What Works

A lot of people are not going to like this. And a lot of them are family and friends whom I respect. But so be it.

This country works. The system works. The economy works. Mirabile dictu, it functions. Not perfectly. And not in ways that you can always explain. But stuff gets done. People get fed and cared for and served with what they want and need—for the most part.¹

And we’re rich. Our gross domestic product, by any measure, is the envy of the world. We are rich enough that our best and brightest can look at the fraction of our population that is doing less well than the rest of us and believe that makes us a broken and foundering society. We are rich enough to deceive ourselves into thinking we are poor.

What makes this all work? Money. Other people can make money by feeding you, clothing you, building a house for you, and entertaining you. And that’s not to just some minimal standard that will keep you sheltered from the elements and stop you from starving but maintain you to whatever standard you aspire. You have your choice of neighborhood, clothing styles, types of foods. You can eat so well that you grow fat—or you can get special foods, tailored nutrition, and now medications—although expensive ones—that will help you become thin again.

Our medical services are the envy of the world, even for the developed world of Europe and Eastern Asia. Again money. Other people can make money by taking care of you. They can get rich by thinking up, developing, and testing new drugs to treat your illnesses, by providing new services to help in your old age or if you become disabled, and by finding new ways to treat traditionally degenerative and previously incurable conditions. The money doesn’t always come from your own pocket—or not directly—because you usually pay for insurance that covers the costs. And yes, there are some medical conditions that may not be covered, or not right away. But by and large you can get coverage for a wide range of life’s illnesses by pooling your monthly payments and deductibles with others.

Our education choices are the envy of the world, too. We provide schooling to any child who will sit down and learn. Yes, it’s usually paid for by a local tax on property—on your house or your landlord’s building, on your nearby shops and businesses—but it’s still money from your community, for the most part.² And it works because there are people who are willing to teach your child if we will offer them a living wage. At the higher levels, and with more direct contributions from the families of those who would learn, a good education in a variety of subjects—from the traditional, valuable enrichment courses that offer a good life, to the scientific and professional studies that offer a good career, along with some of the more frivolous courses that used to be just for fun—is widely available. And if you don’t mind missing out on name-brand scholars in the ivy league institutions, you can get a pretty good grounding in whatever subjects you want at local, community colleges that are almost tuition-free.

All it takes is money.

Oh, no! The profit motive! Grubbing for money! Other people getting rich! Aren’t we beyond all that? In a spiritually pure and stainless world, full of rational people, aren’t we better than that?

No, not at all. Money and its motivations—the chance of getting paid for what you do, of getting ahead by providing a good or a service that other people will buy, and maybe of becoming rich by thinking up a new good or service that will attract, inspire, or delight other people to give you some of their income—money and its exchange are the secret to a healthy economy.³ If you make it worthwhile for other people—actually, strangers—to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you, then voilà! You get choice foods, stylish clothes, and comfortable accommodations. When you are a customer, a free-to-choose consumer, a profit center in other people’s business model, then they will bend over backwards trying to figure out what you need or might want and find ways to give it to you. That is the free-market, free-enterprise, capitalist system that a lot of people today would like to change.

It's messy, of course. Not everyone gets everything that they might want or need. And sometimes things get made, services are offered, and prices are asked for which people have no interest and are not willing to pay. On the surface, that looks like waste. That looks foolish. But for the people making and offering those goods and services, if they think wrong, make bad decisions, don’t or can’t “read the market” correctly, then they lose customers, their investors lose money, they go out of business, and the waste stream gets cut off. Problem seen, problem solved.

