Symphony Of Science
February 8, 2010
These are probably the most amazing videos on Youtube. At least, I think so. Thinking on the topics in these videos makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. All distinctions between myself and all other life disappear. A small confined world of conflict and struggle gives way to an unbound infinite universe.
Just watch as David Attenborough walks through a field of butterflies. Just look at his face. That’s exactly how I feel when I walk through a state park, or look at the stars in an observatory, or crunch away at the mathematical equations of Physics, wondering what light does as it bounces around the room. There’s an infinite universe both on the microscopic and macroscopic scales, each unique, yet at the same time governed by the same simplistic laws. And the more Physics you study the simpler the laws become. They’re not always easy to apply to complex situations, but the laws themselves are simple and rooted in at most a few basic concepts.
The simplicity of the laws is elegant, yet the sheer amount of phenomenon that can be explained using such simple principles is absolutely breathtaking.
My favorite part about this next video is when Feynman talks about the light bouncing around the room. “It’s all REALLY there, REALLY REAALLLYYY there. But you got to stop and think about it to really get the pleasure.” I also like it when he says, “I think nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s that she’s never going to let us relax.” Every line in these videos is amazing.
Carl Sagan says, “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it but the way those atoms are put together.”
The same applies to a computer. You can say a computer is a hunk of metal and silicon, and that would be true, but it wouldn’t capture the entire dynamic of what a computer really is. It’s how skillfully each component of the metal and silicon work together. The same is true of our bodies, and all life on planet Earth. There’s a lot of truths in the world which are true but yet don’t capture the whole picture in its entirety. I think truths like that are dangerous. They’re misleading.
People may know all sorts of truths, and they may even be backed by evidence, but that doesn’t mean that’s the end of the discussion. I think real understanding comes not by knowledge of “truths” so much as the ability to create something and produce new experiences. A sort of control of the universe and the world around you. As Richard Feynman once said, “That which I cannot create I do not understand.”
Or as Bertrand Russell said in yet another way:
“…it is not enough to recognize that all our knowledge is in a greater or less degree, uncertain and vague, it is necessary at the same time, to learn to act upon the best hypothesis without dogmatically believing it.”
- Bertrand Russell, Philosophy For Laymen
Whenever the new truths you’re learning empower you, connect you to everything around you, and lead to a sort of all-connected diversity, you’re heading in the right direction.
Also, once you’re able to create and control, the world of scarcity and struggle for resources goes away. Two things which I find incredibly cruel in this world is our monetary system, as well as the Darwinian struggle for life. Both are rooted in scarce resources. The real truths that we need eliminate this scarcity and remove the need to fight one another.
These videos feature the best and brightest of humanity. Scientists who have spent their lives studying the laws of nature, and life. Compare this to what you see on your television. On the news. All the name calling. All the fighting and bickering. This group pitted off against that group.
Compare the “We’re all connected” message to that delivered by Hitler in this speech. Can you see the difference?
He doesn’t see the world as a “we”, it’s only “them”. Their party must overcome all other parties. Their people must subdue all other peoples. All those who are not racially pure must be removed. All diversity of opinion must be eliminated. They must all unite under his leadership. They must uncompromisingly be the one and only power in all of Germany and the world.
It’s not a world of equality and respect of diversity. They don’t see any connection between themselves and others in the world. They’re not all connected. They must continue to struggle and fight for supremacy against any and all odds, no matter the cost of life.
Their party is infallible. Their fuhrer, a god. Their leaders a holy order. Their blood, pure. All upstanding Germans must be National Socialists.
It’s sad that people give themselves away to these sorts of ideas and passions. They can’t seem to grasp the idea behind the tree of life, even though Darwin’s Origin of Species told all about it and had been around for a long time.
“Only then, if we in the Party with our most obedient dedication become the highest embodiment of National Socialist thought and being, then the Party will materialize into an eternal and indestructible pillar of the German people and the Reich.”
It’s hard for me to watch videos like this. I’m closing it down. I just can’t believe someone can say things which are so incredibly evil, and against the interests of the people, and everyone on the planet, yet every word is resounded in cheers and applause. Watching it fills my entire person with an intense sadness and gloom.
This same irrationality exists even today. They install nude airport scanners, which expose us to toxic, cancer causing X-rays, and completely violate not only our liberties and freedoms, but sanity, and you go on CNN.com and people in the comments are saying, ‘We need these measures.”
Hitler speaks to base instincts. He speaks to tribal emotions. He appeals to rituals and makes everything into a sort of religion. He appeals to the reptile brain. He brings out the worst in humanity with his words. He cries out the everyone’s evolutionary baggage, and a switch flips on in the people. Conflict and mayhem are then unleashed onto the world.
I really try to keep myself away from that sort of thing as much as possible. I’ve always dreamed of building a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, and having a sailing boat. If I marry one day, I could give up the cabin and live in the city or a suburb, but if that never happens, the cabin is best for me. The cabin is my home base, whereas the sailing ship is my mobile base. I’d sail all around the world, and visit a lot of remote locations like David Attenborough did. I’d dive into the oceans and view the life down there. I’d visit scientists all around the world, and maybe spend a few years here, a few years there, contributing to their research and volunteering to work with them.
I priced out that I’d need around 20 million dollars to live that lifestyle. A lot of it is to live on for the duration of my life, living rather modestly, not “paying myself” much more than what you’d make on a normal job. The cabin, with the large amount of land around it, would cost like 5 or 6 million. The sailing ship also costs millions. I’d also need fuel for the ship, and other expenses related to it.
Unfortunately it’s not easy to come into that kind of money without spending a lot of time doing business and pursuing it. Also, when you do end up making money you have to fight off the government’s mass printing of money, constantly devaluing the currency. It makes it almost impossible to save up the kind of money you need to do something like that, even if you can make a lot. By the time you make some new money, your old savings has been devalued by half due to the Fed’s monetary policies.
In an ideal world I’d also construct myself a science lab. But that’d cost even more. I could give up the sail boat I guess, and maybe rent one, or sail with someone else, but in an ideal world I’d have it all 
I’d like to live on the boat as I traveled to different countries and their ports. I’d keep all my books and research material there with me. I wouldn’t have to lug it around. I also never would have to worry about being robbed. Who would want my mathematics books, or my physics texts?
