SPEED OF LIGHT

 

I was doing 70 miles per hour, speeding north out of Los Angeles on the 5 freeway on a typical Southern California morning during the 1990's. Suddenly, a flash of silver in the cloudless sky caught my attention. Then, there was nothing but the pale California blue. Then it flashed again, and again. And just as I started to ponder what it might be, the flashing stopped. Three hours later, when I got home, the first thing I told my my wife,  Samantha, was that I had seen a UFO. 

Now, any object you see in the sky which you cannot identify is by definition, an Unidentified Flying Object. And I had seen one.  But what I had not seen was a flying saucer, as in something built by aliens to visit our world.  

While watching the ten o'clock news my UFO was identified as a small home-built experimental “light” aircraft, flying out of Whiteman Airport, in Pacoma (above).  Right after take off the engine had suddenly quit, and the plane had spiraled into the ground, sadly, killing the pilot. And with this knowledge, I realized every time the spinning plane's wings reflected the sunlight toward me I saw the object. Otherwise the plane was too small and too far away for me to have seen it. 

But what were the odds that I would have been in the exact position and looking in the exact direction to see that flash during the 20 seconds it took to fall three thousand feet? My sighting of that UFO was an extremely unlikely event, but far more likely than an alien spaceship visiting the earth. 

Twenty percent of Americans expect aliens to first land in Washington, D.C., which means that 20% of Americans are, in my opinion, too stupid to find their own feet in the dark. About one in three Americans believe flying saucers are alien visitors.  Barely two in ten are brave enough to assert unequivocally that UFO's are not alien spacecraft. I say all of this not because I believe I am right, but because I know I am. 

Just to leave the earth you have to be going 25,000 miles an hour, which is a very expensive and complicated thing to do.  And if you should see a rocket from an odd angle or at an odd time of day (above), it may look nothing like a televised launch. Being humans, with brains designed to make "sense" of what we see, connecting what we see with what we expect to see, with what we have seen before, it becomes easy to see something that is not what we think it is.

In one of the first UFO sightings, in 1947, over Seattle Washington, an experienced military pilot reported a formation of UFOs that raced away from him,  climbing and diving in defiance of gravity, while maintaining perfect formation. Since no one else saw the "aliens" the report can never be absolutely confirmed or absolutely denied. But a recreation by the PBS program NOVA showed the UFO's could have simply been sunlight reflections on the airplane's canopy.  I can't prove that is was reflections. But ask yourself,  what is more likely - aliens or a simple mistaken assumption when the pilot saw something he did not expect to see when and where he did not expect to see it?  Do you want to panic? Then it was aliens. If you prefer not to panic, then it probably wasn't, and life goes on. It's your choice

Also, consider this;   as difficult as it is to go 7 miles a minute just to get off this rock, in terms of space travel, escape velocity  is like backing out of your driveway. 

From the earth to the sun (called an Astronomical Unit) (above)  is 93 million miles. It would take 176 years to drive to the sun in a Chevette at 70 miles an hour, and you would need special glasses. Call them sun glasses. 

Neptune, the 8th and farthest planet in our solar system  is 30.5 AU's from the sun, so just to get out of our neighborhood you would have to drive that Chevette (above) at 70 miles and hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, for 5,369 years to get to Neptune.  And that would just get you to the edge of our property line, speaking universally. 

The nearest star to our own sun, in other words the house next door, is Proxima Centuri (above, in the red triangle), which is 15, 300 AU from our sun. That means it would take you, at 70 miles an hour,  two million, six hundred ninety-two thousand, eight hundred years to drive there. And at 30 miles to the gallon, that would be a very expensive trip for a Chevette.

Of course, the assumption is that aliens have warp-drive, or hyperdrive or star-drive or maybe  "fold space", which allows then to travel faster than the speed of light. I guess, on a Saturday night future human teenagers will just zip down to the McDonald's on Proxima Centuri to hang out.

 And I wish that were true, I really do. I am a big Star Strek/Star Wars fan. (Dr. Crusher was the MLF. of my 30's ) But it ain't gonna happen, folks.