On the other hand, if a company comes up with a new product, a new customer want or need that it can service, then its business will grow, investors will flock, and perhaps the dynamics of the marketplace will change. Think back to the—what? the mid-1980s—when the government was concerned with the regulated monopoly of the phone lines, AT&T, “Ma Bell.” One big company ran the country’s whole communications system. The government and the courts sought ways to break it up and promoted competitors to take over the regional markets. That worked. But what really took down the monopoly was challenging and ending the phone company’s single requirement that any equipment connected to its system—the telephone sitting in your office or home—be provided by Western Electric, the AT&T subsidiary. And you couldn’t buy that telephone but had to rent it for a monthly charge on your AT&T bill. Ending that restriction opened the telecommunications world to competition from third-party instrument makers, to innovation, and to a better overall communications experience. And then came the cell phones—the first one was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, marketed in 1983—and digital packets in place of continuous analog signaling, which really broke up the landline and long-distance empire.⁴

And what’s the alternative to competition? What is the choice toward which a lot of people today would like to move our country? Blandly, it’s some form of socialism, a command-and-control economy run by the supposedly smartest people. They would like a system where blind faith in the freedom and intelligence of individuals, in the ghostly hand of a marketplace that gropes towards satisfying customers and making money while doing so, where all of that supposedly magical thinking doesn’t exist. Instead, they want a rational society where the best and brightest minds work out exactly what other people will need and try to provide it for them. Not more than they need, nothing sloppy or extravagant, just the 2,000 calories a day for nutrition, one-size-fits-most clothing to cover their nakedness, and 320 square feet of clean, well-ordered living space. That’s all anyone really needs. That’s all that everyone will eventually get.⁵

And of course, this well-ordered society will pay for all this—this needful amount for each and every one of us—by taking a large fraction of everyone’s wages, the portion that would go to their nondiscretionary spending in the first place, and leaving just a bit for some art, a Sunday amusement, or alcohol and drugs. Your choice there.

In a modern, industrialized, technologically driven society, you are either a customer and potential profit center, or you are a cost and a potential liability.

Go to the countries that have ventured down the socialist path. Not all the way, of course, because those are dead places full of people too broken to even try to leave. But those countries where the bite hasn’t cut to the bone. There the food is either rationed or randomly available, the clothing is drab and in limited supply,⁶ and the housing is falling apart. When the government first takes in taxes what it thinks it will be required to feed, clothe, and house people, take care of their medical needs, and provide for their non-productive old age, and gets all that money in one big pot—then doling it out becomes an exercise in cheese paring. Command-and-control economies are cost-conscious, risk-avoidant, and allergic to change.

People are human. Even the best and brightest among us, dedicated civil servants, pledging their lives to the benefit of humanity, still aren’t smart enough or selfless enough to understand and provide for everyone’s personal needs. Decisions must be made. Costs must always be cut. But some scraps and wastage will always get left on the floor, regardless of controls. And some populations are too old, too sick, or too far away from the eye and interest of the central government to be properly served. And then, of course, there are the carpetbaggers—who are always with us—peddling their influence and stuffing their valises with the public silverware.

And even the best and brightest among the entrepreneurs and capitalists are still human. Most are trying to serve their customers honestly and still make a profit. Most know that if they produce shoddy goods and give poor service, they will be spurned and eventually go bankrupt. But they are not all geniuses, and they will sometimes cut corners just bit too deeply or skimp on quality control in the name of cost savings. And, of course, there are still the crooks—always with us—who will try to sell junk with marketing hype, produce miracle cures that are just chalk pills, and promote massive investment scams. That’s why I favor a mixed system rather than an unfettered capitalism or, yech, full-blown socialism. Let the innovators and entrepreneurs operate in a free market, but watch them through government regulation and litigation in the public interest.

But if you favor something more obvious and stringent, remember: You are either a customer and a potential profit center or a cost and a potential liability. Choose wisely.