I could see pirates boarding my ship. “Where’s the jewels? Where’s your cash?” … “I don’t have such things.” … Then they go down into the ship and all they find is a library. “What are these books?” … “Oh these? Well, that’s John Maynard Keynes The General Theory Of Employment, Interest, and Money. Oh that? That’s Richard Feynman’s lecture set on Physics. Over there you find the complete works of Sigmund Freud. There’s John Locke’s Letter on Toleration. Over there’s A library of letters written by President Thomas Jefferson. Oh, there’s my complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There’s Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. There’s Einstein’s book on Special and General Relativity. There’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There’s William James Psychology textbook. There’s Plutarch’s Lives and Edward Gibbon’s history text on the rise and fall of the Roman empire. You know, maybe you should read some of these books. You can borrow them, if you like?”
Though I will admit not all my desires revolve around such noble scientific pursuits. I wouldn’t mind owning a large collection of Harley Davidson motorcycles. Haha. The rumbling engine. The open road. Ride through the barren desert on an isolated highway and floor it on the straightaway. Cruise the strip in Vegas late at night. Ride along the beach and eat some crab legs.
A man has to have a dream, hasn’t he? That’s mine.
But yeah. These days I’ve been busy learning new things and reconnecting to the universe. Somehow I’d been unplugged. I don’t know how or why that happened, but I’ve slowly been re-soldering myself back to the universe’s mainboard.
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
– Carl Sagan
“We must ask ourselves
We who are so proud of our accomplishments
What is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?”
- Robert Jastrow
“Are there things about the universe
That will be forever beyond our grasp?
Are there things about the universe that are
Ungraspable?”
- Richard Dawkins
It’s so deep. They’re both humble, yet pillars of intelligence. They know so much, yet their knowledge leads them to exclaim how they know so little. And they do so with great joy! They don’t live in a box! Their minds have opened up to a bigger world. They have come to learn how little they do know, and reach and see just how much they can discover about this universe. They’ve immersed themselves in infinity and eternity.
In this last video, I love it when Sagan talks about the brain and how it processes information. He shows an excerpt from Principia Mathematica. The logic the brain uses to compute numbers, and analyze the structure and consistency of the world. Well, I can’t say whether the brain really uses the same operations, but it goes into a lot of details into how a logical mind could do such operations. I’ve read a lot of that book. Well, it’s 3 volumes! It gets to where it’s mostly just symbols, each one standing for various logic operations. You get to where you can read it if you spend enough time with it.
I think the best line from the video is:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
- Carl Sagan
Speaking of the brain, lately I found a set of lectures on neuroscience, which I’ve been watching lately. Study Physics by day, then when I get tired of that, study history, economics, and neuroscience. And I’ve been studying a little psychology, but not a whole lot.
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The Basics Of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
February 6, 2010
The other day I mentioned how I wanted to share with you the basic properties of light and how it makes its way across the room. I find this absolutely fascinating. We’ll all soon see that light does not behave how you think it does! At least not how I thought it did!
I want to talk about the weirdness which takes place when you look at yourself in the mirror, or put on a pair of glasses, or even what it means to see something off in the distance. It’s so weird, and I can’t do it justice when I attempt to describe it in emotional terms. I’m simply going to explain it to you, and let you decide what to think of it. It’s just … just… unbelievable.
Light is completely mysterious and you have to study quantum mechanics to understand it. Quantum electrodynamics (QED) patterns the interaction of light and matter, and what I’ll be discussing with you will be a very basic presentation of QED. Though it will be basic, easy to understand, and free from all the complex mathematics, that does not mean it will not be accurate. I hope to help you all understand the core principles behind it all. That’s what I’m going for with this.
So how does it all work? Basically, we’re going to draw some spinning arrows, add them up, and then compute these weird probabilities based on them. If you can add and multiply then you’ll be able to follow this discussion, no problems.
Now when I present these “arrow rules” to you, you’re going to be sitting back in your chair wondering, “Jason, what does this have to do with light?” Just bear with me. It’ll seem weird, trivial and pointless at first. But these simple rules I’m going to show you will provide a weird sort of framework which can be used to describe literally every dynamic of light!
Next I’m going to take that simple rule set we develop and apply it to various everyday scenarios such light traveling across the room, bouncing off a mirror, focusing and bending through a lense, and then conclude with the famous (or infamous!) double slit experiment.
Throughout all these experiments we’ll be discussing we’ll only be considering monochromatic red light, but that’s only to make things easier to understand. Ok, here we go.
Arrow Rules!
First off assume that light consists of little tiny “bullets” flying around the room, like tiny BBs from a BB gun. We all had BB guns when we were little didn’t we? Well, I grew up in rural Missouri in the United States, and spent most of my time outdoors, fishing and shooting my BB gun at everything that moved! My childhood was like that of Ralphie in the movie A Christmas Carol. I too, as a young boy, received a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle for Christmas! It was a real beauty. Unfortunately, many years ago I left it outside in the grass, it got rained on, then rusted. Kids will be kids!
Now when I would fire my Red Ryder, the BB flew out in a nice patterned trajectory. Due to the force at which it was propelled, air resistance and gravity, the fired BBs followed a predictable trajectory, which tended to go in a straight line for a short ways then began to slow down and fall toward the ground. Sometimes I had to compensate for this by aiming above my target, and so forth.
However we will not be working with normal BBs. These are “light BBs” which behave much differently. Their real name is “photons.”
Let’s take my Red Ryder, and put a light bulb at the end. When I pull the trigger the bulb lights up. Let’s say this bulb emits the monochromatic red light I mentioned just a second ago.
Now there’s a special property to these photons. Once they’re emitted by the bulb, we have no idea what they do afterward. Unlike BBs, they don’t have to follow any particular set path or trajectory. It’s actually impossible to model the trajectory of a photon. What you do instead is take the position of the source (our bulb), and then place a photon detector at some location away from the source, and then using some basic rules you compute the probability that the photon will make it to the detector.
What you do is take every possible path the photon could take and represent each path by an arrow. The more paths we have the shorter the arrows are. If there’s 1000 possible paths, each arrow has a length of 1/1000. If there’s 500 possible paths, each arrow has a length of 1/500. What I mean by a “possible path” will be more clear when we get to the examples.
