Jim's Mailings

Its a Small World, after all

LAWRENCE KRAUSS
When four English school-children walked through a wardrobe into a strange new world on the big screen this past month, it renewed the 50-year-old debate about how closely Narnia's lion king resembles Christ, and how closely C.S. Lewis' story resembles a Christian allegory.
But his story is much more than that. It has captured the imaginations of generations of children precisely because, like his fellow Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece "The Lord of the Rings," it tapped into a longstanding human yearning for a hidden universe where the rules may be different, life may be better and new evidence for meaning and purpose may exist.
What child hasn't imagined that the closet or the basement might not open up to a secret universe? I vividly remember — perhaps as Lewis Carroll did — putting my face up closely to a mirror to try and look around the corner to see if the world in the mirror might somehow differ from my own.
The mechanism chosen by Lewis for his portal to Narnia is, in the context of much of the current activity in physics, remarkably prescient. The children in his story open the door to an old wardrobe and find that behind the clothes rack is a new world. Yet, if one were to go behind the piece of furniture, nothing strange would be observed. From the perspective of modern mathematics, there, is one way for such a thing to occur: If the back of the wardrobe connected to an extra dimension of space, an entire universe could exist without occupying any volume in our ob¬servable world.
This idea is precisely what some particle theorists have recently proposed as they attempt to understand the strange nature of gravity, which, as Einstein recognized 90 years ago, appears to be a manifestation of a possible curvature of space in response to matter and energy.
What makes this particularly strange is that the other known forces in nature do not have such an interpretation. Just four years after the development of the theory of general relativity, mathematician Theodor Kaluza suggested that the only other force known at the time, electromagnetism, might also be due to a curvature — not in the three dimensions of space we know, but rather in a hypothetical fourth spatial dimension. Seven years later, the theorist physicist Oskar Klein proposed that the hidden dimension might be curled up in a very small circle, undetectable by any probe that had yet been invented.
In the intervening 80 years, Kaluza and Klein's idea has been resuscitated in a variety of contexts and helped form the mod¬ern basis for the extra dimensions required in string theory, proposed in the 1980s as a way to try and understand the mysterious nature of gravity at small scales.
But extra, curled-up dimensions are not nearly as fascinating as extra dimensions that might be large enough to hide universes like our own. And physics has responded to this fascination with the remarkable realization, less than a decade ago, that it is possible for even infinitely large extra dimensions to exist in nature and still have remained hidden from all of our experimental probes.
The key question, because this is supposed to be physics and not metaphysics, is whether there is any way to directly detect such extra dimensions, and theorists have been working hard to explore ways that the next large particle accelerator being built in Geneva might provide some evidence.
Not a shred of empirical data suggests that the ideas being explored by string theorists, whether or not large extra dimensions exist, actually reflects the underlying nature of our world.
Still, that is the beauty of science, art and literature — indeed of all the products of our human imagination. It is quite possible that if we could not imagine hypothetical hidden worlds, then the world of our experience might become intolerable. But if we are bold enough to subject some of our ideas to empirical tests, recognizing that they are likely to be proved wrong, as were my youthful imaginings about the mirror, we might just end up every now and then opening the door to a magical wardrobe of our own. (This article was downloaded from The Plain Dealer of 23 Jan 2006
Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of several books, including the recently published "Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions from Plato to String Theory and Beyond."
>>>A headline from a later PD issue asserted “The World is Flat!” This came about as the writer looked into a new TV, and was trying to decide between Plasma and LCD. This made me look into how the Flat Worlders look at our planet in these days of Intelligent Design and other Supernatural Phenomena. Having a dose of string theory is in desperate need for an antidote!
>>>>>>The World is Flat From the New York Times by Thomas Friedman
History of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?
In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
Reviews
"Before 9/11, New York Times columnist Friedman was best known as the author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, one of the major popular accounts of globalization and its discontents. Having devoted most of the last four years of his column to the latter as embodied by the Middle East, Friedman picks up where he left off, saving al-Qaeda et al. for the close. For Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning 'flat world' is a jungle pitting 'lions' and 'gazelles,' where 'economic stability is not going to be a feature' and 'the weak will fall farther behind.' Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. As anyone who reads his column knows, Friedman agrees with the transnational business executives who are his main sources that these developments are desirable and unstoppable, and that American workers should be preparing to 'create value through leadership' and 'sell personality.' This is all familiar stuff by now, but the last 100 pages on the economic and political roots of global Islamism are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. Add in Friedman's winning first-person interjections and masterful use of strategic wonksterisms, and this book should end up on the front seats of quite a few Lexuses and SUVs of all stripes." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The above downloaded from AOL<<<<<<
One time a couple of years ago, I wrote Friedman (and the PD) suggesting that world peace might break out if we solved the Isralei-Palestinian Question. I proposed that Jerusalem, Bethlehem, etc. be made part of a Port Authority which resolves disputes between a large number of entities who squabble over a piece of land that has no intrinsic agricultural value, but symbolic or a crossroads. Never heard from either?