1. Oh? What about the homeless? What about the poor? Well, what about them? The class of people we consider “poor” in this country live like middle class in many other parts of the world: usually decent housing, their own cars, television sets, cable connections, cell phones, and readily available food. These may not always be the best and most desirable versions of a good life’s artifacts, but they are generally serviceable. And our poor people have education made available to them and many paths to a better life. We are a rich and generous country.
    And the people living in tents on the street? They can get meals and other services that are generously provided for them. If they’re suffering, it’s because they have intractable addictions to alcohol or drugs, or a mental illness for which they decline to seek treatment, or they just can’t cope with the complexities of modern life within the system. The money is there to treat them—we are a rich and generous country—but they just won’t take advantage. We throw billions of dollars at them—an estimated $24 billion just here in California alone—which go into multiple service organizations to support the homeless, and still they live outside of what most of us would consider a stable situation. They have the personal freedom to reject the help being offered to them.

2. There’s a thought going around—based, I think, on a speech President Obama once gave concluding with “you didn’t build that”—which says that if you like paying taxes, sending your children to public schools, or driving on streets and roads paid for with state and federal funds, then you’re a socialist. Well, with the same logic, I could say that if you work for a private company, have your retirement account invested in the stock market, or buy your groceries at Safeway, then you’re a capitalist. Your personal situation in a large, developed country is never simplistic. Knee-jerk political positions are for morons.

3. See for comparison It Isn’t a Pie from way back in October 2010. One of my earliest blogs and still, I think, true today.

4. If the communications system had been a government monopoly—as under socialism, which is always conservative, seeks to control costs, and avoids risks—you would still be dialing a rotary phone with mechanical switching and paying extra for peak long-distance service.

5. This is Bernie Sanders’ world where you don’t need twenty-three brands of deodorant—just, I suppose, the one he prefers. This reminds me of Westerners who journeyed to Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s and found public places redolent of “Soviet scent.” One size, one smell fits all.

6. At the height of the Soviet experience, people used to shop with lists of their family’s and friends’ sizes in clothing, shoes, gloves, etc. Whenever something became available in the stores, you wanted to be able to buy it, even if not for yourself.

Dark Anything

Did I mention that I’m an atheist? Or rather, an agnostic on steroids. It’s not that I hate or despise or actively deny the existence of a god—I just don’t see or feel the need for one. But, with a gun to my head, I must admit that I just don’t know. And this state of unknowing, along with healthy dashes of doubt and skepticism, colors my tendency to disbelieve in anything I cannot prove or have logically demonstrated to me.

So, um, physics … The acceptance of and belief in what’s called “dark matter” is based on the motion of stars in a galaxy. We add up all the things we can see at galactic distances—that is, the things that shine brightly—and compare them to what we see in our own solar system and nearby detectable systems. The biggest things, the heaviest things, and the ones that shine most brightly are stars. Our Sun is about 99.9% of the mass of our local system. Not even Jupiter and Saturn compete as heavyweights. The rocky planets, the moons, the asteroids, and the icy comets are just a rounding error. That bright thing up there in the sky—the thing that can be seen from other systems in the Milky Way, if anyone is looking—is essentially the mass of our solar system. And we have no evidence that other stars, other bright things we can see, are any different.

Well and good. But add up all the bright things in visible galaxies, estimate their collective mass, and compare that mass and its computed gravitational effect to the observed motion of the galaxy’s stars—and you get an anomaly. The stars in the average galaxy, based on the mass holding them together as a system, should be rotating like wood chips swirling in a whirlpool. That is, the ones near the center should be circling faster than the ones on the periphery. But instead, we observe that they rotate like stars painted on a disk, with the outer ones keeping pace with, and so moving faster than, the inner ones. For that to happen, the galaxy must contain more mass—have a higher gravity attraction and greater bending of spacetime—than the sum of the mass of the bright things. From this is born “dark matter”—can’t see it but weighs a lot. Current candidates are “weakly interacting massive particles” (WIMPs), which would be really big subatomic particles that don’t show up in any reactions, and “massive cometary halo objects” (MACHOs), which would be big objects in the periphery of galaxies, like huge rogue planets or roving black holes, that just don’t shine.¹

The other issue in physics is the expansion rate of the universe. We know that the universe is expanding because we can use “standard candles”—certain periodically variable stars and certain types of exploding stars, both with a known brightness—to measure the distance to these galaxies. By knowing the actual brightness of these objects and comparing that with how bright they appear in our telescopes, we can estimate how far away they and their home galaxies are. In the same way, if you know that the light you see on a distant hill is from a 100-watt bulb, you can know that it’s closer than if it was from a 1,000-watt bulb, which would appear to be farther away.