Next we give each arrow a direction. Each one of these arrows spins around in a circle, exactly like the hand of a clock does. Basically what you do is imagine the photon traveling from the source to the detector along each alternate path all while having this “arrow” traveling along with it, spinning around in a circle. For our monochromatic red light source our arrow would spin in a circle about 30,000 times in every inch. So it’s pretty quick!
After that we add up all the arrows. If there’s a 1000 paths we add up all 1000 arrows. If the arrows are in opposite directions, they cancel one another out. If they’re in the same or similar direction, they add to another.
For example, if you had 1000 arrows all in the same direction, then their sum would be 1. If you had 500 arrows pointing toward 9 o’clock (to the left), and 500 arrows pointing toward 3 o’clock (to the right), then the sum would be zero.
Now finally we have the last step which is to compute the probability. All you do is take this sum, and then square it. That gives you the probability that a photon emitted from that source location will arrive at the detector.
For example, if all of your arrows sum to 0.5, then the probability would be 0.5 x 0.5, which is .25, or 25%.
If this is very weird to you, don’t worry. Quantum physics is REALLY WEIRD. Why such a weird rule can pattern all dynamics of light, beats me. But it works, and it’s pretty amazing. So let’s get to some examples.
Light Moves Across The Room
When you’re out on a date with your special someone, and you’re sitting at a table in a restaurant, you probably don’t think much about the light bouncing around the room… that is, unless you’re an absent minded, philosopher-physicist person like myself. This sort of spacing out, wondering about what space is, can really be bad when you’re out on a date. You stare at the light fixture, the TV mounted on the wall, various objects and furniture around the room, and then give your date a confused look while softly expressing, “Yeepppp.”
That’s when she thinks to herself, “What’s this guy on?” Then she politely says, “Pardon me”, slips to the bathroom and shortly after bails for the exit, never to return. When she takes her coat and purse with her to the restroom, that’s when you know you’ve screwed up again. You’ve been caught thinking about quantum physics in public! After reading this article, you’ll have to learn to shut these thoughts off while in public, for people do not understand the thoughts of a quantum physicist.
Your soft, “Yepppp”, along with your confused expression, was all in hopes to communicate your sense of helplessness to your date. You’re confused. You don’t get what light is. What it does. How it works. What it is that your eyes see. But she didn’t quite get the message and you’ve lost your ability to communicate. Too many hours crunching math equations, and not enough time socializing. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there.
Light generally seems to move in straight lines. If I leave the table and stand inbetween where my date once was and the TV, I can imagine that I’d be blocking the TV’s picture for her. The light emitting from the TV rarely bends around me, ignoring my body like some sort of transparent nothing. I block the light.
It’s everyday experiences like these which give us the idea that light moves in straight lines. But does it really? *shrugs* In times like these we need to experiment. What to do, what to do. Hmmm, I know!
Naturally I’m quite frustrated that my date left me, so I chase her out to the parking lot car, open up my trunk, grab my rusted Red Ryder with the light bulb at the end, with the awesome battery side pack I built myself *big grin*, aim at her and fire! She sees the end of the barrel light up red, and that’s that. I blasted her with some red photons. That’s all I needed to do. The night is done. I then put away my Red Ryder, hop in my car and drive off.
As I drive away, exhilarated at how I “showed her”, I begin to wonder if she understood what happened. She probably thinks the light photon traveled straight from the bulb, across the parking lot, and right to her eyes. If she only knew!
So what really happened? Well, I can’t tell you that. I honestly have no idea what path the photon took to make it to her eyes. That’s the joy of mother nature. It’s absurd, just like my actions that night. (No, I never did this!)
Let’s look at an illustration, taken from Richard Feynman’s book on QED.
The light photons I blasted her with could’ve taken any of these possible paths. Basically you can see each path, A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. The bottom left chart plots time, and each time (based on the distance) gives us the direction of the arrow. Remember, the arrow turns in a complete circle approximately 30,000 times per inch. So in this case, the distance determines the arrow direction. At the bottom right you can see that he (Feynman) sums all the arrows together. Some arrows cancel out the others. For example, you can see that A points mostly up, and B almost straight down. They pretty much cancel one another out. Same with F and G. Though you can see that C, D, and E all point in the same direction, therefore add up together.
In other words, the “straight line” paths, or those very close to straight, tend to add together the most, while other paths cancel themselves out. This is what is meant when you say, “Light travels in a straight line.” Does that mean it necessarily does? No. But if you cancel out those straight line paths the probability that the photon makes it to the source goes down to almost nothing.
Say my date’s father was secretly hiding in the restaurant, overly protective of his daughter. He sees me pulling out my Red Ryder. He immediately runs toward me, putting himself between me and his daughter. Quite noble of him really. I pull the trigger, the red bulb lights up, but my date doesn’t see anything. Her father’s in the way. Dang it. Experiment foiled.
No matter. Even with her annoying father, we still learned something, didn’t we?
In general, though it’s not highly probable, some photons, from time to time, may well bend around her father and make it to her eyes. Problem is, since it’s highly improbable, not many photons will do so. And even if one or two do make it to her once in a blue moon, her eyes aren’t sensitive enough to pick up just a photon or two. The human eye needs at least 5 or 6 light photons before it’s stimulated enough to produce a sight sensation.
Just on a side note, I used to wonder about Maxwell’s equations. I couldn’t figure out how two electromagnetic waves could travel side by side. How close could they get before they merged together and started to interact with one another? If I shot two waves side by side, super close together, would they ever come together? After all, they’re energy, so they have mass, so wouldn’t gravity pull the two of them together? Really Maxwell’s equations, and electromagnetic fields are approximations. This QED stuff is more precise.
The Dynamics Of A Mirror
It sounds like an awful lot of work to compute all these arrows, calculate their directions and sums, and compute this probability, all for the common sense result that light moves in a straight line, which is what we all thought anyways. I’m with ya. I hate tedious, pointless calculations as much as any other man. But patience my young quantum Padawans. We’ll never be able to build our giant laser and take over the world with that attitude. We’ve only just begun! Mwahaha. Mwhahaha. Mwwwhahahahahaaahahahahaa.
We’re all familiar with mirrors, but do we understand how they work? Well, in general most of us believe what we’re told in high school. Our teachers told us that when light bounces off a mirror the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.
