringtheory was discovered by K. Kikkawa and M.

Yamasaki of Osaka University in 1984. Theyshowed that if you “curled up” one of the extradimensions into a circle with radius R, the theorywas the same if we curled up this dimension withradius 1/R. This is now called T duality: R 1/RWhen applied to various superstrings, one couldreduce five of the string theories to three. In ninedimensions (with one dimension curled up) the TypeIIa and IIb strings were identical, as were theE(8)xE(8) and O(32) strings.

Unfortunately, T duality was still a perturbativeduality. The next breakthrough came when it wasshown that there was a second class of dualities,called S duality, which provided a duality betweenthe perturbative and non-perturbative regions ofstring theory. Another duality, called U duality, waseven more powerful.

Then Nathan Seiberg and Witten brilliantlyshowed how another form of duality could solve for the non-perturbative region in four dimensionalsupersymmetric theories. However, what finally con-


18 Fall 2002



vinced many physicists of the power ofthis technique was the work of EdwardWitten and Paul Townsend. They caughteveryone by surprise by showing thatthere was a duality between ten dimen-sional Type IIa strings and eleven dimen-sional supergravity! The non-perturbativeregion of Type IIa strings, which was pre-viously a forbidden region, was revealedto be governed by eleven dimensionalsupergravity theory, with one dimensioncurled up. At this point, I remember thatmany physicists (me included) were rub-bing our eyes, not believing what we wereseeing. I remember saying to myself, “Butthat’s impossible!”

All of a sudden, we realized that per-haps the real “home” of string theory wasnot ten dimensions, but possibly eleven,and that the theory wasn’t fundamentallya string theory at all! This revived tremen-dous interest in eleven dimensional theo-ries and p-branes. Lurking in the eleventhdimension was an entirely new theorywhich could reduce to eleven dimensionalsupergravity as well as ten dimensionalstring theory and p-brane theory.

DETRACTORS OF STRING THEORIES

To the critics, however, these mathe-matical developments still don’t

answer the nagging question: How do youtest it? Because string theory is really atheory of Creation, when all its beautifulsymmetries were in their full glory, theonly way to test it, the critics wail, is torecreate the Big Bang itself, which isimpossible. Nobel Laureate SheldonGlashow likes to ridicule superstring theo-ry by comparing it with former PresidentReagan’s Star Wars plan, that is, they areboth untestable, soak up resources, andsiphon off the best scientific brains.

Actually, most string theorists thinkthese criticisms are silly. They believe thatthe critics have missed the point. The keypoint is this: if the theory can be solvednon-perturbatively using pure mathemat-ics, then it should reduce at low energiesto a theory of ordinary protons, electrons,atoms, and molecules, for which there isample experimental data. If we couldcompletely solve the theory, we should beable to extract its low-energy spectrum,

which should match the familiar particleswe see today in the Standard Model.Thus, the problem is not building atomsmashers l,000 light years in diameter; thereal problem is raw brain power: if onlywe were clever enough, we could writedown M-theory, solve it, and settle every-thing.

EVOLVING BACKWARDS

So what would it take to actually solvethe theory once and for all and end all

the speculation and back-biting? Thereare several approaches. The first is themost direct: try to derive the StandardModel of particle interactions, with itsbizarre collection of quarks, gluons, elec-trons, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, etc. etc.etc. (I must admit that although theStandard Model is the most successfulphysical theory ever proposed, it is alsoone of the ugliest.) This might be done bycurling up six of the ten dimensions, leav-ing us with a four dimensional theory thatmight resemble the Standard Model a bit,then try to use duality and M-theory toprobe its non-perturbative region, seeing ifthe symmetries break in the correct fash-ion, giving us the correct masses of thequarks and other particles in the StandardModel. Witten’s philosophy, however, is abit different. He feels that the key to solv-ing string theory is to understand theunderlying principle behind the theory.

Let me explain. Einstein’s theory ofgeneral relativity, for example, startedfrom first principles. Einstein had the“happiest thought in his life” when heleaned back in his chair at the Bern patentoffice and realized that a person in afalling elevator would feel no gravity.Although physicists since Galileo knewthis, Einstein was able to extract from thisthe Equivalence Principle. This deceptivelysimple statement (that the laws of physicsare indistinguishable locally in an acceler-ating or a gravitating frame) led Einsteinto introduce a new symmetry to physics,general coordinate transformations. Thisin turn gave birth to the action principlebehind general relativity, the most beauti-ful and compelling theory of gravity. Onlynow are we trying to quantize the theoryto make it compatible with the otherforces. So the evolution of this theory can

be summarized as: Principle Symmetry ActionQuantum Theory.

According to Witten, we need to discover the ana-log of the Equivalence Principle for string theory. Thefundamental problem has been that string theory hasbeen evolving “backwards.” As Witten says, “stringtheory is twenty-first-century physics which fell intothe twentieth century by accident.” We were never“meant” to see this theory until the next century.

IS THE END IN SIGHT?

Vafa recently added a strange twist to this whenhe introduced yet another mega-theory, this time

a twelve-dimensional theory called F-theory (F for“father”) which explains the self-duality of the IIbstring. (Unfortunately, this twelve-dimensional theoryis rather strange: it has two time coordinates, notone, and actually violates twelve-dimensional relativi-ty. Imagine trying to live in a world with two times!It would put an episode of Twilight Zone to shame.)So is the final theory ten, eleven, or twelve dimen-sional?

Schwarz, for one, feels that the final version ofM-theory may not even have any fixed dimension.He feels that the true theory may be independent ofany dimensionality of space-time, and that elevendimensions only emerge once one tries to solve it.Townsend seems to agree, saying “the whole notionof dimensionality is an approximate one that onlyemerges in some semiclassical context.” So does thismean that the end is in sight, that we will somedaysoon derive the Standard Model from first princi-ples? I asked some of the leaders in this field torespond to this question. Although they are allenthusiastic supporters of this revolution, they arestill cautious about predicting the future. Townsendbelieves that we are in a stage similar to the oldquantum era of the Bohr atom, just before the full

elucidation of quantum mechanics. He says, “Wehave some fruitful pictures and some rules analo-gous to the Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization rules, butit’s also clear that we don’t have a complete theory.”

Duff says, “Is M-theory merely a theory of super-membranes and super 5-branes requiring some (asyet unknown) non-perturbative quantization, or (asWitten believes) are the underlying degrees of free-dom of M-theory yet to be discovered? I am person-ally agnostic on this point.” Witten certainly believeswe are on the right track, but we need a few more“revolutions” like this to finally solve the theory. “Ithink there are still a couple more superstring revo-lutions in our future, at least. If we can manage onemore super string revolution a decade, I think thatwe will do all right,” he says. Vafa says, “I hope thisis the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ but who knowshow long the tunnel is!” Schwarz, moreover, haswritten about M-theory: “Whether it is based onsomething geometrical (like supermembranes) orsomething completely different is still not known. Inany case, finding it would be a landmark in humanintellectual history.” Personally, I am optimistic. Forthe first time, we can see the outline of the lion, andit is magnificent. One day, we will hear it roar.

Michio Kaku is professor of theoretical physics at theCity University of New York. He is author of numerousbooks, including Hyperspace (1994), Beyond Einstein(1995), Visions (1997), and Introduction toSuperstrings and M-theory (1999). His web site iswww.mkaku.org.

A version of this article was first published in theJanuary 18, 1997 issue of the New Scientist.Reprinted by permission.


20 Fall 2002

he goal of science is to understand the nat-ural universe as completely as possible. In the

four hundred years since Galileo and Keplerand others began modern science, we have suc-

ceeded in understanding the physical worldaround us. We know the particles (electrons, andparticles like electrons but with an extra interac-tion, called quarks) that make up all that we see,from flowers to people to stars. We know howthe particles interact through the gravitational,electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces, accord-ing to the rules of quantum theory, to form thecomplexity and beauty of our world. We knowthe history of our planet, our sun, and our uni-verse back to their beginnings. Our description isa fully mathematical theory that is very well test-ed and established. It incorporates the twoStandard Models of particle physics and of cos-mology (forgive the mundane names — thenames arise as the phenomena are being studied,and then it is hard to change them). Now wewould like to understand why it is that these par-ticles exist and these interactions occur, and whythey have the properties that they do, and toexplain as much as possible about why the uni-verse not only works as it does but even why itexists at all, and why we exist.


T

ForceStrength

Energy in GeV

Strong Force

Weak Force

Electromagnetic Force

With the two Standard Models we can formulatesuch questions scientifically. We can work out howvarious quantities and forces affect the conditions forlife. For example, we know that carbon and otherheavier elements are necessary for our life. In the BigBang, only helium and hydrogen were made in largequantities. Carbon and heavier elements are made instars and then distributed throughout large regionswhen the stars die in supernova explosions after bil-lions of years. That means life can arise only on thesecond- or third-generation planets that incorporatethe heavy elements, after they have been formed in afirst- or second-generation star. So we can basicallyunderstand a “why” question, “why is our universeso old as it is (about 13 billion years)?” It is becauseuniverses with life like ours have to be at least a fewbillion years old so that stars will have formed anddied. We also understand why the universe is notvery much older than it is because if it were, it wouldhave expanded so much it would have such a smalldensity in any region that solar systems with planetswould no longer form.