But the other thing we see, aside from the apparent brightness of known stars, is that the light from all the stars in a particular galaxy, including these standard candles, is “red-shifted.” That is, instead of being, say, bluish-white—as we would expect to see in the light from a similar star in our own galaxy—the light from distant galaxies has a longer wavelength, more reddish in appearance. This is the Doppler effect. If the stars were coming toward us—and some galaxies, like Andromeda, are actually approaching the Milky Way—then the light waves would be compressed, more bluish, just as the sound waves of an approaching train’s horn are compressed and so appear higher in pitch. But stars that are going away shift redder, their light waves more stretched out, like the descending wail of a train that’s leaving you. And the farther away a galaxy is, the redder its apparent light. So from this, astronomers conclude that the universe is expanding.

Well, yes. It supposedly exploded from a single infinitely hot, infinitely dense point some 13.8 billion years ago. So, of course, it’s expanding. But based on observations of galactic red shifts at various distances, as well as from analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation—the fading “echo” of the Big Bang—the expansion rate is apparently increasing. The momentum of the explosive expansion isn’t fading or even holding steady—it’s speeding up. Nothing in current physics explains this result, and so astronomers have proposed that the universe is influenced by something called “dark energy.” There is no good candidate for this energy, except perhaps some kind of “vacuum energy” that resides in and drives the expansion of empty space itself. But whatever it is, it’s vast.²

If you collect all the visible, bright matter we can see in the universe and compare it to our computation of the amounts of dark matter necessary to keep the galaxies spinning like they do, then dark matter makes up about 85 percent of the physical stuff in the universe—way more than the bright objects we can see and, supposedly, interact with.

And if you try to account for all that dark matter plus the dark energy necessary to create and drive the expansion of the known, observable universe, then about 69 percent of everything is dark energy, 26 percent is dark matter, and only 5 percent is the familiar, atomic matter that we can see as stars, planets, dust, gases … stuff. So, in short, we know very little, and have only vague conjectures and initial theories, about the vast majority of the universe we live in.

That’s either a shameful admission—or a vast opportunity.

In a blog last month, I mentioned a breakthrough discovery that gravity—which has long been conspicuously absent from the calculations of quantum mechanics, the science that deals with the invisible world of subatomic particles—may actually exist at and be measurable at the microscopic level. Einstein’s theories of relativity, dealing with the macro world of planets and stars, and quantum mechanics, governing the realm of the unbelievably small, were long thought to be mutually exclusive and irreconcilable. But if gravity is exerted by grains of sand and maybe by subatomic particles, then we may finally be in line to create a “Theory of Everything,” combining relativity and quantum physics—the goal of physicists since early in the twentieth century. That may eventually explain mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

What if gravity—the bending of spacetime according to the amount of available mass—exists and could be measured not just at the level of stars and planets, but in grains of dust, atoms of dispersed gases, and subatomic particles flying through “empty” space? The effects would be small, vanishingly small. After all, the effects of gravity are subtle. It’s the weakest of the four known and fundamental forces.³ The mass of the entire Earth has such a weak gravity field—an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared toward its center from the planet’s surface—that you can overcome it briefly simply by jumping and more permanently by firing off a chemical rocket.

But over vast distances, the distances between galaxies? We know that the bending of spacetime caused by a gravity field creates a “time dilation.” That is, time slows down under the influence of gravity. A clock on the surface of the Earth ticks more slowly than one out in interplanetary or interstellar space. It’s not just that the clock’s mechanism is retarded by the force of gravity, but time itself as the clock measures it has slowed. And a clock positioned near the event horizon of a black hole is slowed so much that the passage of hours it records would register as years to an astronaut orbiting outside the black hole’s effective gravity well.⁴

So … If dust, gases, and subatomic particles hanging about in intergalactic space have actual gravity effects—bending spacetime for anything small enough that passes near them, like a moving photon—might not that effect the timing, the energy level, of the photons themselves? This is a conjecture, similar to but not exactly the same as the “tired light” hypothesis described in the second footnote below.