It’d be pretty strange if this wasn’t the case. Imagine facing a mirror directly yet seeing the side of your face, or the top of your head! It’s amazing how many light photons are bouncing off that thing. Photons from every possible view angle are bouncing off that mirror. It’s absolutely incredible.
You move your head just a little to the right, or the left, or move a little toward it, or away from it, and the image changes. No big deal, right? You do it everyday. But if you take some time to think about it, that’s really amazing. A mirror doesn’t really reflect just one image. There really is no absolute image in the mirror. There’s an infinite number of images in that mirror. You only see one though, because of where you’re standing and where your eyes are positioned relative to the mirror.
Well, can we use these “arrow rules”, and this QED stuff, to show why light bounces off of a mirror the way it does? You bet we can! Why else would I be writing this? Let’s first examine what’s called Fermat’s principle, which says that light always takes the path requiring the least time. It’s very easily illustrated in a picture.
Basically, using mathematics, you can take every point from the light source to the mirror, and then to the destination point P, and show that the point where the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection is always the shortest path. Remember those optimization problems in Calculus class? A lot of undergraduate physics textbooks talk about Fermat’s principle, and work out the mathematics proving this “shortest path,” proof for light.
I always found it confusing. I understood the math, but I didn’t believe that was the real picture. It was like light looked at the mirror, scanned every possible path, and then “choose” the shortest route. Every photon had a sort of free will of its own, and was incredibly lazy, always taking the easiest way out. They were smart little calculating machines, always deliberating what to do, and making sure to do so with maximum efficiency.
Then I studied QED, and, well, became even more confused! It’s like, “Oh Jason? Getting arrogant are you? How about this? I not only calculate the most efficient path, but really I just do whatever I want to. Collectively we have a probability where we may end up, but individually there’s no way for you to know! What do you think of that?”
So using our “arrow” technique, lets represent light bouncing off the mirror along every possible path, and sum up the arrows. What do we get?
So if you sum up all the paths, you see that the middle portions of the mirror contribute the most to the probability calculation, with their arrows adding up. The other arrows cancel one another out. You can see that F,G,H, and I all point in relatively the same direction, so they add together. So saying the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, and that light takes the shortest path is pretty close to correct. Not always though.
So if I stood in front of this mirror, blocking F, G, H, and I, but leaving the rest of the mirror uncovered, the probability that a photon emitted from the source at S will make it to the detector at P goes way down. It’s not impossible. Light may well take a weird path and make it there, but it’s improbable.
Imagine me standing beside you, yet you look in the mirror and it ignores that I’m even there. All the photons just travel around me and ignore my presence. Remember though, that’s possible, just not very probable. Maybe understanding quantum physics well enough, you could engineer a device which makes you invisible in mirrors by changing various energy fields around you. I don’t know. Plato’s Ring of Gyges made a reality!
Once again, you may be wondering why go through with these elaborate procedures of “all possible paths,” and all these arrows, when it doesn’t allow us to predict anything new. What’s the point? Well, be prepared to be amazed. I’m about to make your beloved mirror do some weird things.
What if I carefully scrape away parts of the mirror that that are canceling out my arrows, but leave others which are pointing in the certain direction I want? Interesting things begin to happen! What sort of mirror do I end up with? I end up with a mirror that reflects light at weird angles!
But, I soon run into problems. So far we’ve only been considering a particular shade of red light. That’s where the 30,000 cycles per inch comes from. But when I change the frequency of the light, say to blue, or violet, or something else, that messes with my arrow directions. In other words different colors of light begin to respond differently based on what areas of the mirror I scratch off.
Actually, mirrors like this exist, and they’re called “diffraction gratings.” Pretty neat things really. Basically engineers use fine precision machinery and make mirrors with microscopic sections etched off, all evenly spaced. The net effect is that each color starts to reflect off of it at different angle.
You may have heard of spectral analysis? It’s used in astronomy, astrophysics, physics, and other things. They use diffraction gratings.
We’ve played with mirrors long enough.
Light Through A Lense
Light bending through a lense can also be explained using these same techniques. Say we want to focus light using a lense. To do this we need only one new bit of information: if the material is transparent, light moves at different speeds through different materials. This modifies the cycles per inch number when computing our arrow directions. In a lense we exploit this fact, and trick nature into putting the light where we want it.
Let’s look at a set of paths without a lense.
The “outer” paths are longer than the more direct paths, and this throws off all the arrows. They cancel one another out. But what if we inserted a piece of glass, knowing that light moves slower through glass than through the air or empty space? What would happen? If the glass was thicker toward the middle and thin toward the top, that would slow down the middle paths (around M), and if we’re clever, we can shape the glass just so to where each path to our destination P takes the same amount of time, and therefore all arrows add together. Near every photon emitted would be “focused” and end up at that location.
That’s really the quantum mechanical interpretation of light through a lense, though we didn’t get into the atomic details, such as each atom’s electrons, which quantum mechanics also deals with. Really the light doesn’t “pass through” the lense. The energy of the photons is absorbed by the glass atoms, and is then re-radiated. The time it takes for the atoms to absorb the photons, then emit new ones, and so on and so forth, each atom “passing on” the photon, one to another, is what slows down the “speed of light” through the material.
But how come we can see through a piece of glass, but not a brick wall? Some materials just absorb the photons, which causes random vibrations in the atoms, and instead of passing through, a new photon of a different magnitude is fired back. In a brick wall, the sunlight both heats up the surface, and also reflects back the red light which allows us to see the wall during the daytime.
Or take a black leather car seat in the middle of the summer. The seats are hot as fire when you get in. This is because light made it through the windows and then made its way toward your seats. Your seat material absorbed the light photons and this caused the atoms to vibrate, which is what heat is. This also gave off radiation, which then heated up the air within your car as well. But other materials, such as glass, only temporarily absorb the photons, but then re-radiate them, passing the photon to the atom next to it until it finally exits out the backside of the material.
Depending on how the material absorbs the light photons, and re-radiates them determines how fast the speed of light is through the material, and also how thick the lense has to be to have the proper effects. You oftentimes see old people wearing big thick glasses. Depending on how much the material can slow down the speed of light, and what’s wrong with their eyesight, will determine how thick the lense needs to be.