Some aspects of how things work seem to have tobe rather precise if life is to exist. One example is thestrengths of the forces. Stars “burn” protons to makethe light that provides energy for us to live. To givelife time to evolve, stars need to live billions of years.The rate at which stars burn protons depends on abalance between the attractive strong force and therepulsive electromagnetic force. In the 1960s scien-tists realized that if the strong force were just a littlestronger, only a few percent, stars would burn toofast and provide light for only a few years. Similarreasoning tells us that all the forces have to be aboutthe strength that they are, or we would not exist.Can we explain why the forces have to be “just so,”in astronomer Craig Hogan’s phrase?

ANSWERING QUESTIONS

It turns out that such arguments are less constrain-ing than they first seemed to be. Recently we have

come to understand that the forces are not to bethought of independently. They can be unified in anextension of the Standard Model for which there isgood indirect evidence, called the supersymmetricStandard Model, or in string theory. Assuming theforces are unified, if we imagine increasing thestrong force, we must simultaneously increase theelectromagnetic force. The increased attraction ofthe strong force is balanced by an increased repul-sion from the electromagnetic force, and the amountof increase that allows life is significantly larger thanif we treat them independently. Even then, though,the range of strengths that allows life is still limited— if the force strengths were very much larger thanthey are, the world would be much different. It is aninteresting and legitimate question to ask if we canunderstand why the strengths of the forces are whatthey are.

I and many scientists think of these and similarquestions about particle properties and other quanti-ties as “anthropic questions” that we would like toanswer. For one, we would like to understand whythe force strengths are what they are. Other issuesthat need understanding are a complicated relation-ship between the masses of the up and down quarksand the electron, and a quantity that affects the cur-vature of the universe, called the “cosmological con-stant,” whose actual value is much smaller than thevalue that simple calculations imply for it. If thesequantities differed much from what they actuallyare, we would not exist. Although all the neededanalyses have not yet been carried out, I think mostof the anthropic questions that have to be “just so”in order for us to exist can be reduced to the threecited above, in today’s unified theories.

ANTHROPIC QUESTIONS

22 Fall 2002

This figure shows how the forces of nature (not includinggravity) behave if they are extrapolated to high energies, orequivalently small distances. One can do the extrapolationsince the forces and their effects are described by a mathe-matical theory. The strength of the forces is measured inexperiments and shown at the left edge of the graph, andthe strength they would have for increasing energy is thencalculated. Remarkably, the forces become equal at very highenergies, which implies that they can be interpreted as onebasic force that apparently gives different effects at our lowenergies. Thus if one wants to ask about the effects ofincreasing the strength of one of the forces at our energies,one must move the whole set of lines up and simultaneouslyincrease the others also (maintaining the unification).

In the past there were more anthropic questions;these questions have since been explained by normalphysics, so an anthropic explanation for them is notneeded. For instance, the universe probably wentthrough a very early period of rapid increase in sizecalled inflation, which culminated in the Big Bangexpansion. The resultinguniverse would exist andexpand a long time, sowe have a likely explana-tion of why the universeis old. Another exampleis that the universe ismade of matter but notantimatter. If there wereequal amounts of each,life would not existbecause matter and anti-matter annihilate eachother, leaving too littlematter to form galaxiesand stars. We do not yetknow for sure how theuniverse evolved from aninitial state with equalamounts of matter andantimatter to today’sasymmetry (a universedominated by matter,that is), but several pos-sible explanations arebeing explored and test-ed. We expect one ofthem to be valid, so wethink that we will under-stand this asymmetry.We do not know yet ifall the anthropic ques-tions will be explained,but the remaining threedescribed above are alladdressed by supersymmetric string theory, so wehope that they soon will be.

As people recognized the existence of anthropicquestions during recent decades, a variety of reac-tions occurred. Some scientists are annoyed by them,basically saying that anthropic explanations (such assomething is the way it is because if it were not, wewould not be here to ask) are not explanations, andscience can do better. Others, including distinguishedleaders such as Vaclav Havel (who have been unhap-py that we learned in the past century that not onlywas the earth not the center of the universe, but italso was just one planet in one of a huge number ofsolar systems in one of a huge number of galaxies,

and the particles that we are made of are not eventhe main form of matter in the universe), reacted bysaying the need for anthropic explanations puts usback at the center because the universe is arrangedso that humans can exist. That argument seems to berefuted by recalling that the conditions for life on

earth led to a world dominatedby dinosaurs for more than ahundred million years, until anaccidental collision with an aster-oid destroyed the dinosaurs andallowed mammals to evolve innew directions. Others havereacted by defining “anthropicprinciples” that are hypothesesfor explaining anthropic ques-tions. A widely accepted one isthe reasonable Weak AnthropicPrinciple, which roughly saysthat the forces and particles andlaws must be such as to allowthe universe to contain intelligentlife, because we know that itdoes. A number of other versionsof anthropic principles exist,including stronger ones, but forscience it is understandinganthropic questions (that is,“just-so” phenomena) that is rel-evant, not formulating principlesthat may lead us into missingsome understanding.

MANY UNIVERSES?

Suppose one day we have atheory in which all anthropic

questions are answered, in thesense that once the theory iswritten, calculations will correct-

ly predict all the quantities that have to be “just so”for us to exist. Some people may still have anuncomfortable feeling, asking why the theory is onethat leads to life instead of one that does not andconsidering the possible implications of that ques-tion. Such a question is illuminated and perhapsanswered by another feature of recent theories —today’s theories seem to imply the existence of many“universes.” These results are not yet fully under-stood, so “universes” is in quotes because its mean-ing is uncertain. It may be that these universes are allto be thought of as domains of one inclusive uni-verse, or as entirely separate ones.

Two paths at least lead to such ideas. One isinflation — inflation can happen repeatedly, even to

ANTHROPIC QUESTIONS


As people recognized theexistence of anthropic

questions during recentdecades, a variety of reactionsoccurred. Some scientists areannoyed by them, basically

saying that anthropicexplanations (such as

something is the way it isbecause if it were not, we

would not be here to ask) arenot explanations, and science

can do better. Others,including distinguished leaders

such as Vaclav Havel . . .reacted by saying the need foranthropic explanations puts usback at the center because the

universe is arranged so thathumans can exist.

small pieces of existing universes,with each patch that inflates turn-ing in effect into another universe.The second is string theory. In sci-ence, theories provide equations orprinciples, and the behavior ofactual phenomena are the solutionsof the equations. A system will,most of the time, be in its state ofleast energy, the ground state, justas a ball will bounce down a hill tothe bottom. A universe, like anatom, may form in any of manystates, and it will eventually settleinto its ground state. It turns outthat string theory implies a largenumber of apparently equivalentground states, all of which maylead to separate universes. Thus,both inflation and string theorymay lead to multiple universes.

One aspect of our universe which we want tounderstand is that we live in three space dimensions.There is an anthropic explanation. About a centuryago, we discovered that planetary orbits are not sta-ble in four or more space dimensions, so if therewere more than three space dimensions, planetswould not orbit a sun long enough for life to origi-nate. For the same reason, atoms are not stable infour or more space dimensions. And in one or twospace dimensions, neither blood flow nor large num-bers of neuron connections can exist. Thus, interest-ing life can exist only in three dimensions.Alternatively, it may be that we can derive the factthat we live in three dimensions because the uniqueground state of the relevant string theory turns out tohave three large dimensions (plus perhaps some smallones of which we are not normally aware). Or stringtheory may have many states with three spacedimensions, and all of them may result in universesthat contain life.

Each of the multitude of universes may have dif-ferent laws of nature, or different values of quantitiesthat determine how they behave, such as the speed oflight or Planck’s constant (which determines the sizeof quanta in quantum theory). Some may be suitablefor life, and some may not. All those suitable for lifemay have life develop. Sometimes life will evolveonly into dinosaurs rather than something moreintelligent. We cannot attach any meaning to the factthat a life form which could ask anthropic questionsdid develop in at least one universe. It is very muchlike a lottery. If you win the lottery, you may feelvery grateful, but someone had to win, and no oneselected who that was, except randomly. Just because

a universe has a unique set of laws and parametersshould not lead one to wonder whether that set wasdesigned.

One might worry that the multiple-universeapproach implies that we cannot hope to calculateand understand all the parameters of a physical the-ory from fundamental principles, because their val-ues can differ from one universe to another. Hogan,for example, has argued that even a fully unified the-ory will not allow the calculation of all quark mass-es, in order to allow for different worlds that havedifferent values for them. But from the string theoryor inflation point of view, each world leads to itsown full set of masses and other quantities and laws.In any of them that we could study experimentally,we might be able to learn to understand their lawsand calculate their basic parameters.

At present, neither inflation nor string theory isunderstood well enough to calculate how many uni-verses there are, or even whether the number is finiteor infinite, or in what senses the laws of nature andthe quantities that enter the equations can differ. Sothese arguments are informed speculation. But tomany people it is exciting that these ideas are nowfinally the subject of basic physics research.