I told you I was an agnostic, and I write a kind of science fantasy—not real but hypothetical and, hopefully, barely plausible. As a skeptic, I don’t accept that our current knowledge of anything is actually final.

Sir Isaac Newton refined the observations and theories of the ancient Greek and Babylonian astronomers. Then Albert Einstein refined the observations and mathematics of Newton. And then Niels Bohr and the quantum physicists threw it all into a cocked hat at the subatomic level. Edwin Hubble observed that the light of distant galaxies was red-shifted and so moving away from us, and that the universe was expanding. Cosmologists then used this expansion to wind it back to a single point some 13.8 billion years ago, and the decay of the cosmic microwave background as measured by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson seemed to confirm that dating. Then astronomers figured that the universe is actually larger than it could have grown in that time, and so Alan Guth proposed inflation—that at the moment of the Big Bang, the universe expanded exponentially fast, faster than light speed—to finally arrive at the observable scale. Now we have dark matter and dark energy—unknown and, so far, undetectable “things” and “forces”—to explain anomalies in our observations that don’t fit our theories.

As I said before, these are exciting times. But the whole thing may eventually get tossed into a cocked hat. The Big Bang is, after all, just another creation story, like God moving across the waters and separating the light from the dark, or Great Raven dropping a wing feather upon the Earth to create everything. We yearn to know. And when we don’t, we keep piling theory on theory, until eventually we come upon a universe made up of things and forces we can’t know and can only imagine.

We ain’t done yet.

1. By now it’s generally accepted that our galaxy—and every other one we can study at close range—include a massive black hole at their center. These invisible objects have a mass on the order of a million suns, give or take. The one at the center of the Milky Way is about 4.3 million suns. So, why doesn’t that constitute “dark matter” all by itself? Well, our galaxy has over 100 billion stars; so the central black hole is not even one percent of galactic mass—kind of the situation of all the rocky planets, moons, and asteroids in the solar system.

2. An alternate theory has been proposed to this red-shifted Doppler effect—one that would discount the continuous expansion of the universe in the first place. Suppose light that travels long distances just “gets tired.” Suppose that photons traveling so far—not just between the Sun and the Earth, or from nearby stars to the Earth, but the billions of light years between galaxies—tend to lose energy, so that their wavelength becomes increasingly longer and redder. But there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism driving this effect. Nothing in the vacuum of space exists to “sap the energy” of a moving photon. And just as a body in motion tends to stay in motion—according to the first law of Sir Isaac Newton—until and unless some outside force acts upon it, so light waves should retain their energy unless they interact with something.
    It is part of the General Theory of Relativity that objects in deep gravity fields—spacetime that is bent sharply enough—experience time dilation, as described above in the main text. A physical object in the gravity field of a black hole and approaching its singularity or one moving at light speed—if it could ever attain that velocity—would experience the complete stoppage of time. So presumably a photon, which has no mass, experiences a timeless, changeless existence. But might it not also, at that speed, because it is moving through the dilation, lose just a bit of its energy, become just a little red-shifted, and more so the longer it travels? Conventional physics and cosmology say not, but our observations and theories are continually evolving.

3. The strong nuclear force, which holds quarks together to form protons and neutrons; the weak nuclear force, which holds these particles together in atomic nuclei; the electromagnetic force, which holds electrons in their atomic “orbits” or shells and accounts for the joining together of atoms into molecules, among other effects; and gravity, which bends spacetime around large masses and holds planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies together.

4. This was one of the effects correctly described—not all of them were!—in the 2014 movie Interstellar.