The Double Slit Experiment
This little arrow technique is pretty amazing isn’t it? You just take up all the different paths, represent them with these spinning arrows, then add them all up, and square the resulting magnitude’s sum. Hard to believe that it works.
One puzzling thing about light is how it spreads itself out in a wave when making its way through a tight slit. Or how if you put two slits close together and push light through them you get these interference effects. You start to ask yourself whether light is a wave, or is it a particle? There’s talk about wave-particle duality, and you learn about things like “diffraction” and “interference.” Well, all of these things can be explained by these same simple rules.
You can see from this illustration above how light moves in these particles, but it sort of acts like a wave at the same time. You get those interference bands. Let’s represent this scenario with our paths and arrows. We’ll just explain it for a single slit, but by now you guys shouldn’t have a problem seeing how it would work with double slits. It’s the exact same principle.
First let’s examine the behavior of light moving through an opening. Assume the “slit” is fairly wide and is not a tight squeeze. In this case light proceeds pretty much straight through, not really spreading out at all.
But once we push light through a tight squeeze it starts to behave differently.
Pretty cool huh? By now I think you guys should understand the basics of light. I hope you enjoyed this.
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Tags: diffraction, double slit experiment, interference, light, mirrors, qed, quantum electrodynamics, quantum physics, richard feynmanTopics: Physics | No Comments »
An Economics Lesson For Obama From Japan
January 29, 2010
It seems those in Washington will not learn from history. Printing money, and dreaming this will fix our economic woes only further exacerbates the problem. We’re not suffering from a lack of “demand.” Our monetary policies are not properly allocating resources, which is the true cause of the economic recession. I can’t think of anyone better to explain this all to you than the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Austrian economist, Doug French. Japan was in the same boat we are now back in the late 1980s. Their central banks flooded their system with cheap credit, creating a massive bubble economy, their housing prices went through the roof, and when it all popped they tried massive stimulus package after massive stimulus package, hoping to stave off deflation and cure their economy. Did it work? No. In fact, they’ve been attempting massive stimulus programs ever since. Did ANY of those programs work? No. But they keep doing it over and over and over. The end result? After a decade of sucessive stimulus packages, Japan is now buried in debts, running huge deficits, and on the verge of a collapse. Sound familiar?
The excerpts below can be found in their entirety here. They are quoted from Doug French’s article ‘Illusions of the Age of Keynes.’ If this is all too much for you to read, I bolded the main points within the article, and put really key points in a huge font.
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A year ago George Melloan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “We’re all Keynesian’s Again.” You remember last January — change was on its way. We had a new rock-star president and he was going to get us out of the mess that Wall Street had got us into. “Now is the time to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down,” President Obama told Congress. The new president has a worldview that is “all but in name Keynesian,” Carl Horowitz wrote last spring.
Meanwhile the guy running the Federal Reserve is an expert on the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke wasn’t going to make the same mistakes the policy makers made during the 1930s. After all, he pointed out back in 2002 when he was just a Fed governor,
the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.
…
Washington continues to have faith in government expenditure correcting the downturns of private investment. And the financial press has bought into the scam, evidenced by Time voting the Fed chairman “Man of the Year.” The economy would be much worse if not for the actions of Bernanke and the Federal Reserve is the thinking. “He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy,” Time’s Michael Grunwald gushes, “he led an effort to save the world economy.”
“The Greatest Depression that could so easily have happened in 2009 but did not is the tribute that the world owes to economics,” wrote Arvind Subramanian in The Financial Times.
….
So what kind of Keynesian world are Bernanke and the other wise ones in Washington shaping for us?
Keynesians see a depression as a lack of aggregate demand — as opposed to Austrians who know a depression is the required cleansing of the malinvestments created by the preceding boom of the government’s making. Policy makers, following the Keynesian playbook, enact policies to stimulate aggregate demand and offset the fall in private investment. On the fiscal-policy side, Keynesians advocate higher government spending. On the monetary side, they insist on lowering interest rates to zero if necessary.
The world has recent experience with attempts at resuscitating a bubble economy. The Bank of Japan cut interest rates six times between 1986 and early 1987 and all that new money caused the Japanese economy to bubble over. As Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin write in Financial Reckoning Day Fallout,
the problem with all money is that it is as fickle and unreliable as a bad girlfriend. One minute she goes along with the flow. The next minute she turns silly and bubbly. And then, she gives you the cold shoulder.
The prolonged period of low interest rates created one of the largest domestic bubbles in the world. For a brief moment in 1990, the Japanese stock market was bigger than the US market. The Nikkei-225 reached a peak of 38,916 in December of 1989 with a price-earnings ratio of around 80 times. At the bubble’s height, the capitalized value of the Tokyo Stock Exchange stood at 42 percent of the entire world’s stock-market value and Japanese real estate accounted for half the value of all land on earth, while only representing less than 3 percent of the total area. In 1989 all of Japan’s real estate was valued at US$24 trillion which was four times the value of all real estate in the United States, despite Japan having just half the population and 60 percent of US GDP.
“The Japanese asset bubbles were identical to other asset bubbles in the sense that they were essentially inflated by credit,” writes Asian bank regulator Andrew Sheng in his book From Asian to Global Financial Crisis.
Banks lent to highly leveraged developers to buy real estate against inflated collateral values, which then fueled the bubble further. Asset prices bore no realistic relationship to their return on capital, particularly since cost of funding was exceptionally low. The minute the credit stopped, the bubble began to deflate, and the main victims were the banks themselves.
After the bubble popped in Japan, that government pursued a relentless Keynesian course of fiscal pump priming and loose fiscal policy with the result being a Japan that went from having the healthiest fiscal position of any OECD country in 1990 to annual deficits of 6 to 7 percent of GDP and a gross public debt that is now 227 percent of GDP. “The Japanese tried to cure an alcoholic with heroin,” writes Bonner. “Now, they’re addicted to it.”
Japan’s monetary policy was to aggressively lower rates to .5 percent between 1991 and 1995 and has operated a zero-interest policy virtually ever since.
