Chadwick Boy Comes Home

He walked into the room to the chorus of 300 kazoos playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Michael Reagan is truly loved in these parts. The Republican Women luncheon was sold out, and we were not disappointed. Michael shared some of his childhood experiences here on the Hill. -- He attended Chadwick School because Ron and Jane did not want their adopted son to be exposed to the temptations of Beverly Hills High (and they wanted him out of the house).

He told heartwarming stories about his dad, who was a bit of a cheap skate.

Michael walked into his father’s hospital room --

Michael: How are you doing dad?

Ronald: Well, you know son, I was shot yesterday. (in that soft, slow Reagan tone)

Michael: I know that dad; I just wanted to know how you are feeling.

Ronald: Well, Michael, I’m feeling OK. But I have some advice for you.

Michael: What’s that dad?

Ronald: If you’re going to get shot, don’t wear your new suit.

Michael: I see it dad, the blue suit all cut up lying in the corner.

Ronald: Yes, they had to cut it off me. I was hoping they would try to save the suit. After all, I am the President.

Michael: I know dad.

Ronald: Michael, the boy who shot me; his name is Hinkley. Do you think his parents have money?

Michael: They are oil people, dad.

Ronald: Well, do you think they’d buy me a new suit?

And so it went, one endearing story after another, for over an hour, without a single note.

But there were serious moments as well. Like when he spoke about how we just have to beat Obama before he destroys our country. Michael would vote for any of the Republican candidates (even Ron Paul) and he wishes they would stop taking pot shots at each other and concentrate on Obama. Republicans are sometimes their own worst enemies.

Democrats, being ideologically pure, have no problem with any Democrat candidate (even Barbara Boxer), while Republicans are a more diverse bunch. I thought about what I believe, as a conservative Republican, and contrasted it to mainline Democrat ideology.

Republican vs. Democrat

Rights bestowed by God vs. Rights granted by the State
Individual liberty vs. Government control of our lives
The Constitution vs. A living constitution
Individual responsibility vs. Cradle-to-grave welfare
Life vs. “Choice” (ie a woman’s right to kill)
American is exceptional vs. Just like Greece is exceptional, or China, or..
Right to bear arms vs. Gun control
Legal immigration vs. Open borders
Right to work vs. Unions

Democrats are congenitally wedded to their beliefs, in some cases with a religious fervor (eg. the sacred right of a woman to reproductive freedom). By contrast, Republicans are renegades: Goldwater was pro choice, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens, Bush gave us prescription drugs at government expense, and, did you know, William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot.

Michael told the story about his dad appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in order to keep a promise to his daughter, Maureen, who in return gave up campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.

Several times Michael reminded us to be more like Democrats – to get into the game. Write letters to the editor, knock on doors, don’t just send money like we always do.

Now we need to nominate a ticket and get behind it. For my money the best would be Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for VP. It’s a WASP-free ticket -- a Mormon and a Roman Catholic -- How diverse is that!!

Car Wars

Imagine your teenage son and his cheerleader girlfriend hopping into his brand new jazzy sports scar for its maiden spin. OK, I know this merely reinforces the Palos Verdes stereotype of indulgent parents and spoiled kids. But, hey, the kid is an honor student who will be attending Stanford U. in the fall. Anyway, the car enters the 405 freeway and carefully moves across toward the HOV speed lane. Suddenly the unimaginable happens: the throttle opens wide, the engine revs into the red zone, the brakes cease to function and the steering wheel locks tight. A disaster is imminent.

This is merely the opening scene of Chris Malburg’s new techno-thriller, “Car Wars: A Novel of Industrial Terrorism.” (Get it at http://www.carwarsebook.com/ or at Amazon.com). My friend and PVE neighbor, Chris is a noted business writer who is trying his hand at fiction. And his new book is a fun read, especially on a Kindle at RAT Beach. Without giving away the plot, let me just say that there are plenty of villains in the book, among them Yonggan Zhanshi, ruthless industrialist in control of a devastating weapon of mass destruction, the head of the Chinese National Bank and the honorable President of the PRC.

In a memorable scene the Chinese President reads the riot act to the American president. Here is an excerpt:

...The Chinese President frowned at his American counterpart. “America is bankrupt,” he began. “Morally as well as economically. I can do nothing about the former, but I can do something about your economics. I am your banker. I am now calling in the money I have lent to you. From this moment on, you work for me.” The Chinese President paused for a few seconds to let the shock of what he had just said fully sink in.

“America’s Social Security, its Medicare and Medicaid and its unfunded pension liabilities created by the powerful labor unions now comes to 93 percent of your gross domestic product. There is no more money left to pay for anything else. And so you rely on China, Japan and the UK to buy your Treasury debt to fund your cash needs. No more!
“Your baby-boom generation is now retired. This large portion of your former workforce no longer pays taxes, but they do suck down your government’s benefits like hogs on a teet. Had you raised taxes to pay for all this years ago and reduced spending, things might have been different--”

“I have been in consultation with my fellow holders of US debt. The IMF is calling the temporary line of credit it granted the United States. You have 30 days to repay the $100 billion you borrowed. Additionally, China demands that the US immediately repay $500 billion in Treasury securities coming due in the next 60 days. Not only will China not lend you the $300 billion you have come here to borrow, but my country will no longer be in attendance at your Treasury auctions.”