>>>>>It's a Flat World, After All (Long article)
>>>>>NY Times ^ | 4/3/05 | THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Posted on 04/06/2005 7:33:32 AM PDT by Valin
In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''
And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.
I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia. (Do you suppose Friedman really meant a supersize Plasma TV?)
''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''
''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''
Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!
This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.
''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''
Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast? It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.
The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.
No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.
The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.
Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.
So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.
(Downloaded from Free Republic (AOL)<<<<<<<<
You are invited to Free Republic to read comments by Valin admirers about this article. (My daughter worked several years on the UPS-International project, but I don’t know if her input was what made it so amazing). And today, 1/25/06 we witnessed another Mid-Eastern nation turn to a highly charged Religious Organization to search for Democracy or whatever will give them power over their rivals. After all, we showed the way, just like in the flat-world metaphor.
One of today’s questions refers to the benefits of Wikipedia as opposed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her is an example
>>>>>>Philosophy of religion (Encyclopaedia Britannica – 2003)
Views with anthropic references
Inner attitudes and dispositions
A religious view of the universe contends that a new dimension and depth can be disclosed within the person who responds. Though religious faith has its characteristic inner attitudes and dispositions, they must be of a transcendently self-involving kind, and there must be a depth to any attitude or disposition before it can be called religious. Thus, the attitude of awe is related to the feeling of fear. For fear to become awe, however, it must be characterized by a particular depth and self-involvement that come from responding to the presence and activity of God, or of the sacred or holy that call it forth.
Religion relates to the whole of a man's personality and because of this totality of human response, people speak of “conversion” in relation to religious attitudes. Generally, a person who becomes religious or ceases to be religious undergoes a profound transformation. Persons who have become converted to religion speak of the world as having taken on a fuller and richer dimension; those for whom the religious vision has disappeared speak of a world as having become flat, dead, and bleak.
Behavioral discipline with prescribed practices
Many religions bind their adherents to specific practices and particular moral codes. Thus, conversion has often shown itself in radical changes of behaviour; e.g., an alcoholic becoming a total abstainer. Such behaviour as murder, lying, breaking promises, stealing, and committing adultery have been condemned by the world religions. So strong is the ethical element in Confucianism that some regard it more as an ethical system than a religion. Yet, ethical (and ceremonial) codes can be transformed imperceptibly into no more than current social conventions and mere customs. Whether such codes have changed or not, their range and detail vary widely. Pork is eaten by Christians but is considered to be unclean by Jews and Muslims. Muslims and Buddhists abstain totally from alcohol; Christians and Jews need not. A Sikh will not shave his beard; but Hindus, Christians, and Muslims are free to do so if they wish. In contrast with Christians, Buddhists will not kill animals, and Muslims may practice polygamy. (More references not included here)<<<<<<<
And now to Wikipedia and Mr. Friedman
The World Is Flat
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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; ISBN 0374292884) is a best-selling book by Thomas L. Friedman analyzing the progress of globalization in the early twenty-first century. The principal theme of this book is the "flattening" of the world, a metaphor for the global leveling of competition and capability through globalization. The author analyzes how accelerated change is made possible by intersecting technological advances and social protocols, e.g. cell phones, Internet, open source software (Wikipedia is cited as an example of open-sourcing), etc. Friedman himself is a strong advocate of these changes, calling himself a "free-trader" and a "compassionate flatist," and he criticizes societies that resist these changes. He emphasizes the inevitability of a rapid pace of change and the extent to which emerging abilities of individuals and developing countries are creating many pressures on businesses and individuals in the United States; he has special advice for Americans and for the developing world (but says almost nothing about Europe). The flattening of the world makes possible complex supply chains based on value-added services, with products in all industries being increasingly leveraged through competitive commoditization and the possibility of using labor and services in emerging markets like India and China. Friedman's is a popular work based on much personal research, travel, conversation, and reflection. In his characteristic style, he combines in The World Is Flat conceptual analysis accessible to a broad public with personal anecdotes and opinions. (More at web site)<<<<<<
With no particular credit to Tom Friedman, I would venture to guess that his view is popular among individuals who think in terms of a small state, and who have given up on the notion of “Super Power States” which a great many world view Americans have become attached to, some realizing that they have bought most of the arguments put forth by people I call “Nationalists” as in National Socialism the political force driving the Nazi Party in WW11 Germany. It also seems to be endemic in states that are on the edge of superpower status. The European Union seems well insulated from this fever, and we can only hope that its competition with the United States will keep it thinking that way. One measure is how well flat world views survive in those very separate but united republics.

posted by James E. Opfell @ 8:26 PM