Let's say you wanted to build an interetellar Chevette. I would suggest a few style changes, just because. But even if you kept the classic hatch-back earth size, that car weighs about 2,000 pounds. So, just to get that hatchback into orbit would take 57,000 pounds of thrust, or a 28.5 to one ratio of thrust to weight. Now that ratio drops quickly the further you get from the center of the earth. But as you go faster the ratio starts to go back up, and quickly, because - and hold on to your hat here – ...

Fueling up your 2,000 pound Chevette to reach the speed of light would require 69 billion, 192 million pounds of thrust... except, as you go faster, the Chevette gets heavier. Which means you need more thrust, leading to more mass, requiring more thrust, making more weight, requiring more thrust, etc. ad nauseum. 

That's because the amount of additional thrust required to go even one millionth of a mile per hour faster is always squared, (E=mc2) until the additional thrust required to go even one millionth of one mile an hour faster is infinite. That means that the last little bit of energy required to go from 175, 999 and 9/10ths miles per second to 176,000 miles per second - aka 300,000,000 meters per second - the speed of light - would require you to convert all matter in the universe into energy - including your Chevette.  Relatively speaking,  you can not get to the speed of light unless you start out as light. 

Of course, science fiction writers envision ways of changing the rules of the game, by warping space, or using a convenient worm hole. Except you might as well say going down the worm hole with Alice will get you to Proxima Centuri in five minutes flat. It might. But nobody has ever actually seen a worm hole up close or figured how to get into one. Or designed a workable a warp drive.

Let me, as a male, explain it this way. The speed of light is like a gentleman's club where friendly beautiful naked woman gyrate on your lap. But just to get in the club requires you to hand over all your credit cards. And without a credit card, the beautiful women will no longer gyrate within  a hundred feet of you. 

Just getting into a worm hole requires you to get squished flat in a gravity field, after you have been  bombarded with enough radiation to make you transparent - for the fraction of second before you are disassembled into your individual atoms.  Can I prove that? Aha!. I don't need to. I'm not the one claiming there is a magical way of getting something for nothing out of the universe. You might was well ask a Republican for a affordable health insurance.

Is there life on other planets? Of course there is. On this planet there is life crowded around 700 degree thermal vents, in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean -  bacteria, tubeworms (above), clams, mussels, and shrimp - and even in the space between rocks thousands of miles beneath the surface, These creatures never see sunlight, and find oxygen poisonous and thrive in crushing gravity and melting temperatures.  They actually eat hydrogen and sulfur. There are even bacteria that eat acid and petroleum. On this planet. Why wouldn't there be life on other planets in similar unlikely conditions?

 With an estimated 6 sextillion planets in the universe (that's a 6 followed by 21 zeros), it becomes certain that there is life out there, probably everywhere. But is also certain, they have not and will not visit us because they cannot travel at the speed of light. Let alone faster. Nobody can. It's not unlikely.  It is impossible.

 Sorry, but that's just the way it is.  Grow up and get used to it. UFO's ain't alien space ships. They are just stuff we haven't identified yet, mostly because of the way we are looking at them. But we will. Eventually. Be patient. Some day, Gates McFadden may even ask me for a date. It's possible. It just ain't likely.

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GOING AFTER GALILEO

I make no claims to understand the Byzantine logic of Catholicism, but I do feel empathy for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. History records that it was Bellarmine who was the instrument of Galileo Galileo’s destruction. But that charge is unfair.  The Cardinal was not a brainless evil little toady like Caccini, or a Machiavellian social tyrant such as Maffeo Barberini (aka Pope Urban VIII), and they both played far larger roles in bringing down the best brain in Europe since Pythagoras. 

And the Cardinal did write, early the fifteenth century,  a revolutionary sentence “…Civil authority is instituted by men; (and that power resides) in the people, unless they bestow it on a Prince.” Such revolutionary thought could almost have been written by Thomas Paine, a century and a half later, and it speaks of a faith that values logic and democracy. It is a brand of Catholicism that at times today feels nostalgic.

Things began to go ugly in the spring of 1615 when the Dominican monk Tommasco Caccini took it upon himself to journey to Rome (above).  Caccini was very suspicious of mathematics, which he did not understand, and his intent was to throw what he saw as “intellectual money changers” out of the Vatican. 

