Billions & Billions (4 page)

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Speaking of which …

Nuclear fission was first thought of in London in September 1933 by an émigré Hungarian physicist named Leo Szilard. He had been wondering whether human tinkering could unlock the vast energies hidden in the nucleus of the atom. He asked himself what would happen if a neutron were fired at an atomic nucleus. (Because it has no electrical charge, a neutron would not be electrically repelled by the protons in the nucleus, and would instead collide directly with the nucleus.) As he was waiting for a traffic signal to change at an intersection on South-hampton Row, it dawned on him that there might be some substance, some chemical element, which spat out two neutrons when it was hit by one. Each of
those
neutrons could eject more neutrons, and there suddenly appeared in Szilard’s mind the vision of a nuclear chain reaction, with exponentiating numbers of neutrons produced and atoms falling to pieces left and right. That evening, in his small room in the Strand Palace Hotel, he calculated that only a few pounds of matter, if it could be made to undergo a controlled neutron chain reaction, might liberate enough energy to run a small city for a year … or, if the energy were released suddenly, enough to destroy that city utterly. Szilard eventually emigrated to the United States, and began a systematic search through all the chemical elements to see if any produced more neutrons than collided with them. Uranium seemed a promising candidate. Szilard convinced Albert Einstein to write his famous letter to President Roosevelt urging the United States to build an atomic bomb. Szilard played a major role in the first uranium chain reaction in Chicago in 1942, which in fact led to the atomic bomb. He spent the rest of his life warning about the dangers of the
weapon he had been the first to conceive. He had found, in yet another way, the awesome power of the exponential.

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Everybody has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, etc. Every generation back we go, we have twice as many lineal ancestors. You can see that this is very much a Persian Chessboard kind of problem. If there are, say, 25 years to a generation, then 64 generations ago is 64 × 25 = 1,600 years ago, or just before the fall of the Roman Empire. So (see box), every one of us alive today had in the year 400 some 18.5 quintillion ancestors—or so it seems. And this says nothing about collateral relatives. But this is far more than the population of the Earth, then or now; it is far more than the total number of human beings who have ever lived. Something is wrong with our calculation. What? Well, we have assumed all those lineal ancestors to be different people. But this, of course, is not the case. The same ancestor is related to us by many different routes. We are repeatedly, multiply connected with each of our relatives—a huge number of times for the more distant relations.

Something like this is true of the whole human population. If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor. Whenever a new American President is elected, there’s bound to be someone—generally in England—to discover that the new President is related to the Queen or King of England. This is thought to bind the English-speaking peoples together. When two people derive from the same nation or culture, or from the same small corner of the world, and their genealogies are well-recorded, it is likely that the last common ancestor can be discovered. But whether it can be discovered or not, the relationships are clear. We are all cousins—everyone on Earth.

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Another common appearance of exponentials is the idea of half-life. A radioactive “parent” element—plutonium, say, or radium—decays into another, perhaps safer, “daughter” element, but not all at once. It decays statistically. There is a certain time by which half of it has decayed, and this is called its half-life. Half of what is left decays in another half-life, and half of the remainder in still another half-life, and so on. For example, if the half-life were one year, half would decay in a year, half of a half or all but a quarter would be gone in two years, all but an eighth in three years, all but about a thousandth in ten years, etc. Different elements have different half-lives. Half-life is an important idea when trying to decide what to do with radioactive waste from nuclear power plants or in contemplating radioactive fallout in nuclear war. It represents an exponential decay, in the same way that the Persian Chessboard represents an exponential increase.

Radioactive decay is a principal method for dating the past. If we can measure the amount of radioactive parent material and the amount of daughter decay product in a sample, we can determine how long the sample has been around. In this way we find that the so-called Shroud of Turin is not the burial shroud of Jesus, but a pious hoax from the fourteenth century (when it was denounced by Church authorities); that humans made campfires millions of years ago; that the most ancient fossils of life on Earth are at least 3.5 billion years old; and that the Earth itself is 4.6 billion years old. The Cosmos, of course, is billions of years older still. If you understand exponentials, the key to many of the secrets of the Universe is in your hand.

If you know a thing only qualitatively, you know it no more than vaguely. If you know it quantitatively—grasping some numerical measure that distinguishes it from an infinite number
of other possibilities—you are beginning to know it deeply. You comprehend some of its beauty and you gain access to its power and the understanding it provides. Being afraid of quantification is tantamount to disenfranchising yourself, giving up on one of the most potent prospects for understanding and changing the world.

W
e can’t help ourselves. On Sunday afternoons and Monday nights in the fall of each year, we abandon everything to watch small moving images of 22 men—running into one another, falling down, picking themselves up, and kicking an elongated object made from the skin of an animal. Every now and then, both the players and the sedentary spectators are moved to rapture or despair by the progress of the play. All over America, people (almost exclusively men), transfixed before
glass screens, cheer or mutter in unison. Put this way, it sounds stupid. But once you get the hang of it, it’s hard to resist, and I speak from experience.

