Expanded Universe Part 43

I won't belabor this. Our campuses are loaded with custard-headed pacifists but the yard of the Naval Academy is one place where I will not encounter them. We are in agreement that the United States still needs a navy, that the Republic will always have need for heroes-else you would not be here tonight and in uniform.

Patriotism- Moral behavior at the national level. Non sibi sed Patria. Nathan Hale's last words: "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Torpedo Squadron Eight making its suicidal attack.

Four chaplains standing fast while the water rises around them. Thomas Jefferson saying, "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots-" A submarine skipper giving the order "Take her down!" while he himself is still topside. Jonas Ingram standing on the steps of Bancroft Hall and shouting, "The Navy has no place for good losers! The Navy needs tough sons of b.i.t.c.hes who can go out there and win!"

Patriotism- An abstract word used to describe a type of behavior as harshly practical as good brakes and good tires. It means that you place the welfare of your nation ahead of your own even if it costs you your life.

Men who go down to the sea in ships have long had another way of expressing the same moral behavior tagged by the abstract expression "patriotism." Spelled out in simple Anglo-Saxon words "Patriotism" reads "Women and children first!"

And that is the moral result of realizing a self-evident biological fact: Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and goon. . . as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you've had it, you're done, you're through! You join tyrannosaurus rex, one more breed that bilged its final test.

I must amplify that. I know that women can fight and often have. I have known many a tough old grandmother I would rather have at my side in a tight spot than any number of pseudo-males who disdain military service. My wife put in three years and a b.u.t.t active duty in World War Two, plus ten years reserve, and I am proud-very proud!-of her naval service. I am proud of every one of our women in uniform; they are a shining example to us men.

Nevertheless, as a mathematical proposition in the facts of biology, children, and women of child-bearing age, are the ultimate treasure that we must save. Every human culture is based on "Women and children first"-and any attempt to do it any other way leads quickly to extinction.

Possibly extinction is the way we are headed. Great nations have died in the past; it can happen to us.

Nor am I certain how good our chances are. To me it seems self-evident that any nation that loses its patriotic fervor is on the skids. Without that indispensable survival factor the end is only a matter of time.

I don't know how deeply the rot has penetrated-but it seems to me that there has been a change for the worse in the last fifty years. Possibly I am misled by the offensive behavior of a noisy but unimportant minority. But it does seem to me that patriotism has lost its grip on a large percentage of our people.

I hope I am wrong. . . because if my fears are well grounded, I would not bet two cents on this nation's chance of lasting even to the end of this century.

But there is no way to force patriotism on anyone. Pa.s.sing a law will not create it, nor can we buy it by appropriating so many billions of dollars.

You gentlemen of the Brigade are most fortunate. You are going to a school where this basic moral virtue is daily reinforced by precept and example. It is not enough to know what Charlie n.o.ble does for a living, or what makes the wildcat wild, or which BatDiv failed to splice the main brace and why-nor to learn matrix algebra and navigation and ballistics and aerodynamics and nuclear engineering. These things are merely the working tools of your profession and could be learned elsewhere; they do not require "four years together by the Bay where Severn joins the tide."

What you do have here is a tradition of service. Your most important cla.s.sroom is Memorial Hall.

Your most important lesson is the way you feel inside when you walk up those steps and see that shot-torn flag framed in the arch of the door: "Don't Give Up the Ship."

If you feel nothing, you don't belong here. But if it gives you goose flesh just to see that old battle flag, then you are going to find that feeling increasing every time you return here over the years . . . until it reabhes a crescendo the day you return and read the list of your own honored dead-cla.s.smates, shipmates, friends- read them with grief and pride while you try to keep your tears silent.

The time has come for me to stop. I said that "Patriotism" is a way of saying "Women and children first." And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.

In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.

One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.

But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck- Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free . . . and the train hit them.

The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed-and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.

The husband's behavior was heroic . . but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.

This is how a man dies.

This is how a man .. . lives!

"They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, age.shall not wither them nor the years condemn; At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them .

-Tomb of the Scottish Unknown Soldier Edinburgh

PAUL DIRAC, ANTIMATTER, AND YOU.

A Riddle What have these in common?