Gordon Kane is the Victor Weisskopf CollegiateProfessor of Physics at the Michigan Center forTheoretical Physics, Randall Physics Lab, University ofMichigan.

ANTHROPIC QUESTIONS

24 Fall 2002

Are the laws of nature “just right“ for life to emerge on Earth?

OCTOBER DRAGONFLY

The sweeping spiral of this gust of windskittering amber leaves above the silver pondsuggests the swirling shape of galaxies,a template too for water draining down,but what about the whorls of flesh tipping my fingers?Are they too the residue of primal forces?My eyes seeing in my flesh the very start of time?

A blur-quick dragonfly, so far out of season,suddenly shares this patch of shoreline,gliding over sunsplintered, wavering rippleswith the casual ease of owning the air.

If I’m the residue of primordial whirlperhaps he’s an arrow in sun-relentless motionfired outward from that first climactic shudderwhich birthed every atom of this huge mosaic.

He retreats to the shadow of overhanging boulderseven as the sun slips behind a gray cloudsome atoms of which perhaps can rememberthat first wild moment of colliding spirals,surging wind of birth made manifest as rock,heat, shower, vision, eternity today.

LEE SLONIMSKY

Lee Slonimsky’s work has appeared in Connecticut Review,The Hiram Poetry Review, and other journals. A collection ofhis poems, Talk between Leaf and Skin, was published in2001 by Sulphur River Literary Review Press of Austin,Texas. He is the manager of a hedge fund, Ocean Partners LP.


Omega NebulaA watercolor fantasyland? No. It’s actually an image of

the center of the Omega Nebula, a hotbed of newly bornstars wrapped in colorful blankets of glowing gas and cra-dled in an enormous cold, dark hydrogen cloud. This stun-ning picture was taken by the ACS.

The region of the nebula shown in this photograph isabout 3,500 times wider than our solar system. The arearepresents about 60 percent of the total view captured byACS. The nebula, also called M17 and the Swan Nebula,resides 5,500 light-years away in the constellationSagittarius.

Like its famous cousin in Orion, the Swan Nebula is illu-minated by ultraviolet radiation from young, massive stars,located just beyond the upper right corner of the image.Each star is about six times hotter and thirty times moremassive than the Sun. The powerful radiation from thesestars evaporates and erodes the dense cloud of cold gaswithin which the stars formed. The blistered walls of thehollow cloud shine primarily in the blue, green, and red lightemitted by excited atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,and sulfur. Particularly striking is the rose-like feature, seento the right of center, which glows in the red light emittedby hydrogen and sulfur.Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (USCS/LO), M.Clampin(STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA

he remarkable images that follow are all fromNASA's Hubble space telescope. Originally asymbol of botched technology because of its

flawed mirror, the Hubble, since it was repaired,has been a triumph for the space agency and forscientists all over the world. Its breathtakingimages continue to startle and enlighten. Thephotos we have included are among the mostrecent, and were taken variously with the newlyreactivated Near Infrared and Multi-Object Spec-trometer (NICMOS), the Advanced Camera forSurveys (ACS), and the Wide Field PlanetaryCamera 2 (WFPC2). The text accompanying themis also from NASA's web site, http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html, where you canfind more extensive explanations, along witharchived photos. We greatly appreciate NASAallowing us to use these images and text for this issue.

T

26 Fall 2002


Cassiopeia AGlowing gaseous streamers of red,

white, and blue — as well as green andpink — illuminate the heavens likeFourth of July fireworks. The colorfulstreamers that float across the sky werecreated by one of the biggest firecrack-ers seen to go off in our galaxy inrecorded history, the titanic supernova

explosion of a massive star, about 15 to25 times more massive than our Sun. Thedead star’s shredded remains are calledCassiopeia A, or “Cas A” for short. Thelight from the exploding star reachedEarth 320 years ago.

Cas A is the youngest known superno-va remnant in our Milky Way Galaxy and

resides 10,000 light-years away in theconstellation Cassiopeia, so the star actu-ally blew up 10,000 years before the lightreached Earth in the late 1600s.Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble HeritageTeam (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: R. Fesen (Dartmouth) and J.Morse (Univ. of Colorado)

PEERING INTO THE UNIVERSE


A Wheel Within a WheelA nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about

the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag’sObject (after astronomer Art Hoag, who discovered it in1950). This image captures a face-on view of the galaxy’sring of stars, revealing more detail than any existing photoof this object. The image may help astronomers unravelclues on how such strange objects form.

The entire galaxy is about 120,000 light-years wide,which is slightly larger than our Milky Way Galaxy. The bluering, which is dominated by clusters of young, massivestars, contrasts sharply with the yellow nucleus of mostlyolder stars. What appears to be a “gap” separating the twostellar populations may actually contain some star clustersthat are almost too faint to see. Curiously, an object thatbears an uncanny resemblance to Hoag’s Object can beseen in the gap at the one o’clock position. The object isprobably a background ring galaxy.Credits: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: Ray A. Lucas (STScI/AURA)

Galaxy NGC 4013In another NICMOS shot, the Hubble has pierced

the dusty disk of the edge-on galaxy NGC 4013 andpeered all the way to the galactic core. To the surpriseof astronomers, NICMOS found a brilliant band-likestructure, which may be a ring of newly formed stars(yellow band in middle photo) seen edge-on.

In the visible-light view of the galaxy (top photo),the star-forming ring cannot be seen because it isembedded in dust. The most prominent feature in thevisible-light image is the thin, dark band of gas anddust, which is about 500 light-years thick. The ring-like structure spied by NICMOS encircles the core andis about 720 light-years wide, which is the typical sizeof most star-forming rings found in disk galaxies.

The small ring is churning out stars at a torridpace. The Milky Way Galaxy, for example, is more than10,000 times larger than the ring. If the Milky Wayproduced stars at the same rate, it would be making1,000 times more stars a year. The ring-like structureis seen more clearly in the photo at bottom. This pic-ture, taken with a filter sensitive to hydrogen, showsthe glow of stars and gas. Astronomers used thisinformation to calculate the rate of star formation inthe ring-like structure.Credits for NICMOS images: NASA, the NICMOS Group (STScI,ESA), and the NICMOS Science Team (University of Arizona)

Credits for WFPC2 image: NASA, the Hubble Heritage Team(STScI/AURA) and ESA

28 Fall 2002


Galaxy NGC 4622: Backward SpiralTo the surprise of astronomers, this galaxy,

called NGC 4622, appears to be rotating in a direc-tion opposite to what they expected. The imageshows NGC 4622 and its outer pair of winding armsfull of new stars (shown in blue).

Astronomers are puzzled by the clockwise rota-tion because of the direction in which the outerspiral arms are pointing. Most spiral galaxies havearms of gas and stars that trail behind as they turn.But this galaxy has two “leading” outer arms thatpoint toward the direction of the galaxy’s clockwiserotation. To add to the conundrum, NGC 4622 alsohas a “trailing” inner arm that is wrapped aroundthe galaxy in the direction opposite to the one inwhich it is rotating. Based on galaxy simulations, ateam of astronomers had expected that the galaxywas turning counterclockwise.

Astronomers suspect that NGC 4622 interactedwith another galaxy. Its two outer arms are lop-sided, meaning that something disturbed it. TheHubble image suggests that NGC 4622 consumed asmall companion galaxy. The galaxy’s core providesnew evidence for a merger between NGC 4622 and asmaller galaxy.Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team(STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: Dr. Ron Buta (U. Alabama), Dr. GeneByrd (U. Alabama) and Tarsh Freeman (Bevill StateCommunity College)

Merging Galaxies: NGC 4676The ACS here has captured a spectacular pair of galaxies engaged in a

celestial dance of cat and mouse or, in this case, mouse and mouse.Located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma

Berenices, the colliding galaxies have been nicknamed “The Mice”because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy.Otherwise known as NGC 4676, the pair will eventually merge into a sin-gle giant galaxy.

The image shows the most detail and the most stars that have everbeen seen in these galaxies. In the galaxy at left, the bright blue patchis resolved into a vigorous cascade of clusters and associations of young,hot blue stars, whose formation has been triggered by the tidal forces ofthe gravitational interaction. Streams of material can also be seen flow-ing between the two galaxies.

The clumps of young stars in the long, straight tidal tail (upper right)are separated by fainter regions of material. These dim regions suggestthat the clumps of stars have formed from the gravitational collapse ofthe gas and dust that once occupied those areas. Some of the clumpshave luminous masses comparable to dwarf galaxies that orbit in the haloof our own Milky Way Galaxy.Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (USCS/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G.Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA



“Tadpole” GalaxyAgainst a stunning backdrop of thousands of

galaxies, this odd-looking galaxy with the longstreamer of stars appears to be racing through space,like a runaway pinwheel firework. Galaxy UGC 10214,dubbed the “Tadpole,” is unlike the textbook imagesof stately galaxies. Its distorted shape was caused bya small interloper, a very blue, compact galaxy visiblein the upper left corner of the more massive Tadpole.The Tadpole resides about 420 million light-yearsaway in the constellation Draco.