Between 1992 and 1995, the Japanese government tried six stimulus plans totaling 65.5 trillion yen and they even cut tax rates in 1994. They tried cutting taxes again in 1998, but government spending was never cut. Also in 1998, another stimulus package of 16.7 trillion yen was rolled out nearly half of which was for public-works projects. Later in the same year, another stimulus package was announced, totaling 23.9 trillion yen. The very next year an ¥18 trillion stimulus was tried, and, in October of 2000, another stimulus for 11 trillion was announced. As economist Ben Powell points out, “Overall during the 1990s, Japan tried 10 fiscal stimulus packages totaling more than 100 trillion yen, and each failed to cure the recession,” with Japan’s nominal GDP growth rate below zero for most of the five years after 1997.
After five years in an economic wilderness, the Bank of Japan switched, during the spring of 2001, to a policy of quantitative easing — targeting the growth of the money supply instead of nominal interest rates — in order to engineer a rebound in demand growth.
The move by the Bank of Japan to quantitative easing and the large increase in liquidity that followed stopped the fall in land prices by 2003. The Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero until early 2007, when it boosted its discount rate back to 0.5 percent in two steps by midyear. But the BoJ quickly reverted back to its zero interest rate policy.
In August of 2008, the Japanese government unveiled an ¥11.5 trillion stimulus. The package, which included ¥1.8 trillion in new spending and nearly ¥10 trillion in government loans and credit guarantees, was in response to news that the Japanese economy in July suffered its biggest contraction in seven years and inflation had topped 2 percent for the first time in a decade.
Newswire reports said the new measures would include assistance to the agriculture sector, support for part-time workers to find better employment, and rebates on toll roads. Additional spending was also to flow to healthcare, housing, education, and environmental technology.
Just this past April, the Japanese government announced another ¥10 trillion stimulus program. This was after Japan’s economy shrank by a record 15.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2009. This drop was on the heels of a 14.4 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Last month, Reuters reported that the Bank of Japan reinforced its commitment to maintaining very low interest rates and may provide even further easing. “The bank said that it would not tolerate zero inflation or falling prices.” The bank left its policy rate at .1 percent and analysts see the rate staying low possibly until 2012.
According to Reuters, the Japanese government “is fretting over the risk of the economy flipping back into recession and is pushing the bank for action.” Economy flipping back into recession? Are they kidding? Japan’s GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992–17 lost years.
“After 17 years of bailouts and stimulus programs, the Japanese should be getting good at them,” write Bonner and Wiggin. “But it’s a little like a guy who’s getting good at suicide — if he’s so good at it, you’d think he’d be dead already.”
…
Government Keynesians want to stimulate the economy by pouring taxpayer and inflated money into their pet projects. What they would spend money for stimulus on is different than, say, what Tiger Woods would spend his stimulus money on. And you may have noticed that energy, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and environmental technology are where Keynesians want stimulus money spent on whether they are American Keynesians or the Japanese variety.
“Producing things that nobody wants and propping up malinvestments cannot possibly help any economy,” writes Powell.
This policy is equivalent to the old Keynesian depression nostrum of paying people to dig holes and fill them. Neither policy will revive the economy because neither forces businesses to realign their structures of production to match consumer demands.
And why don’t those low interest rates get things moving? “With distressed banks, reflation fails to induce another bank credit expansion,” Professor Jeffrey Herbener wrote in the Asian Wall Street Journal. “Keynesians have mistaken the impotency of the Bank of Japan to restart credit expansion in the 1990s as a liquidity trap. But the problem is not that interest rates are so low everyone expects them to rise and therefore hoards cash. Banks refuse to lend because of the overhang of bad debt. Any cash infusion is held as reserve against it. Businesses refuse to borrow because of their debt burden, built up to expand capacity during the boom, and their over-capacity resulting from their malinvestments.”
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A Cold Heart
January 28, 2010
About a year and a half ago I committed myself to try and more fully understand love. By love, I mean all possible uses of the word. I felt that I understood love very little, so attempted to figure out all I could about it.
The more I dug and the more I read, the more confused I became. I read different philosophers and their writings on love, the beautiful and the sublime. I read the great works of theology and pondered God’s love, thinking that maybe even religious stories could lead me to what I was wondering about.
No matter how much I read though, I still felt I didn’t understand love. At least, not what I was looking for. So instead of reading about it, and hoping to learn it from philosophers and psychologists, I figured I’d just observe kind, loving people, and see how their behavior differs from my own. There was something about those people that I’ve always admired. For a long time, I’ve wanted to integrate that trait of kindness and love into my own person, but I never could quite put my finger on what exactly was different about them.
After a year of observation, I still hadn’t figured anything out. But just the other day, while lying in bed, I think I may have finally found out something. Something I’d been looking for for a long time.
I discovered one principle that their actions had behind them, which mine lacked. They cared what others thought of them.
I noticed that principle in every loving, kind person that I’ve ever met. At least, the sort of love I was mentioning just now. It hasn’t failed yet. And on the other end, people I’ve met who were very unkind seemed to care very little what I thought of them.
Take one kind woman I remember. This was at a luncheon type event, and she had baked cookies for everyone there. I made my way to the table, she greeted me, and I took one of her cookies. She watched attentively as I took my first bite, waiting anxiously in anticipation. Then she said, “So!? How is it?” I replied, “These are great!” Then she said, “I’m glad you like them!”
Think about this event closely. There’s so much to learn from it. She’s very concerned what I think about her cooking. It’s obvious that she put a lot of effort into those cookies, and wanted everyone to enjoy every bite.
Compare this to a more individualistic, less sociable type of person. They have a mindset like, “I make cookies because I like cookies. I make them for me. If you want one, fine, but if you don’t like them it’s not going to hurt my feelings any. Whatever people don’t eat I’ll take home and have for myself.”
The kind, gentle, warm people I meet all seem to always extend invitations to be their friend. They want your attention. They want you to like them, what they do, and appreciate them. And the same sort of fawning they seem to desire themselves, they extend to others.
They compliment one another’s clothing, hair styles, and accomplishments. They’re always trying to make it clear, “I like you. I’m glad you’re here.” Good, loving relatives always tell their family, “I’m proud of you. I’m so glad you could come visit me.”
And like I said, loving people go to great lengths to make sure you like them and reconcile any conflicts. They’re the types that ask, “Did I do something wrong? You seem to be upset with me.” Or if they’re a more personal friend, “I really hate having you mad at me. I can’t live like that.” And they really do seem to be upset that you don’t like them. It’s not an act. It really does make them sad.
