PERSPECTIVE, EDUCATION OF A SUNDAY MORNING

PERSPECTIVE, EDUCATION OF A SUNDAY MORNING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 15, 2012

Reading the Sunday newspaper in one’s golden years, and having had an interesting and sometimes exciting life, it is something to read a section of a newspaper and realize education is a constant in one’s life. 

In a section designated PERSPECTIVE, one is introduced to the latest findings in science, scandal in finance, and social psychological persuasions in politics. 

For one who first pursued the hard then the soft sciences, then did research and development in both fields, along with a spate of adjunct professorship at several universities, it is a credit to a newspaper not to “talk down” to the reader in tracking science achievements, apprising financial malfeasance, while having a little fun with happiness and political orientation.

What follows is my take on these subjects of a Sunday morning as I walk through the neighborhood reflecting on this newspaper’s PERSPECTIVE.

FROM H2O TO THE HIGGS BOSON

The nature of man seems to be an insatiable curiosity for what is not known but can be found out.  Think of man evolving from the earth on this lonely planet, taking root but uncertain of the matter of mass, until he discovered the “God particle.”  . 

My science education was during this primitive period, when water was described as simply two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.  Hydrogen charged with one electron and oxygen charged with two.  Smaller than these atoms, then, were electrons and protons. 

Particle physicists dreamed up the idea of an energy field that would have permeated the early universe, but research kept coming up with particles with zero mass, which could not explain matter. 

Dr. Peter Higgs, and others realized that when the universe cooled enough after “the Big Bang,” this energy field would have had to emerge, but proving this was the challenge.

Known as the “Higgs Field,” its existence required a new particle, the “Higgs boson” (Bosons are a class of fundamental particles defined by quantum mechanics.).  Finding the Higgs was the major goal of the Hadron Collider at CERN laboratories near Geneva, Switzerland.  On July 4, 2012 physicists announced the discovery.

This is complicated physics.  To the newspaper’s credit, it provides simple illustrations and the words of a credentialed physicist that will change our view of our place in the universe and view of ourselves. 

The Higgs confirms the “standard model,” which is the physicist’s framework for understanding the particles that make up the universe and the forces that govern them. 

The “standard model” was sixteen fundamental particles, which still failed to explain mass.  It required the 17^th particle, the Higgs, to do so.  Like a puddle of molasses, physicists explain, the “energy field” resists the motion of particles moving through it.  Such resistance to motion, or inertia, is the defining quality of mass or substance.  Subatomic particles acquire differing amounts of mass, and depend on how strongly they interact with the energy field.  This is illustrated in this article. 

The reader is also introduced to new terms beyond protons, electrons and neutrons, as the “standard model” has two kinds of particles, Fermions, which give form, and bosons, which transmit forces such as electromagnetism and radioactivity.  Still with me?

“The standard model” has up and down “quarks” held together in the proton by “gluons,” which act like glue.  There is still an electron in orbit by electromagnetic forces transmitted by photons.  So, the hydrogen atom looks quite different than it did when I studied it sixty years ago.  Neither the gluon nor the photon has any mass.

For the past fifty years, Geneva has been struggling to put the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle together that might explain our existence to form from nothing.  That is how long ago Peter Higgs proposed the “Higgs particle.”  Now, it is confirmed.  Physicists have shown with this discovery why we exist and why we have a Genesis.

CALL THIS SCANDAL LIBOR

In everyone’s life without exception, there will be many times when what is ethical will compete in the mind with what is legal, and this in terms will compete with what is moral, and often, it is sad to say, ethics and morality suffer for expediency in the belief that departure from the straight and narrow “this one time” won’t be so bad. 

If nature abhors a vacuum, certainly nature also abhors expediency. 

As bad as the punishment may be to admit and deal with a failure, a stupid error, or a departure from good sense, rationalizing the situation in an attempt to dodge the consequences of one’s action is surely to come to no good.  Remember, we all have to live with the coldest most unforgiving critic of all, ourselves.

This newspaper article reports on the LIBOR (London interbank offered rates) saying, “sometimes the most earth changing events are the most banal,” as this surely appears to be.  LIBOR is the everyday rate bank traders set in manipulating financial transactions. 

The rigging of this obscure number is beginning to assume global significance.  These traders at the Barclay Bank of London were toying with the prices people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings.

LIBOR is the number used by traders to set payments on about $800 trillion worth of financial instruments from complex interest rate derivatives to simple mortgages.

The charge is that Barclays and regulators in Great Britain and the United States tried to rig the number time and time again over the past five years.  One observer quipped, “This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” referring to the $ billions tobacco companies’ settlements in the tobacco scandal of 1998.