Seen shining through the Tadpole’s disk, the tinyintruder is likely a hit-and-run galaxy that is nowleaving the scene of the accident. Strong gravitation-al forces from the interaction created the long tail ofdebris, consisting of stars and gas that stretch outmore than 280,000 light-years.

Numerous young blue stars and star clusters,spawned by the galaxy collision, are seen in the spi-ral arms, as well as in the long “tidal” tail of stars.Each of these clusters represents the formation of upto about a million stars.

The galactic carnage and torrent of star birth areplaying out against a spectacular backdrop: a “wall-paper pattern” of 6,000 galaxies. These galaxies rep-resent twice the number of those discovered in thelegendary Hubble Deep Field, the orbiting observato-ry’s “deepest” view of the heavens, taken in 1995 bythe Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. They are amyriad of shapes and represent fossil samples of theuniverse’s 13-billion-year evolution.Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (USCS/LO),M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team,and ESA

Gomez’s HamburgerHubble has snapped a photograph of a strange object

that bears an uncanny resemblance to a hamburger. Theobject, nicknamed Gomez’s Hamburger, is a sun-like starnearing the end of its life. It already has expelled largeamounts of gas and dust and is on its way to becoming acolorful, glowing planetary nebula. The ingredients for thegiant celestial hamburger are dust and light. The ham-burger “buns” are light reflecting off dust, and the pattyis the dark band of dust in the middle. The reason whythe star is surrounded by a thick, dusty disk remainssomewhat uncertain. It is possible that the central objectis actually a pair of stars. If so, then the star that ejectedthe nebula may be rapidly rotating, expelling materialmostly from its equatorial regions.Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team(STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: A. Gomez (Cerro Tololo Inter-AmericanObservatory)


30 Fall 2002

infared eyes” of NICMOS can’t penetrateall the way through it. The image showsthe tip of the nebula, about half alight-year long. The entire nebula is 7light-years long.

NICMOS has peeled away the outerlayers of dust to reveal even denserdust. The denser regions give the nebulaa more three-dimensional structure thancan be seen in the visible-light pictureat left, taken by the ACS. In peeringthrough the dusty façade to the nebula’sinner regions, NICMOS has unmasked


Cone NebulaNICMOS has penetrated layers of dust

in a star-forming cloud to uncover adense, craggy edifice of dust and gas(image on the right in the paired photos).

This region is called the Cone Nebula(NGC 2264), so named because, in ground-based images, it has a conical shape. NIC-MOS enables the Hubble telescope to seein near-infrared wavelengths of light, sothat it can penetrate the dust thatobscures the nebula’s inner regions. Butthe Cone is so dense that even the “near-

several stars (yellow dots at upper right).Astronomers don’t know whether thesestars are behind the dusty nebula orembedded in it. The four bright starslined up on the left are in front of thenebula.Credits for NICMOS image: NASA, the NICMOSGroup (STScI, ESA), and the NICMOS ScienceTeam (University of Arizona)

Credits for ACS image: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G.Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G.Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA

Collision of Four GalaxiesNICMOS and the ACS teamed up to capture the final

stages in the grand assembly of galaxies. This photographshows a tumultuous collision between four galaxies locatedone billion light-years from Earth. The galactic car wreck iscreating a torrent of new stars.

The tangled up galaxies, called IRAS 19297-0406, arecrammed together in the center of the picture. IRAS19297-0406 is part of a class of galaxies known as ultralu-minous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs). ULIRGs are consideredthe progenitors of massive elliptical galaxies.

ULIRGs glow fiercely in infrared light, appearing 100times brighter than our Milky Way Galaxy. The largeamount of dust in these galaxies produces the brilliantinfrared glow. The dust is generated by a firestorm of starbirth triggered by the collisions.

IRAS 19297-0406 is producing about 200 new Sun-likestars every year — about 100 times more stars than ourMilky Way creates. The hotbed of this star formation is thecentral region (the yellow objects). This area is swampedin the dust created by the flurry of star formation. Credits: NASA, the NICMOS Group (STScI, ESA), and the NICMOSScience Team (University of Arizona)


Dust Cloud in the Cone NebulaResembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a

crimson sea, this monstrous object is actually an innocuouspillar of gas and dust in the Cone Nebula. This giant pillarresides in a turbulent star-forming region. This pictureshows the upper 2.5 light-years of the nebula, a heightthat equals 23 million roundtrips to the Moon.

Radiation from hot, young stars (located beyond thetop of the image) has slowly eroded the nebula over mil-lions of years. Ultraviolet light heats the edges of the darkcloud, releasing gas into the relatively empty region of sur-rounding space. There, additional ultraviolet radiation caus-es the hydrogen gas to glow, which produces the red haloof light seen around the pillar. A similar process occurs on

a much smaller scale to gas surrounding a single star, formingthe bow-shaped arc seen near the upper left side of the Cone.This arc, seen previously with the Hubble telescope, is 65 timeslarger than the diameter of our solar system. The blue-whitelight from surrounding stars is reflected by dust. Backgroundstars can be seen peeking through the evaporating tendrils ofgas, while the turbulent base is pockmarked with stars red-dened by dust.

Over time, only the densest regions of the Cone will be left.Inside these regions, stars and planets may form.Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (USCS/LO), M.Clampin(STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA


32 Fall 2002


he National Space Grant Satellite Program

is opening a wide door of space opportuni-

ties for young people. Its “crawl, walk,

run, and fly” strategy provides a chance

to students from high school to graduate

school to build, launch, and operate space hard-

ware with increasing degrees of complexity and

sophistication. The program’s website announces

that “Missions of growing complexity provide

opportunities to acquire baseline skills and then

to build on them. They range from the simple —

building soda-can ‘satellites’ or small payloads

for launch from small rockets or balloons — to

building sophisticated satellites.” The vision of

the program’s leaders is compelling: “to make

aerospace history and send the first student-built

satellites to Mars.”

T

The National Space Grant Student SatelliteProgram (SG-SSP) comes as a blessing at a timewhen the aerospace community is facing a major cri-sis. The aerospace work force is getting old becausefewer young people have been entering the pipeline.The Commission on the Future of the United StatesAerospace Industry warns, “The impending retire-ment of the aging aerospace work force, the fact thatyoung people are not choosing engineering as acareer field, and a lack of qualified, skilled workerswill result in a shortage of aerospace workers in thenext decade.” (Interim Report #3 – 2002) This isechoed by the new NASA Administrator, Mr. SeanO’Keefe: “We are coming up against critical short-ages in the face of impending retirements.” Abouthalf the NASA work force will reach retirement agewithin five years. In his address at SyracuseUniversity on April 12, 2002, O’Keefe told the coun-try, “America has a serious shortage of young peopleentering the fields of mathematics and science,”adding that “our best and brightest are being drawninto other professions.”

Whereas young people are very fond of spaceexploration, science, and technology in their pre-teen years, many lose this interest in their teen yearsand leave the mathematics, science, and technologypipeline between grades eight and the junior year incollege. It is thus necessary not only to fill thepipeline with pre-teens but also to retain them duringtheir teen years. A recent national commission reportdescribes math and science teaching at the K–12 levelas “nothing short of a national disgrace” (Before It’sToo Late: A Report to the Nation from the NationalCommission on Mathematics and Science Teachingfor the 21st Century, September 2000). In addition,in the first two years of college, students have verylittle motivation to pursue a career in the sciences orengineering, and the only hope committed studentshave is to reach the light at the end of the tunnelprovided by the junior and senior years, when theywill finally do something interesting. Others chooseostensibly greener pastures.

The National Space Grant College and FellowshipProgram (Space Grant) is addressing this challengehead-on with its Student Satellite Program. The SG-SSP was launched by a group of Space GrantDirectors with essential input from Professor RobertTwiggs of Stanford University, a veteran satellitebuilder and educator whose aim is to develop, build,and launch low-cost, small satellites within a shorttime. The SG-SSP gives students an opportunity tolearn math, science, and technology by doing workwith aerospace professionals, to participate in a pro-ject from inception to operation, to be engaged in ateam effort, to have pride in their nascent skills, andto appreciate the value of the concepts that they

learn. Theprogrambuilds a“communityof learners.”

Hands-on,student-drivenprograms suchas SG-SSPprovide a wel-come, unique,and veryattractivelearning expe-rience thatparallels andcomplementstraditionallearning for-mats. Studentsselect anddesign theirspacecraft,order parts,build and testcomponents,integrate theminto a func-tional whole,and finallyready thespacecraft forlaunch. In theprocess, students learn not only the technical aspectsof building space hardware but also how to raisefunds, write proposals, manage their program, workin teams, build websites, develop logos, and publishadvertising brochures.