I’ve struggled with this issue because I’ve always concerned myself too much with individuality. Basing your happiness and desires on other people leaves you to conformance to their worldviews and lifestyles, which can be a bad thing. A sort of fear of being bent and giving way to others’ opinions.
There’s something beautiful about being an individual, and walking your own path no matter what people think. That sort of mindset can take you to new heights if you’re not doing so in fear. Then again, there’s also something very beautiful about the cookie lady. It creates a warm environment where everyone seems much more happy.
The two very easily come into conflict. Either extreme can be bad. But like I said months ago on here, I’ve been thinking about two topics a lot lately: moderation, and love. It seems most anything taken to an extreme is bad.
Extreme individuals, such as myself, tend to create strict environments which don’t seem very open to the public, so to speak. I’m in my own world, and if you don’t go along with its flow, then, well, I don’t care. If I’m not invading your personal liberties, leave me alone.
Extreme cookie ladies (lol, that sounds funny), can easily become self conscious, and if it goes too far can become paralyzed in fear. Other people’s decisions can easily end up ruining their day.
I don’t think I completely understand this issue completely, but even so, I’m going to try to add a little more “cookie lady” to my personality. From my thoughts on this, it seems the extreme individual position is safer, but is cold. Being the cookie lady leaves you open to emotional attack, and getting your feelings hurt, though in the end, it’s probably more rewarding.
When a mindset challenges me to be brave and put myself at risk for someone else’s sake, it’s probably not too far from a good one.
To care what others think about me. To want to be admired by others. Hmm. That’s a rather novel concept for me, and one which I’ll have to take very slowly.
Oh, and by the way. It’s my birthday!
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Today’s Thoughts
January 22, 2010
Lately I’ve been studying economics and quantum mechanics, in particular quantum electro-dynamics (QED). I was thinking about writing an entry on the basics of QED and how light travels across a room, bends through a lense, or bounces off a mirror. I think you’d all find it interesting. It’s very very strange. Light does not behave how you think it does. Light is a strange beast.
It’s too late to write up an entry on that tonight though. But I will share the ending lines from John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves to some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
I don’t agree with Keynes on this point. He’s too trusting in politicians, government, and humanity in general. To him, most all “wrongs” are due to stupidity and incorrect economic ideas. He fears stupidity – I fear the Fed and Goldman Sachs. With the bailouts, the CDS market, and filibusters on pretty much any meaningful reform, I’m not going to discount the big corporations and their lobbying interests to do anything to keep their profits. Then again, who am I to know someone else’s motives? From what I can tell, as far as trusting government, 1 being no trust, 10 being complete trust, Keynes seems to be a 7 or 8. I’d be a 3 or possibly 4. I think the economy is too big and complicated to plan. Their intervention almost always just gets in the way.
I have very little trust in government. The power attracts a certain type of person, and their campaigns are so expensive, by the time they get in office they owe so many favors they lose whatever values they may have had prior to running for office. In the big picture, you can’t deny that powerful people are out there trying to build empires. That’s all our history has ever been. Adler’s inferiority complex. Their lives don’t mean anything unless they have a powerful influence controlling the lives and minds of those in their society.
I see it everywhere I go. It’s not just Washington. In my hometown’s McDonalds the owner has put up a “philosophy” wall. His face plastered there for all to see, and he shares his personal quotes of economic thrift, prudence, and business acumen to all the patrons. Sip away on your chocolate shake, swivel your chair side to side, and contemplate lines like, “Those who are patient enable wisdom to find them.”
But even though I don’t agree with everything I’m reading, I am glad I’ve finally found some time to read Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook, which is one of the best economics textbooks from the Keynesian perspective. Maybe he’ll convince me on some of government’s roles in the economy, but I doubt it. I’m far more leaning to the free market and the Austrian school. I sympathize with social safety nets, and income distribution through taxation, and all societal changes which might well never happen without planning, but once a person tastes a free lunch, it’s over. Once big funds are collected, the vultures come in to siphon off all they can. And before long, everyone is wanting everyone else’s stuff and all the good intentions just turn out to be a big mess.
I believe in universal college education. I’ll pay for kids to go to school. I’ll pay for their medical bills as well. If you don’t have the money to have a surgery done, or to fix a cavity in your mouth, I don’t mind that. I hate seeing kids struggle to make it through school and rejecting a person who needs treatment just because they lack money or insurance is inhumane. That says their life is worth less than the price of their treatment.
But there’s an opportunity cost to everything, and people have to realize that providing a government service to one person, is taking away from someone else. Those tax revenues used to fund these programs is money the citizens could’ve spent on what THEY wanted. As Fredrick Hayek once said, “Collectivism is slavery.” If we have too many taxes, and too many programs, we’re seceding our freedom to the politicians, who then decide where our money goes, instead of the free market, which represents us spending our money on what we want.
It’s complicated, I know. Without love I don’t think we’re ever going to move anywhere. But love aside, the question of private property is a difficult issue. When I build up a business, work 12 hours a day for years, and finally start to succeed and then make a lot more money than someone else, who’s to blame here? I end up with a lot, and someone else has a little. Who deserves what, based on the labor they do? Answer that question.
What I do know is this – men hate work. They’ll do anything and everything to avoid it. They’ll argue and fight for hours over something that would’ve only taken them 30 minutes to do themselves. If not strictly enforced, they’ll come into work late, slack off the first hour, goofing off on their computer. Then they’ll get up and chat with co-workers, or goof off on their cell phones, texting their girlfriends and buddies. After so long they’ll finally start to feel guilt and put in an hour or so of work. Then they’ll raise their arms, yawn, and say to themselves, “Well, lunch time’s coming up. What will I eat?” They’ll slack off the last 30 minutes before lunch. Then another hour goes to lunch. They’ll slack for an hour after they get back, letting the food “settle.” They browse around on various news sites. Then they might put in a little more work, then slack off the rest of the day.
Adam Smith showed us that men won’t do anything without incentive. Salaried employees are that way. If they get the same amount of money whether they work hard or not, they won’t work hard. They more often than not could care less about the business, or their employer — outside of losing their job completely that is, and they only care about that if it’d be difficult for them to find another job.