1. 1926: A graduate student, Cambridge University 2. Billions of years ago: Quasars exploding 3. 1908: A Siberian forest devastated 4. 10 million years ago: A galaxy exploding 5. 1932: A cloud-chamber track, Pasadena, Calif.

Answer: All may, and 1 and 5 do involve antimatter.

(ANTI matter?) Yes-like ordinary matter with electrical properties of particles reversed. Each atom of matter is one or more nucleons surrounded by one or more electrons; charges add up to zero. A hydrogen atom has a proton with positive charge as nucleus, surrounded by an electron with negative charge. A proton is 1836.11 times as ma.s.sive as an electron, but their charges are equal and opposite: + 1 - 1 = 0.

Uranium-235 (or ~2U~35, meaning "an isotope of element 92, uranium, nuclear weight 235") has 235 nucleons: 143 neutrons of zero charge and 92 protons of positive charge (143 + 92 = 235; hence its name); these 235 are surrounded by 92 electrons (negative), so total charge is zero: 0 +92-92 = 0. (Nuclear weight is never zero, being the ma.s.s of all the nucleons.) Make electrons positive, protons negative: charges still balance; nuclear weight is unchanged-but it is not an atom of matter; it is an antiatom of antimatter.

"Touch Me Not!"

In an antimatter world, antimatter behaves like matter. Bread dough rises, weapons kill, kisses still taste sweet. You would be antimatter and not notice it.

WARNING! Since your body is matter (else you could not be reading this), don't kiss an antimatter girl. You both would explode with violence unbelievable.

But you'll never meet one, nor will your grandchildren. (I'm not sure about their grandchildren.) E = mc2 Antimatter is no science-fiction nightmare; it's as real as Texas. That Cambridge graduate student was Paul A. M. Dirac inventing new mathematics to merge Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity with Max Planck's quantum theory. Both theories worked-but conflicted. Dirac sought to merge them without conflict.

He succeeded.

His equations were published in 1928, and from them, in 1930, he made an incredible prediction: each sort of particle had antiparticles of opposite charge: "antimatter."

Scientists have their human foibles; a scientist can grow as fond of his world concept as a cat of its "own" chair. By 1930 the cozy 19th-century "world" of physics had been repeatedly outraged. This ridiculous new a.s.sault insulted all common sense.

But in 1932 at the California Inst.i.tute of Technology, Carl D. Anderson photographed proof of the electron's antiparticle (named "positron" for its positive charge but otherwise twin to the electron).

Radical theory has seldom been confirmed so quickly or re warded so promptly: Dirac received the n.o.bel prize in 1933, Anderson in 1936-each barely 31 years of age when awarded it.

Since 1932 so many sorts of antiparticles have been detected that no doubt remains: antimatter matches matter in every sort of particle. Matching is not always as simple as electron (e-) and positron (e+). Photons are their own antiparticles. Neutrons and neutrinos (zero charges) are matched by antineutrons and antineutrinos, also of zero charge-this sounds like meaningless redundancy because English is not appropriate language; abstract mathematics is the language required for precise statements in physical theory. (Try writing the score of a symphony solely in words with no musical symbols whatever.) But a hint lies in noting that there are reaction series in which protons and electrons yield neutrons-one ealnple: the ~o,-disa nr Solar Phoen I (solar power theory, Hans Bethe); if we ignore details, the Solar Phoenix can be summarized as changing four hydrogen atoms (four of 1Ht) into one helium atom (2H4). We start with four protons and four electrons; we end up six stages later with two neutrons, two protons, and two electrons-and that is neither precise nor adequate and is not an equation and ignores other isotopes involved, creation of positrons, release of energy through mutual annihilations of positrons and free electrons, and several other features, plus the fact that this transformation can occur by a variety of routes.

(But such are the b.o.o.by traps of English or any verbal language where abstract mathematics is the only (-orre(-1 l~Ingtta~e.) A ide ~I ~CL ( i I' I

t iprolons ~md l'Ofl~ to V~Hd ~nl n~nt i OHS. Ilie tVifl types (ii aiieties 01 tr~n~10t~Uah1o)t1s filentiolled above are simply samples: there 31 c many 01 hei types being 1)0th predicted ii nil hemat lea1 l~ and detected in the laboratories almost dailv---and many or most transformation series involve antiparticles of antimatter.