Until recently, student-built satellite programshave been developed in only a few states. This yearthe Space Grant Program has solicited work-forcedevelopment proposals from its consortia. A total of$3.6 million was available. Many successful consor-tia proposed to establish a student satellite programin their states. We should thus see a significant devel-opment of these projects in many states and hun-dreds of new students across the country gettinginvolved. Thanks to the Space Grant’s national net-work of more than seven hundred affiliates, ofwhich the majority are colleges and universities,there is widespread expertise and experience that theSG-SSP is eager to help share and spread to partnerinstitutions.

Aerospace industries are strongly supportive ofthese programs. “Their engineers and scientists actas volunteer mentors to our students. Test facilities

SPACE GRANT STUDENT SATELLITE PROGRAM

34 Fall 2002

The National Space Grant College andFellowship Program (Space Grant) is anationwide network of more than sevenhundred colleges, universities and otherinstitutions that supports the NationalAeronautic and Space Administration’seducation, research, and public servicemissions. It is a congressionally mandat-ed public service program, instituted in1988, and modeled after Sea Grant andLand Grant. Space Grant is comprised offifty-two consortia, one per state plusthe District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.Each consortium consists of a lead insti-tution and affiliate member institutions,mostly universities but also industrialaffiliates, state organizations, museumsand planetariums, and other not-for-profit institutions. Consortia are fundedby the Space Grant Office housed in theEducation Division at NASA’s Head-quarters in Washington, D.C. Space Grantis probably best known for its scholar-ship and fellowship programs that haveawarded support to more than 12,000students since 1989. One of the centralmissions of Space Grant is to promoteand help develop a skilled aerospaceworkforce. The National Space GrantStudent Satellite Program will be a majorthrust for Space Grant in 2003 as a toolfor work force development.

About the Space Grant Program . . .


and materials and even direct funding are madeavailable for the student-built payloads. The compa-nies are eager to move the students into employmentas soon as they graduate,” states the SG-SSP website.

The website then goes on to give the followingexamples:

• Within 24 hours of one state’s first Space GrantConsortium student payload balloon flight, GSSLInc., a NASA contractor, contacted the Consor-tium and offered to hire any student who hadworked on the program.

• Since establishing the national CubeSat universityemail listserv, three aerospace companies soughtto hire students who have worked on CubeSatprograms.

Part of the interest stems from the fact that fewNASA or aerospace-industry scientists and engineersever take a project through the full mission cycle,whereas projects such as building CubeSats providethat opportunity, given the short one-year cycle forits completion from inception.

CRAWL

At the “Crawl” entry level, high school studentsand college undergraduates build and launch

low-cost craft such as high-altitude balloons ormodel rockets that radio data to ground stations foranalysis. High altitude balloons hover above 99 per-cent of the atmosphere, reaching altitudes of morethan 100,000 feet — three times the altitude of com-mercial aircraft — where the roundness of earth andthe blueness of the atmosphere are clearly visible.These near-space conditions are ideal for testingsatellite components or for making astronomical andearth observations. When they reach their predeter-mined final altitude, the balloons are made to burst,and the equipment’s descent is slowed by a para-chute. A global positioning system (GPS) connectedto a transceiver on board the craft reveals both thealtitude and the latitude-longitude of the equipmentduring the entire experiment. Recovery is made byground crews who follow the balloon experimentusing their own GPS and ground receivers.

The Montana Space Grant Consortium’s High-Altitude Balloon Program provides a near-space plat-form that can be used for student-led experiments.The Alabama Space Grant Consortium is developingAHAB, the Auburn High-Altitude Ballooning capa-bility to launch science and technology experimentsto the edge of space. Other Space Grant Consortia instates such as Arizona, Colorado, and Iowa havesimilar programs. A high-altitude ballooning capabil-ity can be established in a few months at the low

cost of $4,000. Its very low launch cost — about$200 per launch — and its simplicity make thisscheme very attractive to many entry-level studentteams.

Model rocket programs have been developed inArizona, California, New Mexico, and other states.Students develop, launch, operate, recover, and ana-lyze data from soda-can-sized “spacecraft” launchedfrom amateur rockets. The New Mexico StudentLaunch Project was developed to create scientificand engineering literacy in the area of launch tech-nology. In California, high school students work onCricketSats, small telemetry experiments that mea-sure temperature and other environmental conditionsinside a can that can be launched by a model rocketor be part of a balloon experiment. These entry-levelexperiments provide the background, learning, andskills required to participate in increasingly complexspace-flight missions.

WALK

Experiments at the “Walk” level take about a yearto complete, require more funding, and are a

notch higher in complexity than at the “Crawl”level. They include building and launching CubeSatsinto Earth orbit and designing and building experi-ments to be launched on board sounding rockets.

CubeSat was invented by Professor Twiggs. It is asmall cube to be launched into earth orbit where itcan perform science and technology missions. TheSG-SSP website announces: “Under the leadership ofStanford University’s Space Systems DevelopmentLaboratory and California Polytechnic State Univer-sity, a number of Space Grant consortia are buildingsmall 1 kg and 10x10x10 cm Cubesats for launch toearth orbit. These small ‘picosatellites,’ capable of


Examples of CubeSat missions:• Montana’s first satellite, MEROPE

(Montana Earth-Orbiting PicoExplorer), will measure radiationin the inner Van Allen belt aroundEarth.

• Auburn University’s first satelliteAubieSat 1 will test communica-tions with a tumbling satelliteusing patch antennae and willmeasure the tumbling rate of thesatellite.

• The University of Arizona’sRinconSat will measure its tum-bling rate by measuring the cur-rents from its solar panels.

carrying significant science and engineering pay-loads, can be designed, built, and launched on amuch shorter timescale and are cheaper to buildthan standard satellites — major benefits for stu-dents and industry sponsors.” A typical CubeSatcosts between $5,000 and $10,000 (not includinglaunch) and can be built, tested, and launched with-in a year. These features make it an ideal entry-levelsatellite that teams of undergraduate students in thesciences and engineering can design, build, test,launch, and operate. The Space Grant Consortia ofAlabama, Arizona, Montana, and Pennsylvania areactively involved in supporting CubeSats at some oftheir affiliates. Many other Space Grant Consortiaare expected to join the CubeSat club shortly. Anumber of universities in other states, such asCalifornia, Hawaii, and New Hampshire, are alsoactively involved in building CubeSats.

The singlemost difficultissue forCubeSatsand otherstudent-builtsatellites is to find anaffordablelauncher. Atypical satel-lite launchcosts millionsof dollars, anamount thatis obviouslyprohibitivefor a stu-dent-satelliteproject.However,many rock-

ets end up with extra cargo space that could be usedfor a secondary payload and that could be madeavailable at a much lower cost. Expected launchcosts should be in the $45,000-$70,000 range for asingle CubeSat. Group launches could be arrangedby SG-SSP with several CubeSats stacked together inso-called “P-Pods.” The P-Pods would be released inspace from the launching rocket when the primarypayload has been safely put into proper earth orbit.Finally, a spring system would eject the CubeSatsfrom the P-Pod. At a November 15, 2000, newsconference, Bob Twiggs said that he could “envisionsome 100 to 200 of these small satellites beinglaunched annually.”

Another Space Grant-supported Walk-level pro-gram is the Alaska Student Rocket Program.

Students at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks(UAF):

work together as an interdisciplinaryteam to design, build, test, and launchsounding rocket payloads from the near-by Poker Flat facility. [Sounding rocketsdo not put payloads into orbit but pro-vide telemetry data during a single flight.They are typically smaller and cheaperrockets that carry payloads of variousweights to altitudes above 30 miles (48km).] The goal of the program is to pro-vide the students with an opportunity toapply their technical education to thesolution of real-world engineering designproblems. Equally important to the tech-nical aspects of this program are the prac-tical experiences gained in working aspart of an interdisciplinary design team inan environment similar to what the stu-dents will encounter in industry. TheAlaska Space Grant Program directorserves as the primary faculty advisor andmanager of this ongoing program(http://www.uaf.edu/asgp/asrp.htm).

The website adds that “The Poker Flat ResearchRange (PFRR) is the only university-operated sound-ing rocket range in the world.” This facility couldbecome a resource for a national Walk-level programunder the auspices of the SG-SSP, allowing studentsfrom other universities to use it to launch their ownspace experiments.

RUN

Examples of “Run” level programs are nanosatel-lites. Nanosatellites are larger than CubeSats,

more complex, take longer to design and build, costmore, and probably require graduate-student in-volvement. Several such satellites were built by students before the creation of the SG-SSP. Forexample: the “Six-kilogram nanosatellite ASUSat 1was successfully launched on January 26, 2000,from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the first AirForce OSP Minotaur (Orbital Sciences). This event,culminating the efforts of countless individuals andcorporate benefactors, provides testament to thepotential in today’s students — the space scientistsand engineers of tomorrow — which can only berealized if provided the opportunity” (ftp://pirlftp.lpl.arizona.edu/pub/spacegrant/).

Another nanosatellite, Citizen Explorer 1 (CX-1)is being designed, built, and operated by college stu-dents under the auspices of the Colorado SpaceGrant Consortium. It is a remote-sensing satellite


36 Fall 2002

A typical CubeSat costsbetween $5,000 and

$10,000 (not includinglaunch) and can be built,

tested, and launchedwithin a year. These

features make it an idealentry-level satellite thatteams of undergraduatestudents in the sciences

and engineering candesign, build, test,

launch, and operate.