On the surface Caccini (above)  was complaining about Copernican astronomy, but Copernicus was beyond earthy correction, having died in 1543. In fact this “dreadful fool”, as his own brother described Caccini, sought to overturn the dominance of the Jesuit order in the Church. This was an internal Catholic  "cultural war".

Of course the Pope himself, Paul V (above), was a Jesuit, so Caccini aimed at a stand-in instead; Galileo Galilei. Caccini told the Holy See that Galileo had contaminated all of Florence with his heresies about the sun being the center of the solar system, and the moon not being a pristine celestial orb. Worse, Caccini alleged that Galileo was saying in public that God did not perform miracles.

Caccini was indeed  a “turbulent ignoramus”, as Galileo described him, and Pope Paul V might know that his own nose was being tweaked by the Dominican, but Catholic politics did not allow the Vatican to ignore the charges that had been made. And Galileo was no longer an energetic young man, self confident and  able to defend himself.

The pope had originally turned to his most dependable cultural warrior, 73 year old Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (above). It had been the intellectual Bellarmine who had out maneuvered and isolated the clever James I of England over his English translation of the bible, and who had prosecuted the magician Giordano Bruno sixteen years earlier. 

They had been forced to put a wooden clamp on Bruno’s tongue to prevent him from shouting heresies while they burned him at the stake (above), but in the end Bruno was silenced. It is doubtful the Pope wanted Galileo silenced so absolutely, but he expected Bellarmine to remove the Flrointine as an irritant, whatever that demanded.

The problem was that Bellarmine understood enough about mathematics to know that Galileo’s numbers were right. When the old and ill Bellarmine interviewed Galileo, which he did three times, he fell under the genius’s spell. In the end Bellarmine provided the Florentine with a letter that allowed him to "discuss" the idea of a sun centered universe, so long as he did not claim publicly that it was not opinion but fact. 

Despite what Bellarmine and Galileo both knew to be fact, officially, according to the Church, the Earth remained at the center of the universe because several Popes had said it was so.  Robert Bellarmine would die in 1624, and later become a saint. But the saint's letter of instruction for Galileo would prove to be a dead letter.

That letter rose from the dead after Pope Paul V died in 1621. He was followed by the brief and sickly Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 by the energetic and energetically ignorant Pope Urban VIII, aka Maffeo Barberini (above). How Barberini’s mind worked was revealed in 1624 when he issued a Papal Bull, or pronouncement, making it a sin to smoke tobacco - not because it was unhealthful but because it often caused its users to sneeze, an act which Barberini considered similar to sexual ecstasy - which leaves me wondering about Signor Barberini’s boudoir habits during flu season.So, for the next eight years it was war and not sin which occupied Barberini. If he was not fighting battles to extend the Church’s (and his families') dominions, then he was preparing to fight battles. Barberini turned the Vatican into an arsenal, and built a factory in Tivoli to supply it with weapons. And when the Holy See ran short of cannon Barberini had bronze ripped from the roof of that temple to the Roman Republic, the Pantheon, and melted it into more cannon. As an unknown sage put it at the time, “That which the barbarians did not do, Barberini did” (in Latin – “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”).

But finally, in February of 1632, with the printing of Galileo’s newest book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”,  the prosaic world of ideas captured Barberini’s attention. Seeing criticism of himself in Galileo’s arguments (and, honestly, it seems to have been there) Barberini ordered the book seized and the printer arrested. And he ordered the Inquisition to investigate Galileo.The Church had been at war with dissenters from the moment Christ died on the cross, and by 1542, when Pope Paul III established the “Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” in Rome, that war had become formalized and institutionalized, replete with all forms of torture, including water boarding, and with all the advantages and disadvantages found in any bureaucracy, even a bureaucracy of torture.

By 1633, when an ailing Galileo was ordered to Rome (he arrived carried in a litter) to face the Dominican Cardinals who had been given responsibility for his inquisition, the machinery of correction had been perfected. To be charged was to be guilty.

Galileo thought his 1616 letter from Cardinal Bellarmine would protect him, but Bellarmine was a decade dead, and instead the Cardinal’s letter would be the clamp used to silence Galileo’s tongue. Galileo was presented with an “official” copy of that letter which included a phrase – “Galileo agrees to neither hold, defend, nor teach the Copernican opinion in any way whatsoever” – that had not been in the original letter, which the old man still had. 