Nevertheless, antimatter is scarce in our corner of the universe-lucky for us because, when matter encounters antimatter, both explode in total annihilation. E = mc2 is known to everyone since its awful truth was demonstrated at Hiroshima, j.a.pan. It states that energy is equivalent to ma.s.s, ma.s.s to energy, in this relation: energy equals ma.s.s times the square of the velocity of light in empty s.p.a.ce.

That velocity is almost inconceivable. In blasting for the moon our astronauts reached nearly 7 miles!

second; light travels almost 27,000 times that speed- 186,282.4 (0.1) miles or 299,792.5 (0.15) kilometers each second. Round off that last figure as 300,000; then use the compatible units of science (grams, cen timeters, ergs) and write in centimeters 3 x 1O~, then square it: 9 x 1020, or 900000,000,000000000,000. (!!!).

This fantastic figure shouts that a tiny ma.s.s can become a monstrous blast of energy-grim proof: Hiroshima.

But maximum possible efficiency of U23~ fission is about 1/10 of 1%; the Hiroshima bomb's actual efficiency was much lower, and H-bomb fusion has still lower maximum (H-bombs can be more powerful through having no limit on size; all fission bombs have sharp limits). But fission or fusion, almost all the reacting ma.s.s splits or combines into other elements; only a trifle becomes energy.

In matter-antimatter reaction, however, all of both become energy. An engineer might say "200~ eli1lent" as anti mattel undergoing ann lb hat lOll conelts into raw energy an equal ma.s.s of matter Mathematical Physicists An experimental physicist uses expensive giant accelerators to shoot particles at 99.9~-f- of the speed of light, or sometimes gadgets built on his own time with scrounged materials. Large or small, cheap or costly, he works with things.

A mathematical physicist uses pencil, paper, and brain. Not my brain or yours-unless you are of the rare few with "mathematical intuition."

That's a tag for an unexplainable. It is a gift, not a skill, and cannot be learned or taught. Even advanced mathematics ("advanced" to laymen) such as higher calculus, Fourier a.n.a.lysis, n-dimensional and non-Euclidean geometries are skills requiring only patience and normal intelligence .. . after they have been invented by persons having mathematical intuition.

The oft-heard plaint "I can't cope with math!" may mean subnormal intelligence (unlikely), laziness (more likely), or poor teaching (extremely likely). But that plaint usually refers to common arithmetic-a trivial skill in the eyes of a mathematician. (Creating it was not trivial. Zero, positional notation, decimal-orbase point all took genius; imagine doing a Form 1040 in Roman numerals.) Of billions living and dead perhaps a few thousand have been gifted with mathematical intuition; a few hundred have lived in circ.u.mstances permitting use of it; a smaller fraction have been mathematical physicists. Of these a few dozen have left permanent marks on physics.

But without these few we would not have science. Mathematical physics is basic to all sciences. No exceptions. None.

Mathematical physicists sometimes hint that experimentalists are frustrated pipefitters; experimentalists mutter that theoreticians are so lost in fog they need guardians. But they are indispensable to each other. Piling up facts is not science-science is factsand-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning; a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness. To be valid a theory must be confirmed by all relevant facts. A "natural law" is theory repeatedly confirmed and drops back to "approximation" when one fact contradicts it. Then search resumes for better theory to embrace old facts plus this stubborn new one.

No "natural law" of 500 years ago is "law" today; all our present laws are probably approximations, useful but not perfect. Some scientists, notably Paul Dirac, suspect that perfection is unattainable.

A powerful theory not only embraces old facts and new but also discloses unsuspected facts. These are landmarks of science: Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric theory, Johannes Kepler'srefining it into conicsections ballistics, Isaac Newton's laws of motion and theory of universal gravitation, James C.

Maxwell's equations linking electricity with magnetism, Planck's quantum theory, Einstein's relativity, Dirac's synthesis of quantum theory and special relativity-a few more, not many.