So far there are no student projects that fit thiscategory, but the “Fly!” level is the pinnacle, theHoly Grail of student-satellite teams.

CONCLUSION

The National Space Grant Student Satellite Pro-gram offers young people a purpose and a road

map. It is spurring many young space enthusiastsinto action: to form teams, to select and design theirspacecraft, to enlist the support of faculty membersat their university, to contact the Space Grant Con-sortium in their state, and to request funding fromtheir university, from Space Grant, from industry,and from the military. Since the end of the MoonProgram, space enthusiasts have been looking forinspiring and committed leadership. Granted, wehave sent instruments to explore the solar systemand to probe the depths of the universe, and theseinstruments have provided us with a wealth of excit-ing information that has even forced us to rewritethe astronomy textbooks. We also have built a spacestation, and we have seen astronauts and cosmo-nauts orbit Earth and work in space.

But in the view of this author, we have not triedto push the envelope. We did not challenge ourselvesto the point that we put a sparkle in the eyes of ouryounger generations. And the results are here: feweryoung people interested in aerospace careers. Thistrend is now being changed. Young people have beengiven a challenge: learn to design, build, and launchsmall spacecraft that will explore the universe andour own planet from space. There is such enthusi-asm, such a sense of direction, such hope in this pro-gram that we may well be on the road to excitingspace exploration again, inspiring a new generationof explorers, as only NASA can.

J-M Wersinger is an associate professor of physics atAuburn University in Auburn, Alabama. He is the fac-ulty mentor for the Auburn University Student SatelliteProgram’s AubieSat-1 and is the campus director for theAlabama Space Grant Consortium. He has been work-ing with NASA as a Space Grant Faculty Fellow since1994. His interests are in remote-sensing applicationsand in science outreach. He hashelped initiate the Earth GrantProgram, a joint NASA-USDA-NOAA effort to bring the benefitsof remote-sensing applications tothe states through the Land GrantExtension Network.



that will take earth data from space and will involveK-12 schools all over the world as ground stations,bringing space one step closer to the classrooms. TheCX-1 project combines the remote-sensing devices onboard a satellite and ground observers using hand-held instruments to measure long- and short-termatmospheric events, especially changes in the ozonelayers (http://citizen-explorer.colorado.edu/overview/science.php).

Finally, Arizona State University, the University ofColorado at Boulder, and New Mexico State Univer-sity are joining efforts to develop Three Corner Sat, aset of three nanosatellites as part of the AFOSR/DARPA/AFRL/NASA GSFC/DoD STP UniversityNanosatellite Program. The three satellites will doformation flying in space to perform research andstereo-imaging and virtual formation operations, andto test innovative intersatellite communications,innovative command and data handling, and micro-propulsion. This constellation of three satellites willbe launched in 2003 by the Air Force on the NASASpace Shuttle. The students actively participate in allthe design and in Space Shuttle safety reviews. More-over, the students are learning about the challengesof coordinating a program over long distances.

These are by no means the only examples of nan-osatellites built by student teams. Other universitiesin the United States have student-satellite programs,some of them funded by NASA. Many student-satel-lite teams also have been established in other coun-tries. Germany, Great Britain, Norway, and Japanhave significant student satellite programs.

FLY!

Crawl,” “Walk,” and “Run” projects will pre-pare us to “Fly!” announce the leaders of the

SG-SSP, adding that this “may include visiting aster-oids or the moon, or conducting sophisticated astro-physical or Earth Sciences missions — all withstudent-built satellites. Ultimately we plan to send aflotilla of student satellites, representing the 52 SpaceGrant consortia, to Mars.” This bold concept wasenthusiastically endorsed by Scott Hubbard, thenNASA’s Mars Program Director (and subsequentlyby his successor Orlando Figueroa), in a letter ofsupport dated January 26, 2001: “I write . . . con-cerning sending 52 student-built ‘CubeSats’ to Marsunder the auspices of the NASA Space GrantProgram. Let me start by stating that the concept hasa significant visionary aspect. It integrates NASA’sSpace Science and Education responsibilities into aprogram that adds substantially to both. If success-ful, the idea of launching 52 student-built CubeSatsto Mars would constitute the first time student-builthardware has been launched beyond Earth orbit.”

“

END OF SEASON

For some, it’s an undulating flock linkedby a thread and fleeing a sudden cold snap,or the gnarled hands of fallen leaves on the brinkof the tawny underworld, fingering a map.

For me, it’s an autumn lightning bug that crawls,dragging a belly of chilled luciferin,no longer one of the syrupy stars, loosenedfrom a brilliant summer constellation. It stalls,

slowly raises the housing of its wings,an old machine of wrought iron and duskytangerine, then launches itself, whirring,into the agonizing stare of day.

K.E. DUFFIN

K.E. Duffin’s poems have appeared in Poetry, PartisanReview, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, Verse, andmany other journals. In 2001, she was a finalist for theNational Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and theColorado Prize. In recent years she has had residencies atThe Millay Colony and Yaddo.

38 Fall 2002


Book Review

MARCUS CHOWN. The Universe Next Door: TheMaking of Tomorrow’s Science. Oxford UniversityPress, New York, 2002. 191 pages. $26.00

In this brief volume (actually only 158 pages of text, plusglossary and end materials), Marcus Chown presents themost entertainingly mind-boggling theories of the way theuniverse works on both the micro and macro level currentlybeing discussed in the scientific community. Many of theideas he covers are so contradictory to everyday experiencethat they seem ludicrous. Because of this issue’s theme, Ithought it would be worth summarizing The Universe NextDoor briefly chapter bychapter to preview thetheories that Chown cov-ers.

Universe is dividedinto three major sections:“The Nature of Reality,”“The Nature of theUniverse,” and “Life andthe Universe.” The bookleads off with a chaptertitled “Unbreak MyHeart” in which Chowndeals with the idea thatsomewhere in our uni-verse the arrow of timemight run backwards:shattered coffee mugsspring back together,elderly people growyounger and younger, civilizations fall, then rise. Chownpoints out that the arrow of time as we see it can be attrib-uted to entropy and to the expanding universe. Cosmologistshave long entertained the possibility of the “Big Crunch,” inwhich the universe reaches a critical point in expansion andbegins to contract, thus reversing the arrow of time.However, Lawrence Schulman of Clarkson University hascreated a computer simulation which shows that in localizedareas of the universe, time already could be running back-ward, as long as these regions interact only weakly with ourforward-running arrow of time. One explanation for theseregions of reverse time is that they may be relics of an earlierera in our universe where a Big Crunch was occurring, andtime was reversed.

In Chapter 2, “I’m Gonna Live Forever,” Chown movesto the “Many Worlds” Theory, the idea that an infinite num-ber of possible realities exist, realities in which our fatesmight be very different from the one that we perceive

(including ones in which we might never die). The ManyWorlds theory has been around for a number of years,based on the idea that one cannot observe phenomena atthe quantum level without that observation affecting thething being examined. In other words, “reality” is onlypotential until it is observed. Using the example of a quan-tum computer, which has the potential to do more calcula-tions than there are particles in our universe, physicistsargue that such a computer could overcome this limitationby interacting with and using the particles from other uni-verses. Astounding though this idea may seem, many physi-cists are coming to embrace it as possible, if not probable.So take heart; if you failed to work up the nerve to askBetty Jean or Brad to the prom in this universe, you mightvery well have succeeded gloriously in another.

With more serious implications for how the world ismade, “Dividing the Invisible” covers the possibility that wemay all be made up not of subatomic particles, but ofwaves. Humphrey Maris of Brown University argues thatcertain experiments using electrons trapped in super-cooledhelium have shown that the supposedly indivisible electroncan indeed be halved, with the implication being that thefundamental particles are literally waves, rather than parti-cles that simply behave like waves under certain circum-stances. Thus we are ultimately all composed of wavefunctions, a vaguely unsettling thought that plays with ourillusion of our own solidity.

The next chapter takes quantum weirdness a step furtherby proposing that “All the World’s a Time Machine.”Chown begins this chapter by discussing the incompatibilitybetween Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and quan-tum theory:

Here then is the fundamental incompatibilitybetween quantum theory and general relativity.General relativity, like every theory of physicsbefore it, is a recipe for predicting the future. If aplanet is here now, in a day’s time it will havemoved over there, by following this path. Allthese things are predicted by the theory withabsolute certainty. Compare this with quantumtheory. For an atom flying through space, all wecan predict is its probable final position, its prob-able path. The very foundation stones of generalrelativity, such as the trajectory of a bodythrough space, according to quantum theory, are a fiction (51).