I know this cycle. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve ever worked and even in business projects of my own. I’m guilty of it myself when I’ve worked with others. We procrastinate when we don’t want to do something, and most people don’t want to work. Menial jobs are rote, boring, and pointless in the big scheme of things, and the more you think on it the more depressed you’ll be. That’s why everyone wants to be the manager. At least then you get the thrill of ordering people around, feeling like the big shot, and not getting stuck with the boring repetitive tasks — you assign those to your secretary! To top it all off, you get paid more.
The rich and powerful are almost always the most intelligent of that society, and that’s not just a coincidence. If they’re not, they won’t be rich for long for a fool and his money are soon parted. This intelligence is typically not used to help the masses, but to escape the harshness of this reality because there’s no degree to which people hate toil and being separated from their desires. Even Keynes himself, the beloved genius economist, once wrote this about economics, “I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organize a Trust or at least swindle the investing public.” He tells us to trust the government, as long as they’re listening to his council I suppose. And why would he want to swindle the public? If I recall correctly he was quite the investor and then lived an idle life himself. He supported the Royal Opera House, collected the personal papers and books of Issac Newton, and collected fine arts to ornament his home. And could you ever earn that kind of money working a normal job?
The ones who speak out against the corruption are those who have no incentive to lie, such as salaried academics. I think a lot of their honesty stems from the fact that they have no reason to lie to you. But skilled economists can be bought, ready to show all sorts of charts and graphs intended to deceive all but the most educated. They’re on the news every day. Those who do see through it and speak out will then be ignored and not given any mainstream media attention, or ridiculed and marginalized.
I find something particularly interesting. People think the “eye of the tiger” (to use the term from the Rocky movies!) comes from a strong desire to accomplish something. On the positive side of things you can say that men continually strive to better their world. However, you can just as easily see it from the negative side of things – they’re unsatisfied with where they find themselves, and want a new life. What else is a goal, other than this? We all want a better life – how you choose to see that particular truth emotionally is your choice. We are in a continual flight from reality. A continual struggle to change a world we don’t like, into one we find more suitable.
Whether you hate life and just say, “Screw it”, or find beauty in the small things life has to offer which are free, or find happiness in a lover, or strive to reform the your world and make it “big” – all of these are simply different psychological reactions to the same truth of life — life is difficult and not what we intended. So, what are you going to do about it? From a perspective of happiness I don’t find any of these reactions really all that much different. They’re all rooted in the same base cause and are very human.
In the end we all want a better life, but get tired of working so hard for it. Some just give up, some settle for little, some turn to the imagination, while others find theft a viable option. It’s so much easier to take from someone else. Like the old tale of the hen and the pigs (I think it was). Nobody would help her make the bread, but everyone wanted to eat the bread when it was done. And the “taking” goes both ways. The poor and middle class are always trying to take from the rich through taxation, and the rich are always trying to take from everyone through cheap labor, swindling through investment and financial industry, and lobbying Congress for price floors and monopolistic legislation. And who deserves what the society produces? It’s a gray area, and everyone seems to feel they deserve more than what they currently get, and that war wages on day after day.
Bankers run their companies into the ground but still feel they deserve huge bonuses. They’re under-compensated! The middle class feels they work too hard. They only have 3 cars in the drive-way, and a big flat screen TV which delivers every sort of movie imaginable right into their living room, and a swimming pool out back — but they don’t make enough! They want comprehensive healthcare, and the rich should pay for it! And so class warfare ensues, everyone feeling themselves the victim, and trying to get everything they can.
We speak of loving one another, but the love seems to only extend to those in a situation similar to our own. And when we fight for social reform, isn’t it funny how we’re almost always the benefactors of the changes we fight for?
To trust government denies most of history. Go back to the first tribal war lords. All the fun jobs they kept for themselves, and all the toilsome jobs, they forced the weaker members to do. Later we had monarchs and aristocrats. The monarchs claimed a divine right, and descent from the Gods. Maybe in a sense this was to unite the people, but people can be united without having to pay tribute, high taxation, and construction of palaces at the expense of starving and impoverishing their subjects. This all stems from human greed. And what is the origin of greed? To escape the toils of this world!
It’s like the old curse from the book of Genesis in the Bible. Men fell out of favor with God, and from then on would have to derive their living from the sweat of their brow. As they multiplied over the Earth, they learned they could earn their living from the sweat of someone else’s brow! And hence began the world of theft, wars, and manipulation of the mind! That curse is what is behind this world’s problems, and when God curses something, it’s no joke.
And you’d think the religious priests, who are supposed to teach these lessons, would be different, but no. The Catholic church was no better. Popes continually strove for empire and expansion. They wanted more churches in every town, and collection of tithes, offerings, and other fees, over which a portion was sent to the Vatican in Rome. Even modern day TV preachers, what do they tell their congregation? They say the key to prosperity and wealth is to send gifts and offerings to their ministry, and then God will open a supernatural fountain of blessing over their life, giving them an edge over their fellow man. They’ll have “favor” with their employers, and in business.
Greed has so many faces. It’s everywhere. Aristocrats became the land owners, who simply by “owning” great quantities of land felt entitled to tribute of all sorts. They lived idle lives sitting in the king’s court, while their serfs labored away for them. Today, those in the financial world, the big corporations, and even a great deal of the environmental movement… There’s always someone after your money and the things you produce.
There has to be checks and balances. Checks checks and more checks! Someone will ALWAYS scheme their way out of labor. ALWAYS. You need pure transparency in government, and real journalists who both know what they’re talking about, and actually report things they dig up, not just what the White House feeds them. Instead, most of them just polarize a left/right paradigm, resort to name calling, and read us the official story. In the end it seems they work in the interests of the corporations, and rarely truly inform the public.
This may all sound very pessimistic, but really I’m just being realistic. It’s an empirical observation. I believe in humanity. I think we can do great things, and together there’s not anything we can’t do. But, we’ll have to recognize these things, and see what’s really going on.
I long for a day when there’s more respect in the world of money and the economy. But honestly, nobody has came up with an system which fixes these problems. With big government you run into graft and vultures. With small government, the powerful prey on the weak. Our fight is with ourselves, and I think we’re all guilty for where the world is today. A while back I had a talk with my father about these issues, and he seems to feel it’s a moral issue. I think he’s right. I don’t know if love would fix everything, but it’d certainly make things better.
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