Mathematical physicists strive to create a mathematical structure interrelating all s.p.a.ce-time events, past and future, from infinitesimally small to inconceivably huge and remote in s.p.a.ce and time, a "unified field theory" embracing 10 or 20 billion years and light-years, more likely 80 billion or so-or possibly eternity in an infinity of multiple universes.

Some order!

They try. Newton made great strides. So did Einstein. Nearly 50 years ago Dirac brought it closer, has steadily added to it, is working on it today.

Paul Dirac may be and probably is the greatest living theoretical scientist. Dirac, Newton, and Einstein are equals.

Paul A. M. Dirac The experimentalists' slur about theoretical physicists holds a grain of truth. Newton apparently never noticed the lovely s.e.x in all his years. Einstein ignored such trivialities as socks. One mathematical physicist who swayed World War II could not be trusted with a screwdriver.

Dirac is not that sort of man.

Other than genius, his only unusual trait is strong dislike for idle talk. (His Cambridge students coined a unit the dirac-one word per light-year.) But he lectures and writes with admirable clarity. Taciturn, he is not unsocial; in 1937 he married a most charming Hungarian lady. They have two daughters and a son.

He can be trusted with tools; he sometimes builds instruments and performs his own experiments. He graduated in engineering before he became a mathematical physicist; this influenced his life. Engineers find working solutions from incomplete data; approximations are close enough if they do the job-too fussy wastes man-hours. But when a job needs it, a true engineer gives his utmost to achieve as near perfection as possible.

Dirac brought this att.i.tude to theoretical physics; his successes justify his approach.

He was born in Bristol, England, Aug. 8, 1902, and named Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. His precocity in mathematics showed early; his father supplied books and encouraged him to study on his own. Solitary walks and study were the boy's notion of fun-and are of the man today. Dirac works (and plays) hardest by doing and saying nothing . . . while his mind roams the universe.

When barely 16 years old, he entered the University of Bristol. At 18 he graduated, bachelor of science in electrical engineering. In 1923 a grant enabled him to return to school at the foremost inst.i.tution for mathematics, Cambridge University. In three years of study for a doctorate Dirac published 12 papers in mathematical physics, 5 in The Proceedings of the Royal Societv. A cub with only an engineering degree from a minor university has trouble getting published in any journal of science; to appear at the age of 22 in the most highly respected of them all is amazing.

Dirac received his doctorate in May 1926, his dissertation being "Quantum Mechanics"-the stickiest subject in physical science. He tackled it his first year at Cambridge and has continued tO unravel its paradoxes throughout his career; out of 123 publications over the last 50 years the word quantum can be found 45 times in his t.i.tles.

Dirac remained at Cambridge-taught, thought, published. In 1932, the year before his n.o.bel prize, he received an honor rarer than that prize, one formerly held by Newton: Lucasian professor of mathematics. Dirac kept it 37 years, until he resigned from Cambridge. He accepted other posts during his Cantabrigian years: member of the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J., professor of the Dublin Inst.i.tute for Advanced Studies, visiting professorships here and there.

Intuitive mathematicians often burn out young. Not Dirac!-he is a Michelangelo who started very young, never stopped, is still going strong. Antimatter is not necessarily his contribution most esteemed by colleagues, but his other major ones are so abstruse as to defy putting them into common words: A mathematical attribute of particles dubbed "spin"; coinvention of the Fermi-Dirac statistics; an abstract mathematical replacement for the "pellucid aether" of cla.s.sical mechanics. For centuries, ether was used and its "physical reality" generally accepted either as "axiomatic" or "proved" through various negative proofs. Both "axiom" and "negative proof" are treacherous; the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment showed no physical reality behind the concept of ether, and many variations of that experiment over many years gave the same null results.

So Einstein omitted ether from his treatments of relativity-while less brilliant men ignored the observed facts and clung to cla.s.sical ether for at least 40 years.

Dirac's ether (circa 1950) is solely abstract mathematics, more useful thereby than cla.s.sical ether as it avoids the paradoxes of the earlier concepts. Dirac has consistently warned against treating mathematical equations as if they were pictures of something that could be visualized in the way one may visualize the Taj Mahal or a loaf of bread; his equations are rules concerning s.p.a.ce-time events-not pictures.