Trying to reconcile these two incompatible theories is thecurrent Holy Grail of physics. Physicist Mark Hadley pro-poses that quantum particles are actual time loops that existin future, present, and past simultaneously. One of the para-doxes of quantum theory is that paired particles withreverse spins somehow “know” what each other’s spin is. Ifone particle reverses its spin, the other particle instanta-neously reverses its own, even if the particles are light yearsapart. This instantaneous reversal contradicts the law which

says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. IfHadley’s theory is correct, this phenomenon poses no threatto General Relativity because the particle simply receives thenews outside of time. As Chown puts it, “There is . . . noth-ing to stop such a particle reacting to an event before it actu-ally happens. According to Hadley, this is all that ishappening when a particle reacts instantaneously to its part-ner flipping direction. It is simply reacting before news of theevent arrives” (56).

In chapter 5, “Tales from the Fifth Dimension,” Chownexplores the concept of extra dimensions, beyond the fourdimensions (three spacial dimensions plus time) that we canperceive. These dimensions, formed in the first millisecondsof the Big Bang, are “curled up” literally so small that theyare beyond our current ability to detect them. Chown raisesthe possibility that the new Large Hadron Collider atCERN, scheduled to come on line in 2006, might be able togenerate enough atom-smashing force to allow us to detectone or more of these tiny dimensions. String theory, the cur-rent best hope for the Grand Unified Theory, requires atleast ten such dimensions, and having experimental evidenceof them would begin to lend some credibility to that theory.In addition, knowledge of these extra dimensions wouldreveal a whole host of new subatomic particles and mightalso give us a clue about why matter came to predominate inour universe instead of antimatter.

In the next major section of the book, “The Nature ofthe Universe,” Chown turns from the micro to the macrouniverse. He leads off with a chapter titled “The Holes inthe Sky,” in which he discusses the theory of Mike Hawkins,a Scottish astronomer, that much of the unknown “dark”matter, which cosmologists theorize makes up most of thematter in the universe, might be made up of countless refrig-erator-sized black holes. Hawkins suggests that such blackholes, small but tremendously dense, might account for 99percent of all matter in the universe. By studying the gravita-tional lensing effect that makes quasars appear to fluctuatein their brightness, Hawkins decided that the fluctuation wascaused not by the quasars themselves, but by countless verydense bodies passing in the line of sight between us and thequasars. If these countless black holes exist, they couldaccount for enough mass to eventually put the brakingmotion on the universe’s expansion and propel it toward aBig Crunch.

In “Looking-Glass Universe,” the idea of a mirror uni-verse existing along with our own is explored. This conceptsprings from a problem with symmetry. Nature seems tothrive on symmetry; as Chown puts it, “Nature, for reasonsbest known to itself, has chosen laws that exhibit the maxi-mum possible degree of symmetry” (84–85). A problem aris-es, however, with the laws of physics. For example,neutrinos always “corkscrew” in a left-handed direction,never right. Where then are the right-handed neutrinos? Topreserve symmetry, physicists have posited that there mustbe an invisible, “mirror” universe in which such particlesexist.

Chapter 8, “The Universe Next Door,” extends the mir-ror universe concept into the idea of the “multiverse,” or aninfinite number of possible universes. As Chown reveals, ifcertain fundamental forces that make up the universe werejust fractionally stronger or weaker, the universe simplywould not have formed, and we would not be here to wit-ness it. Physicists find this “just-so” universe too perfect tobe coincidental — it is almost as if it were designed, a con-cept anathema to many scientists (see Gordon Kane’s article“Anthropic Questions” in this issue). As Max Tegnarkasserts, “There are only two possible explanations . . .Either the universe was designed specifically for us by a cre-ator, or there exists a large number of universes, each withdifferent values of the fundamental constants, and not sur-prisingly we find ourselves in one in which the constantshave just the right values to permit galaxies, stars, and life”(103).

In “Was the Universe Created by Angels,” Chown pre-sents the ideas of Edward Harrison, who takes the idea thatthe universe exists because we observe it a step further,positing that our universe was designed and created bysuper-intelligent beings in another universe in such a waythat development of life was inevitable. Because these superbeings are not gods, Harrison states that “the creation ofthe universe drops out of the religious sphere and becomes asubject amenable to scientific investigation” (114). Therecipe for “making” a universe is not particularly complicat-ed — it is simply far beyond our own current technicalcapabilities.

In the final major section, “Life and the Universe,”Chown turns to the question of the origins of life. “TheWorlds Between the Stars” covers the ideas of DavidStevenson, a cosmologist at Cal Tech, about the possibilityof Earth-sized solid planets (as opposed to gas giants such asSaturn) existing free in the depths of space, rather thanorbiting a star. Many such planets may have been flung outof their originating solar systems by a close brush with aneighboring gas giant. Though isolated in the frigid cold ofdeep space, such planets could actually harbor life, warmedby their internal fires and insulated by a thick blanket ofprobably methane gas, not entirely unlike what astronomersspeculate about Jupiter’s moon, Europa. If such planetscould be located free in space, they could be used as waystations for galactic exploration, though they would notnecessarily be fit for human colonization.

In “The Life Plague,” astronomer Chandra Wickrama-singhe speculates that life on Earth originated in the icycomets that pass through our galaxy and occasionally makeviolent contact with the Earth. Wickramasinghe has foundthat interstellar grains of dust that permeate space absorbinfrared light in precisely the same manner that dried bacte-ria do. He theorizes that this interstellar dust is thus madeup of complex organic molecules, some of which could havebeen trapped by and flourished as life in the temporarily liq-uid centers of comets, and then survived the cometary deep-freeze for eons until they found a home on the newly

BOOK REVIEW

40 Fall 2002

hospitable Earth as it cooled and water appeared.Wickramasinghe freely admits that he does not know wherethese bacteria originated. His theory, however, might indeedbe testable, using space craft on a close encounter with acomet.

To end the book, in “Alien Garbage,” Chown presentsthe ideas of Alexey Arkhipov that we might find evidence ofalien intelligence here on earth — in the form of random“space junk” that has crossed the Earth’s path over the eons.Arkhipov, using calculations about the percentage of worldsin our galaxy that could have developed advanced civiliza-tions and launched probes and spacecraft, estimates thenumber of alien space artifacts that have fallen to earth asbetween forty and four thousand pieces in our planet’s four-and-a-half billion years of existence. With the forces of ero-sion and tectonic shift, the chances of such materialsremaining intact enough to be recognized or even located arevery small, but not zero. One suggestion is that a betterplace to find such artifacts might be on the Moon, becauseof the almost complete lack of erosion there. As Chown endsthe chapter and his book:

Somewhere in the world a puzzling artifact islying in a museum. Perhaps nobody has noticed itfor a century or more. Or perhaps, at this verymoment, a curator is taking it out of a glass case,looking at it, and scratching his or her head inbafflement. Will the curator take it to be chemi-cally analyzed? Or will the curator put it back inthe case and forget about it forever? We can onlyhope that doesn’t happen (155).

What to make of all this? Clearly many of these ideasand theories that Chown explores stretch one’s credulity.Some of them seem to substitute one unknowable for anoth-er; for instance, the idea that super-intelligent beings createdour universe in a way simply substitutes one “god” foranother. Others are so fantastic that they seem to enter therealm of science fiction. Yet many aspects of Einstein’sTheory of General Relativity were once seemingly outra-geous, until they were experimentally demonstrated to betrue. And the bizarre behavior of particles at the subatomiclevel, behavior that also seems against common sense, hasbeen tested and demonstrated again and again. Thus it mightbe unwise to dismiss lightly even the most absurd-soundingtheories in this volume.

Chown’s real achievement in this book is not just in pre-senting these ideas, but in doing it so clearly that while thebook is by no means a “quick read” (especially the earlierchapters), one can easily grasp the very difficult conceptswith a little careful, patient reading. As a layperson who hasspent a good deal of time wading through similar books onphysics touted as “lucid” and “understandable,” but whichturned out to be quite opaque, I appreciate what Chown hasaccomplished. Even if you do not agree with the majority ofwhat he presents, it is worth reading his book to know whatserious scientists are proposing. After all, one never knows

when some clever experimental physicist will devise a wayto show that our universe actually does have more than fourdimensions or that indeed quantum particles are tiny timemachines, somehow enabling you to go back in time andask Betty Jean to the prom after all. This is a fun book toread, one that stretches the imagination and revels in thewonders of our strange universe. It is well worth a look.

Pat Kaetz is editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum.

BOOK REVIEW


EINSTEIN’S CROSS

Toward Pegasus, light fromA quasar splits into fourImages in the shape of a cross,

A gravitational mirage to foolThe unwary but notThe theorist who predicted it.

Einstein didn’t need to gazeInto space. He could seeThe images in his mind’s eye,

The calculations a precise lensBy which light bent aroundStars aligned with Earth.

But what would Einstein sayAbout dark matter,Which we can’t even see,

Which makes up almost allThe universe’s mass, and whichIs all around us?

PETER HUGGINS

Peter Huggins’s books of poems areHard Facts, Livingston Press/Universityof West Alabama, and Blue Angels,River City Publishing. In the Companyof Owls, a novel for middle readers, isforthcoming from NewSouth Books. Heis the president of the Alabama Writers’Forum and teaches in the EnglishDepartment at Auburn University.

United States is protecting freedom— the war on terror is a good war.