Like all good ideas gone to seed, LIBOR is supposed to be a pretty honest number.  Once the rate was set, it was assumed banks would play by the rules and give truthful estimates.  In reality, the system proved rotten from the start with banks manipulating the rate away from its benchmark with the incentive to minimize or bury losses, or provide marginal profits when clearly that was a betrayal of trust. 

Groups of derivative traders at Barclays and other banks fixed the final LIBOR rate by only one or two hundredths of a percentage point (one to two basis points), but sometimes LIBOR panels submitted rates as high as 30 to 40 basis points too low on average.  These manipulations could result in $ millions to the manipulators.

Barclays chief executive, Bob Diamond, who resigned on July 3, 2012, as a result of the scandal, claimed, “on the majority of days no requests were made at all” to manipulate the rates.  The article risibly adds, “This is rather like an adulterer saying that he was faithful on most days.”

Obviously, there will be hearings, trials, with possible civil and criminal prosecution, along with reforms.  They will only be stopgap measures as the culture of society is acquisitive, and trust is often considered a luxury that cannot be afforded. 

A graph shows trust and confidence in banking has plummeted from 60 percent in 1980 to 21 percent in 2010.  The more things change the more they remain the same.

WHY CONSERVATIVES ARE HAPPIER THAN LIBERALS

Academics and studies are quoted on political persuasion and happiness.  You decide whether this makes sense to you or not.

While conservatives are shown to be naturally authoritative, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of the loss of self-esteem, and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking, the article claims they are much happier than liberals. 

The Pew Research Center in 2006 found conservatives 68 percent more likely to say they were happy than liberal Democrats.  Conservatives, it shows, favor marriage and faith 53 percent to 33 percent for liberals. 

Marriage and happiness go together as the married person is 18 percentage points more likely to say he is happy than an unmarried person.  Conservatives go to church and appear twice as happy as people who claim to be separatists (43 percent to 23 percent).  These differences seem to be unrelated to education, race, sex or age.

Fifty-two percent of married, religious politically conservative people with children are very happy to only fourteen percent of single, secular, liberal people without children.

Liberals are more idealistic to conservatives who are inclined to rationalize or explain away inequalities in society.  This is called “system justification.” 

Conservatives see free enterprise as a beacon on the hill with every American with a chance to get ahead; liberals see it as a gated community with most people victims of circumstances needing the government as liberator. 

Even liberals who have achieved status are one third less likely to see the free enterprise system as a good thing.

Liberals, the article continues, have this pie in the sky vision of fairness and social justice that will lift people who refuse to get up and do something, anything, on their own. 

Liberals will forgive people of everything, people who don’t file their federal income taxes, don’t vote in state and federal elections, people who fail as students in school (it is the teacher’s fault), who become drug addicts or alcoholics (it is because they don’t have jobs), who become obese or suffer some other behavioral induced condition (it is society’s fault), who drift into crime (again, it is society’s fault).  The individual is off the hook. 

Conservatives see the individual with this mindset as lost, wanting to be saved from himself when that self never thinks of being a factor in process.

Ironically, people at the extreme of liberal and conservative persuasion are the most happy (48 percent) because they have the whole world figured out, and have no doubt in their minds they are right.  It is the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd and the “Tea Party.” 

The least happy people are those labeled “independent,” people who want to be on the winning side and can’t make up their minds which side that is, people who are ambivalent and undecided, not only about politics, but about most things in life, people who like to be accepted, not make waves, not cause controversy, not get into trouble, people who are safe hires, and mind their own business.  You might think such people would be the happiest, but this article claims the contrary.  Regards to this liberal newspaper for printing this piece.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

It means a stimulating session with writers going to the trouble to explain the difficult (Higgs particle), commenting on the embarrassing (LIBOR scandal), and reflecting on the attitudinal (happiness or its lack). 

There is a photograph of Dr. Peter Higgs, white haired, with the grimace of a man deep in internal contemplation unaware of the camera.  He and others like him, unknown to 99.9 percent of us, are revealing the physical world hidden, and in the process, changing civilization without fanfare.

As to the LIBOR scandal, thinkers since Socrates have pondered why men choose deception and fraud to honesty.  Honesty is the best policy.  We should never tire of reminding ourselves of that fact.

“Happiness,” philosopher Alan W. Watts has said, “once you define it you lose it.”  I agree.  It is a state of mind, a disposition to action, not contemplation.  Yet, academics and research organizations will continue to devote their efforts to the subject.  My sense is that the reader, whether conservative or liberal will come away from this piece pretty much undamaged.

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