The Dickensian Decade

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

Can we use the stirring words of Charles Dickens to describe the first decade of the twenty-first century, the “Oughty-Noughties” (2000-2009 or the 00s) as it has come to be called?

Answer: A qualified “Yes.”

The decade began with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in March of 2000. Eight months later, George W. Bush claimed the presidency of the United States after the “hanging chad” farce in Florida and a strange and unprecedented 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

On September 11, 2001, homicidal maniacs claiming Islam as guidance hijacked commercial airliners and crashed into what they perceived as American symbols of power, the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Close to 2,300 Americans and an estimated 500 foreign nationals from 91 nations perished in the attacks.

In response, the U.S. went after the Taliban in Afghanistan with almost universal support. The Taliban were swiftly routed but victory proved elusive as a quagmire set in, reminiscent of Vietnam. Eight years later, the war continues as a corrupt Karzai regime hangs on to power.

Support for American policy quickly dried up as President Bush used the pretext of weapons of mass destruction and a manufactured Al-Qaida connection to attack Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in March of 2003. The invasion, boasting technological “shock and awe,” seemed at first to be as easy as winning a video game but the occupation proved catastrophic. America’s moral authority came undone in waterboard torture pits and in the horror dungeons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

As of now, the Iraq war has alone caused almost 100,000 civilian deaths, euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Sectarian violence is a daily occurrence and the Iraqi government remains weak and dysfunctional. The toll the two wars have taken on the families of American soldiers killed and injured is incalculable.

In technology, the Internet gold rush that collapsed in 2000 regained some of its luster, as social networking became all the rage. MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2007) became household names. Web 2.0, the read/write Web, turned everyone (well, almost everyone) into a blogger and a “pundit.” How far the democratization of ideas and opinions go and what influence it has in speaking truth to power, however, remain to be seen. Apple revolutionized the music industry with its iPod products and leading universities of the world made many of their courses in various disciplines available online. Cloud computing went mainstream and software and hardware breakthroughs blurred the distinction between smartphones and PCs.

Amazon’s success with the Kindle, introduced in November of 2007, raised an intriguing question: Will eBooks replace physical books, and if so, when? “When” is difficult to say but it is clear that, where the technology is available, sale of eBooks is rising dramatically against the sale of ink-on-paper books. As Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos noted, however, the Gutenberg model has had a 500-year run, making the physical book probably the most successful technology ever.

Among many achievements in science, scientists mapped the human genome sequence and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider first sputtered and then came to life as two beams of protons collided head on at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, setting the stage for answering fundamental questions about our universe in the new decade.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president of the United States. Americans were drawn to his platform of change and hope. The world breathed a sigh of relief and the nation’s stature in the world went up almost overnight. But a global economic meltdown, brought on by Wall Street charlatans, Ponzy schemers, unscrupulous bankers and hedge-fund hucksters, threatened to undermine his presidency from day one.

Massive stimulus money pumped into the economy seems mostly to have rescued the industry titans and their acolytes, however. Financial future of the average American appears bleak at this point, with job losses and home foreclosures not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis has spread worldwide and it will clearly be a while before the Great Recession is actually over.

Still, the election of Barack Obama to the highest office of the land was like light breaking forth after an unending night of darkness. Sadly, the president has committed more troops to Afghanistan, although withdrawal from Iraq is expected to take place during the middle of 2010. The new year will test the young president’s mettle, his ability to deliver on the message of hope and change that carried him to victory.

Perhaps the most significant global issue of the decade was climate change and our response to it. Most of us, with the exception of rabid right-wingers and congenital contrarians, recognize the existential threat that global warming poses to the earth. Yet consensus on how to mitigate this threat has fallen prey to nationalism. For the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases – China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan – national economy trumps the survival of the planet.

Still, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December of 2009 raised the expectations of common and indigenous people around the world to soaring heights, a reflection, perhaps, of the hope they invested in Barack Obama.

But while it roared in like a lion, the Summit went out like a lamb. There were no lasting binding agreements. A limited deal was reached in which both developed and developing nations agreed to “list national actions and commitments” on cutting carbon emissions. Wealthy nations also offered billions in aid to help countries like Bangladesh and the island nation of Kiribati, threatened with the worst effects of climate change. Significantly, leaders also gave their assent to a 2 degree Celsius cap on global warming.

The real success of the Climate Summit is in the impetus it has given to green technology and clean energy. Entrepreneurs are racing to produce energy-efficient devices and systems, ranging from innovative fuel-cells and green building materials such as ultra-insulated windows and glass to roof-top gardening, clean-coal technology and high-efficiency solar and wind systems.

It is also not without irony, and some measure of justice, that Al Gore, who lost the muddled 2000 presidential election to George Bush, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to raising global awareness of man-made climate change.