Jeremy A. MutzTallahassee, Florida

Thank you for publishing HowardZinn’s “A Just Cause, Not a Just

War” in the Spring 2002 Forum. Myheart winces every time I think of thepeople carried to their deaths on theflights crashing into the World TradeCenter, into the Pentagon, and intothe woods in Pennsylvania. Likewise,when I think of the people in thosebuildings, sitting down at their desks,reaching for a cup of coffee, or chat-ting with a friend, and imagine thewalls crashing down on them, I wantto cry out, “Why? Why, damn it?Why?”

Professor Zinn asks me to thinkof those civilians in Afghanistankilled by bombs dropped on themby my country in a similar manner.Children die equal deaths in bothcases. How can their deaths be sepa-rated into unjust and just? Howindeed!

Does he intend for us to equatethe terrorist pilot and the militarypilot? Innocent death results fromthe action of both. A dead baby is adead baby. Does the label “collateraldamage” make a baby less dead?This is the question that ProfessorZinn asks me to ask myself. What isthe answer? Do you know?

Many people do know theanswer, don’t they? President Bushapparently does; and I am confidentthat Vice President Cheney possessesthat certain knowledge. But I sus-pect that Secretary of State Powell isstill, in his heart of hearts, askingProfessor Zinn’s question. I surelyhope so.

Thank you again for your deci-sion to let the question be asked.

Miles RichardsonBaton Rouge, Louisiana

Iam replying to the letter written byMark Miller (Summer 2002 issue)

in response to Professor HowardZinn’s article, “A Just Cause, Not aJust War.” Professor Zinn’s articlecontains little, if anything, with whichI agree. Indeed, there is much to besaid against the points made therein.(See, for example, Sam Snyder’s letterin the Summer 2002 issue.) Mr.Miller’s letter, however, disturbs mefar more than Professor Zinn’s articleever could.

Mr. Miller’s letter embodies oneof the very qualities that motivatethe terrorist groups he rightlymaligns — namely, an extremeexpression of intolerance in the faceof a divergent viewpoint. Leastinnocuous is Mr. Miller’s implicit adhominem attack by placing Profes-sor Zinn’s title in quotes. Far worseis the implication that anyone whodoes not favor war necessarily mustsupport the terrorists.

Indeed, the fact that an opposingviewpoint causes Mr. Miller to expe-rience “high blood pressure andanxiety” is a sad commentary on thecurrent state of the values of free-dom and tolerance upon which thisgreat country was founded. Iencourage Mr. Miller to recognizethat Phi Kappa Phi Forum is pre-cisely that: a forum for the presenta-tion of views — some popular, someunpopular, some patriotic, somecritical — but all worthy of expres-sion.

Mr. Miller, I implore you to rec-ognize that the greatness of ournation is, in part, grounded in thewide range of opinions held, andexpressed, by members of ourdiverse population. I, for one, relishmy ability and right to be exposedto those who do not see the worldas I do.

Kevin D. SmithPittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In “A Just Cause, Not a Just War,”Howard Zinn presents a condemna-

tion of the United States for instigat-ing the attack leveled upon it by the alQaeda terrorists. In examining hisjeremiad, I found his reasoning deeplyflawed and his ignorance of militaryhistory total.

42 Fall 2002

L e t t e r s t o t h eE d i t o r

A JUST CAUSE, NOT AJUST WAR

Howard Zinn’s “A Just Cause, Nota Just War” [“Terrorism,” Spring

2002] is disrespectful to all who servein uniform. U.S. actions, at the cost ofnumerous American lives, have freedthe Afghanis from the brutal alQaeda-backed Taliban and have giventhe Afghans hope for a better future.The United States did not rush intothis campaign. It took a decade ofattacks (since the 1993 bin Laden-supported attack on U.S. forces inSomalia) before this country respond-ed with force. The fact that the UnitedStates did not respond earlier, otherthan the “pinprick” 1998 cruise mis-sile strike, emboldened bin Laden tothink this country was weak, that hecould attack with impunity.

It is overwhelming force alonethat terrorists respect. The same wastrue in Vietnam; we struck fear intothe North Vietnamese and broughtthem to the negotiating table onlywhen B-52s and other aircraft, foreleven days and nights, raineddestruction on Hanoi’s military andindustrial targets. The U.S. militaryis always very careful to avoid hurt-ing civilians; there are exceedinglycomplex rules of engagement to pre-vent it. This was true in Vietnamalso. In Iraq, Saddam placed civil-ians near military targets, makinghuman shields of them.

No other country has done moreto help suffering people throughoutthe world than the United States.The U.S. military has no “ambi-tions” other than protecting Amer-ica. In Panama, Grenada, andelsewhere, the United States was trying to protect Americans andachieve other legitimate goals, suchas ending drug trafficking and stop-ping Soviet/Cuban expansion. TheUnited States has ever defended for-eign peoples’ freedoms. This was soin Vietnam, where the United Stateswas trying to protect the SouthVietnamese, and all of South Asia,from Communist aggression. The

His piece does elicit certain ques-tions. Why does Professor Zinnchoose to live in a country that is sodistasteful to him? What is holdinghim back from a move to Iraq,Syria, or any of the other “modest”peace-loving countries of the world?

Another question arises. Why doI continue to support an organiza-tion that is so relentlessly PC as PhiKappa Phi?

Malcolm Muir, Jr.Clarksville, Tennessee

HOW DID WE GET INTOTHIS MESS? THEAUDITING DILEMMA

Iam writing in regard to ProfessorCharles Davis’s article in the

“Business & Economics” column ofthe Summer 2002 journal [“Food &Culture”]. Professor Davis mentionsthe name Enron (he spells it with cap-ital letters) several times but providesno evidence of what the topic of hisarticle, IS audits, has to do withEnron’s problems. I suspect the reasonis that there is little, if any, relation-ship between the two. Informationsystems typically cover routine trans-actions — shipping and receiving,paying bills, and so forth. Enron’saccounting trickery was not in howthey accounted for day-to-day trans-actions; it was in legal structures thatbusinesses and assets that were part ofthe company appear as if they werenot. The only piece of more compli-cated transactions handled by systemsare the booking, or not booking, of afew journal entries. Enron providesno evidence of a failed IS audit; itprovides evidence of a failed audit ofone-off type transactions.

The use of the word “Enron” toget an emotional response is abehavior that I expect from politi-cians anticipating mid-term electionsor perhaps Gov. Gray Davis. I wasshocked to see it in what is sup-posed to be a scholarly journal.

Judson A. Caskey

Aspecial thanks is offered to“Business & Economics” colum-

nist Charles K. Davis for the real pro-tein he served up amidst all the

gastronomy in your “Food & Culture”issue (Summer 2002). Davis providesconvincing answers to puzzling ques-tions about the causes of the currentcrisis in corporate fiscal reporting.

Davis’s clear exposition about thecomputer-related difficulties facedtoday by auditing firms exemplifiesthe kind of incisive insight that caus-es the reader to pay it the compli-ment of regarding it as self-evidentand deluding himself by thinking “ofcourse — I should have realized thatmyself.”

Technology has transformed oreliminated many professions —spearwright, teamster, publisher, andyes, we now see, thanks to Davis,auditor. I surmise that in each casethe displaced establishmentarianshave felt that the barbarians were attheir gates. For example, even Daviscategorizes the classical financialauditors as “highly polished . . . pro-fessionals” and the upstart informa-tion systems auditors as “quirky,nerdy computer jocks.”

Fortunately, society as a whole, aswell as some of the professionalguilds, has proven more capable ofacclimation to such change than hasthe typical individual guildsman.Though we no longer depend on lit-eral horsepower, we utilize every daythe mechanical horsepower of auto-motive transportation, with virtuallytotal success. Though we no longerthrow spears, we utilize whenevernecessary the guided missiles whichreplaced them, with reasonable suc-cess. In each case, the skills requiredto become a guildsperson haveundergone major revision.

The auditing dilemma whichDavis’s headline appropriately calls“This MESS” will eventually thoughpainfully be solved in similar fashion.This too shall pass. The nerdy jockswill acquire an appreciation for pub-lic relations and will come to beregarded as highly polished profes-sionals.

Ben B. BarnesFlorence, Alabama


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

THE PLEASURES OF COFFEE TOGETHER

They’ll have to shoot meif they shoot me down,our colonel swore.

He leaned back, sipping,and sighed: I’d kill them allfor coffee. How that man

could fly and teach a tightformation, trying to save usfrom rookies’ mistakes

and missiles. Capturedwhen his luck ran out,he lasted years in solitary,

beatings, bones never set.After they dumped the corpse,they shipped his dog tags back.

Now, past fifty,I can’t stand coffee at dawnwithout my wife beside me.

I’d quit this habit without her.God knows what I would doif she were gone.

WALT McDONALD

Walt McDonald was an AirForce pilot and served as TexasPoet Laureate in 2001. His twen-ty books include Climbing theDivide (University of NotreDame Press, forthcoming, 2003),All Occasions (Notre Dame,2000) and others from Harper& Row and university pressesincluding Massachusetts, OhioState, and Pittsburgh.

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