The Chinese President stopped his pacing in front of his counterpart, turned and looked him in the eye. “This financial hiatus China is taking from America does not have to be permanent. If the US puts its financial house in order and affords China one other courtesy, I may elect to resume doing business on a limited scale.”

The American President sat very still in his chair. He rejoiced that there might yet be a way out of this financial morass. “Yes, Mr. President? What kinds of house cleaning tasks do you have in mind?”

The Chinese President’s knife-edged hand slashed the air, making his first point. “America will limit the coverage of Medicare and Medicaid--no more expensive treatments. Either your people will pay for them on their own or they will do without.” The hand slashed the air a second time, “Next, no health insurance subsidies. You will explain to your greedy, unemployed nation of welfare recipients that healthcare is not a right of citizenship but instead, a personal responsibility.”

“Next,” continued the Chinese President, “You will eliminate all nonessential governmental expenses. You will begin with farming subsidies, ethanol production, public broadcasting, energy conservation and trade promotion.” The knife-edged hand slashed the air yet a third time, “You will go to a flat tax system where everyone--every single American citizen--pays taxes equivalent to 18 percent on the income they earn. You will eliminate all deductions and tax credits. You will also increase the gasoline tax to $2 a gallon. You will balance your federal budget.”

The US President raised his hand for permission to speak. “That’s a lot to take in. Are you finished, Mr. President?”

“I will tell you when I am finished...

Good stuff that. I had no idea that the PRC President was a Republican. In fact some of his action items could be taken straight from Newt Gingrich’s new 21st Century Contract with America.

Faster than Light

"We don't serve faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

The cognoscenti were abuzz -- Einstein was wrong! Relativity was debunked! European scientists at CERN in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy had shown that the speed of light is not really the limit. Physicists, on the other hand, were mildly amused, one, even, who promised to eat his shorts if the experimental result was correct. The great majority of physicists, a clear consensus, were skeptical of the results, thinking that there must be an experimental error.

Interestingly, no one in the physics establishment mentioned the consensus. No one accused the experimenters of being Relativity-deniers. No one tried to stop publication of the seminal paper in a prestigious journal. And no one claimed that the CERN-Sasso scientists were bigots – after all, Einstein was a Jew. In short, the physics community reacted not at all like the global warming community when confronted with contrary evidence.

So what was all the excitement about? The experiment, code named OPERA, was built to detect neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles, which are produced at CERN and aimed towards Gran Sasso, 700kms away. There are several types of neutrinos and two of the species are called mu neutrinos (mu-nu) and tau neutrinos (tau-nu). The primary purpose of the experiment was to determine if any of the mu-nus from CERN had converted into tau-nus along the way. If so, this would help establish the idea that neutrinos have a finite (really tiny) mass that might account for the much-sought-after “Dark Matter” hidden in the universe. A sidelight was to measure the time of flight of the neutrinos and compare it to the time light would take to travel the same distance. Surprise! The neutrinos took less time, 60 nanoseconds less.

OPERA chief scientist Antonio Ereditato explained that “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy. And of course the consequences can be very serious.” Indeed, much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light (in vacuum).

Faster-than-light particles, so-called tachyons, have long been contemplated by theoretical physicists. If they did exist they could be used to send signals into one's own past, a clear paradox of causality -- and an explanation of the backwards joke at the beginning of this note. In fact, the most famous quip about “faster than light” has by now attained a venerable age (Reginald Buller in Punch, 12/19/23):

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

The upheaval of known physics resulting from the discovery of tachyons would be momentous. A few astounding effects are discussed briefly in the Appendix.

In a related development, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics has been granted for an experimental error! It was 1997 and Adam Riess was sure he'd spotted a blatant error in his results -- measurements of exploding stars implied that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, instead of slowing down, as everyone expected. Indeed, astrophysicists believed that the rate of expansion of the universe -- set in motion by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago -- would be slowing down due to the influence of gravity. The goal was to figure out how rapid the deceleration was. What the scientists found, instead, was that the expansion of the universe was accelerating -- an observation that could be explained by the existence of a mysterious “Dark Energy” that acts like anti-gravity. Further experiments supported this finding and, even though no one knows what the Dark Energy is, the experimenters were awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize.

In breaking news (10/5/11): The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, for his discovery of quasi-crystals, a form of matter that was not thought to exist. Shechtman faced skepticism, even expulsion from his research team, before his discovery won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough. “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman, 70, told a news conference in Haifa, Israel.

These cases illustrate the way real science should work. It is not politically motivated, and is not right just because it is believed, no matter the consensus.

Appendix

In classical physics, mass is independent of speed. In Relativity, however, Einstein showed that the mass of a particle is related to its velocity, v:

M = M0/sqrt(1- v2/c2)

where M0 is the particle’s rest mass (mass at zero speed), c is the light speed and sqrt(…..) signifies the square root of the quantity in brackets. As one tries to accelerate a particle, and its velocity increases, so does its mass because of the v in the denominator of the equation. That makes it harder to speed up the particle. The result is that for all normal particles (we might call the tardyons) the speed has an upper limit of c, the speed of light.

Note that for tachyons, if they exist, the term v/c exceeds one, and the term in the brackets is negative. Since the square root of a negative number is imaginary, the mass of a tachyon is a strange thing indeed.

Another curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, energy approaches zero when v approaches infinity. Therefore, just as tardyons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.