Holding this official forgery Galileo mumbled, “I don’t remember the clause “in any way whatsoever… ”. And then his voice fell silent. He must have understood at that instant that this Pope (and his army of sycophants) was willing to commit the sin of bearing false wittiness to secure Galileo's silence, or his death.

When presented with his false confession the old man signed. To have refused would have been to invite a death by fire. And in the last act of the farce Galileo was required to openly announced his “abiurare”, that he abjured and renounced the idea that the sun was at the center of the solar system. 

Later generations would insist the old man left the court muttering his independence, but that was just wishful thinking. Barbarini used the power of Galileo's imagination, which had once opened the universe to all of humanity, by showing him the instruments of torture, to frighten  him and close that universe. He could imagine the endless pain the Pope could cause him. That is not faith. It is obedience. 

In exchange for his “abiurare” the old man was allowed to return to his home in Florence but he was never allowed to write another word on science. He died in January of 1641, blind and gagged. It was a great victory for Barbarini.

It was not until 31 October, 1992 – Halloween, 350 years later –that Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s official regret at the way Galileo had been persecuted. John Paul admitted that the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun, once a year. According to John Paul II, “The error of the theologians of the time…was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of sacred scripture.”It seemed, at least for a time, that Catholicism would enter the twenty-first century in peaceful coexistence with science, or, perhaps, even mutually supportive.. Cardinal Bellarmine would have been dis-pleased, but I remain  more than a little wary of the sins the church might commit tomorrow, all in God's name, of course.

                                      -30-  

TOWER OF BABBEL TWO

 

I doubt you would have heard of the English monk Roger Bacon were it not for his corpulent boss  Pope Clement IV.   Clement the Fat was famous for only three things. First, that he was really fat. Secondly, he really hated Jews. And third, he ordered the “brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric” Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon to write a compendium of philosophy and science.

Bacon's “Opus Majus” laid the foundation for our world, beginning with the startling suggestion that since humans are made of the same stuff as the stars, we should be able to understand the stars.  Further, Bacon wrote, "Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them"  He was thus hinting that all languages must at one time have had common ancestors. Eight centuries later, Bacon still appears correct about both of those ideas. 

It makes you wonder how far Bacon's mind might have taken us  had not fat Clement IV died just four yeas after becoming Pope. With Clement's early demise Roger Bacon lost his financial and moral support.  

Roger went right on thinking great thoughts, even when he had to hide them from his new regressive church superiors (above), inventing the magnifying lens among other things, but since the Cardinals would not chose Clement's successor for three years, Europe had to wait another two hundred years for The Renaissance, which  Roger had been trying to midwife into existence. The Black Death putting half of Europe in mass graves did not help, but the singular death of the anti-Semitic fat man was a real blow to the evolution of humanity.

The theory of a Universal Grammar, first postulated by Roger Bacon and most recently by Noam Chomsky, is supported by the existence of “cognates”.   

As Bacon pointed out in 1254, cognates are words which share "the same linguistic family or derivation”. Such as:  “la misma familia lingüística o derivación” (Spanish), “a mesma família lingüística ou derivação” (Portuguese), “la stessa famiglia linguistica o derivazione” (Italian), “la même famille linguistique ou dérivation” (French), “la mateixa família lingüística o derivació (Catalan), “din aceeasi familie lingvistice sau derivare” (Romanian)..or, in English, lexical cognates. They make up about  quarter of  all English words .  

The reality of Universal Grammar makes the work of code breaking possible, and drew Alice Elizabeth Kober into the Minoan labyrinth created by little Arthur Evans.  Remember him?

On the day in 1928 when 18 year old Alice Kober (above) received her Bachelor's Degree from Hunter College in Manhattan, she confidently announced she would decode Evan's mysterious Linear B language. It was not merely that Alice was arrogant. As far as I can tell she had no ego about her science. But she was very, very, very smart. And she knew it.

Alice got her Phd from Columbia in 1932, excavated in Greece, and in 1940, landed a job as an assistant to Sir John Linden Myers, professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University. Myers had worked directly under Professor Arthur Evans. And when age and illness had forced Evans into retirement, Myers took over his work on Linear B. But Myers didn't get very far.