Athletes run, jump, hit, slide, throw, kick, tackle—and there’s a thrill in seeing humans do it so well. They wrestle each other to the ground. They’re keen on grabbing or clubbing or kicking a fast-moving brown or white thing. In some games, they try to herd the thing toward what’s called a “goal”; in other games, the players run away and then return “home.” Teamwork is almost everything, and we admire how the parts fit together to make a jubilant whole.

But these are not the skills by which most of us earn our daily bread. Why should we feel compelled to watch people run or hit? Why is this need transcultural? (Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and Aztecs also played ball. Polo is Tibetan.)

There are sports stars who make 50 times the annual salary of the President; some who are themselves, after retirement, elected to high office. They are national heroes. Why, exactly? There is something here transcending the diversity of political, social, and economic systems. Something ancient is calling.

Most major sports are associated with a nation or a city, and they carry with them elements of patriotism and civic pride. Our team represents
us
—where we live, our people—against those other guys from some different place, populated by unfamiliar, maybe hostile people. (True, most of “our” players are not
really
from here. They’re mercenaries and with clear conscience regularly defect from opposing cities for suitable emolument: A Pittsburgh Pirate is reformed into a California Angel; a San Diego Padre is raised to a St. Louis Cardinal; a Golden State Warrior is crowned a Sacramento King. Occasionally, a whole team picks up and migrates to another city.)

Competitive sports are symbolic conflicts, thinly disguised. This is hardly a new insight. The Cherokees called their ancient form of lacrosse “the little brother of war.” Or here is Max Rafferty, former California Superintendent of Public Instruction, who, after denouncing critics of college football as “kooks, crumbums, commies, hairy loudmouthed beatniks,” goes on to state, “Football players … possess a clear, bright, fighting spirit which is America itself.” (That’s worth mulling over.) An often-quoted sentiment of the late professional football coach Vince Lombardi is that the only thing that counts is winning. Former Washington Redskins’ coach George Allen put it this way: “Losing is like death.”

Indeed, we talk of winning and losing a war as naturally as we do of winning and losing a game. In a televised U.S. Army recruitment ad, we see the aftermath of an armored warfare exercise in which one tank destroys another; in the tag line, the victorious tank commander says, “When we win, the whole team wins—not one person.” The connection between sports and combat is made quite clear. Sports fans (the word is short for “fanatics”) have been known to commit assault and battery, and sometimes murder, when taunted about a losing team; or when prevented from cheering on a winning team; or when they feel an injustice has been committed by the referees.

The British Prime Minister was obliged in 1985 to denounce the rowdy, drunken behavior of British soccer fans who attacked an Italian contingent for having the effrontery to root for their own team. Dozens were killed when the stands collapsed. In 1969, after three hard-fought soccer games, Salvadoran tanks crossed the Honduran border, and Salvadoran bombers attacked Honduran ports and military bases. In this “Soccer War,” the casualties numbered in the thousands.

Afghan tribesmen played polo with the severed heads of former adversaries. And 600 years ago, in what is now Mexico City, there was a ball court where gorgeously attired nobles watched uniformed teams compete. The captain of the losing team was beheaded, and the skulls of earlier losing captains were displayed on racks—an inducement possibly even more compelling than winning one for the Gipper.

Suppose you’re idly flipping the dial on your television set, and you come upon some competition in which you have no particular emotional investment—say, off-season volleyball between Myanmar and Thailand. How do you decide which team to root for? But wait a minute: Why root for either? Why not just enjoy the game? Most of us have trouble with this detached posture. We want to take part in the contest, to feel ourselves a member of a team. The feeling simply sweeps us away, and there we are rooting, “Go, Myanmar!” Initially, our loyalties may oscillate, first urging on one team and then the other. Sometimes we root for the underdog. Other times, shamefully, we even switch our allegiance from loser to winner as the outcome becomes clear. (When there is a succession of losing seasons, fan loyalties tend to drift elsewhere.) What we are looking for is victory without effort. We want to be swept up into something like a small, safe, successful war.

In 1996, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, then a guard for the Denver Nuggets, was suspended by the National Basketball Association. Why? Because Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the compulsory playing of the National Anthem. The American flag represented to him a “symbol of oppression” offensive to his Muslim beliefs. Most other players, while not sharing Abdul-Rauf’s beliefs, supported his right to express them. Harvey Araton, a distinguished sports writer for the
New York Times
, was puzzled. Playing the anthem at a sporting event “is, let’s face
it, a tradition that is absolutely idiotic in today’s world,” he explains, “as opposed to when it began, before baseball games during World War II. Nobody goes to a sporting event to make an expression of patriotism.” On the contrary, I would argue that a kind of patriotism and nationalism is very much what sporting events are about.
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