So there you have it, a decade dominated by terror, bad governance, war, unregulated greed and financial terrorism, but also a decade in which sanity replaced insanity toward the end, in which Muslims overwhelmingly rejected Al-Qaida’s message of nihilism and asserted their message of moderation (the Nidal Hasans and the Abdulmutallabs reflected systemic failures), in which awareness of the earth’s fragility entered our consciousness and spurred us to action, and in which we recognized, as never before, that our prosperity and well-being depended on the status and education of women throughout the world.

We may have begun this decade in the winter of despair but perhaps it is not too far fetched to suggest that a spring of hope beckons as we end it.

Happy New Decade!

Nobel Scientists for Obama

Science took a severe beating from George Bush and his administration. Funding for cutting-edge research dried up in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. Where once the U.S. dominated, from high-energy physics to medical research, the scientific frontier has slowly moved to Europe. That’s where most of the exciting work in science is done these days. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at the Swiss-France border, is only one example.

In an open letter to the American people, 76 American Nobel Prize-winning scientists (including the three chemisty and physics laureates this year) endorsed Barack Obama for president. (Martin Chalfie, the chemistry winner, has even recorded a video of his endorsement). They are the Who’s Who of American science. Their passionate support for Obama and disdain for Bush, and by extension of McCain and Palin, should be a wake-up call for Americans struggling to understand why we as a nation have fallen behind other countries in basic scientific research. Only the other day, the clueless Sarah Palin mocked fruit fly research as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Christopher Hitchens’ devastating deconstruction of Palin’s ignorance and the importance of fruit fly research that led to a Nobel Prize for Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1933 makes for fascinating reading.

P.S. 11/1/08 - Here is another response to Palin's "scientific" observations on the fruit fly by a scientist.

Unveiling Nature's Deepest Secrets

Man must understand his universe in order to understand his destiny," said Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

Mankind took a significant step toward understanding the universe this week. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that began its first tentative operation on September 10 at CERN is our most ambitious (and most expensive) effort yet to understand how the universe came into being and why nature is the way it is.

The origin of the universe is echoed in the smallest of particles and the fiery fragments they create when colliding at or near the speed of light. In late fall of 2008 or early spring of 2009, when the LHC is fully operational, protons will be slamming into protons at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, and scientists and interested laymen alike will hold their collective breath for what ensues.

Whereas in nuclear fission or fusion, mass is converted into energy according to Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, at the LHC energy is expected to be transformed into mass (m = E/c2), creating particles that will test the most successful particle physics theory called the standard model. At the heart of the standard model, formulated in the 1970s, is Higgs boson, a particle that has never been detected, but without which this theory remains just that, a theory.

Some scientists, including English physicist Peter Higgs who came up with the idea of the particle that is meant to account for an object’s mass, worry that the LHC may not be able to detect the Higgs boson. That can very well mean, of course, that there is no Higgs boson to begin with, and you cannot detect something that doesn’t exist. Would that mean that for 40 years scientists have been chasing a red herring?

I think that is the wrong way to look at it. If the LHC confirms the existence of Higgs boson, wonderful! If it doesn’t, that’s wonderful too! Why? Because while the complex intellectual edifice called the standard model may come down like a house of cards, it will most likely open the door to a yet deeper theory whose beauty and predictive power will surpass the standard model. Nature gives up her secrets only under torture, it would seem, but when she does, we can only marvel at the fact that her imagination always proves richer than ours.

The LHC experiment is also expected to shed light on the validity of string theory. According to its detractors, it's a vast wasteland where bright young physicists have gone to seed for almost four decades. For now, though, string theory is the leading candidate to unite the four fundamental forces of nature - gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and nuclear. Can it prove to be the fabled "Unified Theory" that eluded Einstein? Can the LHC discover "sparticles," the supersymmetric particles predicted by the theory and represented by higher vibrations of strings, the visible universe being the manifestation of only the lowest vibrations? It is not to a scientist that we turn to but to a poet - Tennyson - for insight into the elusive nature of truth: "I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move."

Be that as it may, the success of the LHC is assured one way or the other. Even if most of us cannot follow the enormously complicated calculations and interpretations that will occupy LHC scientists for years to come, we can still rejoice when nature reveals her mysteries. Scientists toil for decades to clear dense undergrowths that stretch into forever and suddenly a vista of breathtaking beauty opens and we look at each other "with a wild surmise - Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The silly talk of tiny black holes that may be created at the LHC that can gobble up the earth (Switzerland first, France second ...) has brought rebukes from reputed scientists but I find such fears humanizing. An $8 billion dollar experiment designed by thousands of scientists working for 14 years that has not some scare built into it isn't worth its name.

The micro black holes are expected to disintegrate far too quickly to do any damage, as predicted by Stephen Hawking's theory, but let's say that something utterly unimaginable and unexpected happens and the black holes begin to act on their voracious appetite.

What then? Well, can anyone imagine a more honorable way to exit the earth than in our quest to understand our destiny?

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