Alice Kober agreed the mother tongue of Minoan was probably Etruscan, a culture which dominated the northern Italian peninsula after about 700 B.C. The rational as handed down from Evans to Myers and now to Alice, was that because the Linear B inscriptions were found on Etruscan amphora at several Minoan sites on Crete, it had to be based, at least in part, on Etruscan. 

During World War Two Professor Myers went to work for the Royal Naval Intelligence service. That left Alice, now a professor herself at Brooklyn College in New York City (above), as the leading expert still working on decoding Linear B. And she decided to make a fresh start.

Alice chose our old friend, frequency analysis. She knew the 90 characters generally acknowledged as Linear B, did not represent a phonetic alphabet like modern languages, but closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Evans himself had suggested it might use voice inflection to define tenses, with the nouns changing their endings to fit past, present and third person perfect. But that also made a paper translation all the more difficult. So Alice began to collect every crumb of information she could about all of the 90 most probable Linear B symbols, as well as the two hundred possible ones. And she taught herself ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Egyptian, so she could do that.

Had this been a modern research project, Alice would have input it all into a computer. But the world's first one of those had just been built to crack the German Enigma codes, and its very existence was so secret, the allies officially referred to it as the “Ultra Secret”.  So Alice had little choice but to use 3X5 inch “index cards”. When the war caused a shortage of those, she scavenged paper from old calendars, greeting cards and catalogues, even stealing library index cards. She carefully filed her homemade index cards into handmade drawers constructed from empty cigarette cartons provided by her addiction to nicotine.

Alice explained the problem in a 1948 paper published by the American Journal of Archeology. “People often say,” she wrote, “ that an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. They are putting the situation optimistically. We are dealing with three unknowns: language, script and meaning.... Forty years of attempts to decipher Minoan by guessing....have proved that such a procedure is useless. Minoan cannot be deciphered, because we do not know if "Minoan" existed....If, as seems probable, it was a highly inflected language, it should be possible to work out some of the inflection pattern.” And she ended that paper with a warning about speculation. “When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

After a full day of teaching, Alice would return to her home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which she shared with her widowed mother. There is no record she ever had a romantic life. Perhaps Alice was gay, or had little sexual drive. But for whatever reason, her life was clearly devoted to Linear B. After dinner and grading papers, she would engage her opponent. Said one writer, familiar with her work, “She suffered no fools. She demanded precision of herself and others. She spoke and wrote in no-frills, spin-free English, direct and blunt, prickly and undiplomatic”.

I wonder what old King Minos would have thought, had he caught a glimpse of Alice around a corner in the labyrinth of ages, her research scattered across the kitchen table, a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray, its smoke curling romantically to the ceiling, as Alice shuffled and rearranged the 186,000 cards she had created, and the symbols and notes they contained. Like an alchemist she was trying to conjure an ancient world out of what came to be called her “Triplets”, three-word sets she had uncovered, with similar suffixes. Deciphering an entire language out of that would be a real magic act. And she darn near pulled out a rabbit

Prophetically, Alice had delivered a lecture on Linear B in 1948, in which she did speculate about the doors which a solution to Linear B might unlock - and might not.. “We may find out if Helen of Troy really existed, if King Minos was a man or a woman...On the other hand, we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June 1400BC.” After learning of her terminal cancer diagnosis, Alice wrote to a colleague, “The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it. ” She died on 16 May, 1950, at the age of just 43, with the great mystery of her life unresolved.

The odd thing is, just after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, Alice had met the solution to the great mystery.  She had traveled to England, to visit with her mentor Professor Sir John Myers. He had arraigned a brief meeting between Alice and a man he thought was a promising young architectural student named Michael Ventris (above). The meeting did not go well. Alice was an academic, the daughter of blue collar parents, respected for her hard won achievements in science and the byzantine politics of academia. Michael was the son of a wealthy family, raised by a mother influenced by the cold and imperial psychiatrist Carl Jung. They were both socially inept to a degree and managed to say just the wrong things to each other. But being socially inept, they did not hold it against each other, and exchanged a few letters over the next five years, all strictly on the topic of Linear B. And oddly, that was where the solution would be found, in the unpleasant pauses in their conversations.

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