(This may be the key to his extraordinary successes.) One more example must represent a long list: Dirac's work on Georges Lemaltre's "primeval egg"- later popularized as the "big bang."

Honors also are too many to list in full: fellow of the Royal Society, its Royal Medal, its Copley Medal, honorary degrees (always refused), foreign a.s.sociate of the American Academy of Sciences, Oppenheimer Memorial Prize, and (most valued by Dirac) Great Britain's Order of Merit.

Dirac "retired" by accepting a research professorship at Florida State University, where he is now working on gravitation theory. In 1937 he had theorized that Newton's "constant of gravitation" was in fact a decreasing variable . . . but the amount of decrease he predicted was so small that it could not be verified in 1937.

Today the decrease can be measured. In July 1974 Thomas C. Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Observatory reported measurements showing a decrease in gravitation of about a ten-billionth each year (1 per 1010 per annum). This amount seems trivial, but it j~ very large in astronomical and geological time. If these findings are confirmed and if they continue to support Dirac's mathematical theory, he will have upset physical science even more than he did in 1928 and 1930.

Here is an incomplete list of the sciences that would undergo radical revision: physics from micro- through astro-, astronomy, geology, paleontology, meteorology, chemistry, cosmology, cosmogony, geogony, ballistics. It is too early to speculate about effects on the life sciences, but we exist inside this physical world and gravitation is the most pervasive feature of our world.

Theory of biological evolution would certainly be affected. It is possible that understanding gravitation could result in changes in engineering technology too sweeping easily to be imagined.

Antimatter and You Of cosmologies there is no end; astrophysicists enjoy "playing G.o.d." It's safe fun, too, as the questions are so sweeping, the data so confusing, that any cosmology is hard to prove or disprove. But since 1932 antimatter has been a necessary datum. Many cosmologists feel that the universe (universes?) has as much antimatter as matter-but they disagree over how to balance the two.

Some think that, on the average, every other star in our Milky Way galaxy is antimatter. Others find that setup dangerously crowded-make it every second galaxy. Still others prefer universe-and-antiuniverse with antimatter in ours only on rare occasions when energetic particles collide so violently that some of the energy forms antiparticles. And some like higher numbers of universes-even an unlimited number.

One advantage of light's finite speed is that we can see several eons of the universe in action, rather than just one frame of a very long moving picture. Today's instruments reach not only far out into s.p.a.ce but also far back into time; this permits us to test in some degree a proposed cosmology. The LST (Large s.p.a.ce Telescope), to be placed in orbit by the s.p.a.ce Shuttle in 1983, will have 20 times the resolving power of the best ground-based and atmosphere-distorted conventional telescope-therefore 20 times the reach, or more than enough to see clear back to the "beginning" by one cosmology, the "big bang."

(Q: What happened before the beginning? A: You tell me.) When we double that reach-someday we will- what will we see? Empty s.p.a.ce? Or the backs of our necks?

(Q: What's this to me? A: Patience one moment....) The star nearest ours is a triplet system; one of the three resembles our sun and may have an Earthlike planet-an inviting target for our first attempt to cross interstellar s.p.a.ce. Suppose that system is antimatter- BANG! Scratch one starship.

(Hooray for Zero Population Growth! To h.e.l.l with s.p.a.ce-travel boondoggles!) Then consider this: June 30, 1908, a meteor struck Siberia, so blindingly bright in broad daylight that people 1,000 miles away saw it. Its roar was "deafening" at 500 miles. Its ground quake brought a train to emergency stop 400 miles from impact. North of Vanavara its air blast killed a herd of 1,500 reindeer.

Trouble and war and revolution-investigation waited 19 years. But still devastated were many hundreds of square miles. How giant trees lay pinpointed impact.

A meteor from inside our Galaxy can strike Earth at 50 miles/second.

But could one hit us from outside our Galaxy?

Yes! The only unlikely (but not impossible) routes are those plowing edgewise or nearly so through the Milky Way; most of the sky is an open road-step outside tonight and look. An antimeteor from an antigalaxy could sneak in through hard vacuum-losing an antiatom whenever it encountered a random atom but nevertheless could strike us ma.s.sing, say, one pound.