A Reflection on my 67th Birthday

I turned 67 today and I don’t feel any different than I did when I turned 40, or 30, or even 20, and I remember all those birthdays like it was yesterday.  Of course the muscles in my knees are weak and sometimes they give out without notice, my hair is a little thin and almost totally gray and that makes it look thinner, I’m about 50 pounds over my weight at 40, I seem to get more emotional about some things and the lyrics of the songs of my younger years seem to pack a lot more meaning.  I don’t recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror, but other than that, my state of mind is no different than when I was fourteen.  I’m curious about everything and little wonders like a simple flower and a falling dew drop impress me as they used to.  However, I am a little more reflective about my life and I often wonder if anybody had any idea what would become of me as my mother gave birth to me in a room in a house where my mother and father lived.  At that far away time in March 1947, they were renting a room from some friends of the family because they could not afford their own house.  My expected lifespan in 1947 was about fifty years and I’m certain my parents had no idea what their future would be and less what mine would be.

My father was a product of the depression but he managed to start a business and he worked hard to support his growing family.  He was extraordinarily hard working and versatile person and he would take on any job to earn a living.  I remember when I was about 12, he started a third job - cleaning windows.  He clean windows early in the morning, go to his factory job in the afternoon and his dry cleaning job on rainy days and on weekends.  Like all other people at the bottom of the economic scale, he knew his place in society and he was expected to stay put and work in whatever he could find.  But unlike the rest of the people he did not stay put, he always saw greener pastures in other places and followed his nose to a better living.  My mom was also a go-getter making ends meet with the small farm keeping chickens and pigs in a small home farm where I had to help with the chores from a very early childhood.

    

Being the oldest in a family of ten, I don’t think I ever had a coming-of-age days.  Helping to take care of the brothers and sisters and working in the farm fields in the summer from an early age, one does not have the luxury of regular people going through the stages of life.  I think I was born mature, or at least went from being a kid in the third grade to being held responsible for household responsibilities.  For example, at eight years of age, my mother would send me by bus to take chorizo from our pigs and eggs from our chickens to market 25 miles away, make the transactions and return by bus by myself – and I better has sold it at the highest price and don’t lose any of the money.  What eight year old kid does that these days?

 

My father is a devout Catholic and therefore, we were raised to be devout Catholic, although I have to admit that I have found logic more compelling than faith and take a more secular view of religion.  My parents drove me to higher education, the only way to advance in life.  I believed what they told me and I follow their guidance ever since I can remember.  Education has been a main drive in life.  My father, with a third grade education, but lots of street learning, was also taught to know his economic and social place and defer to authority.  In many ways, I am my father’s son; same genes and chromosomes. We have shared the same interests in knowledge, in innovation, and in invention.  I might have been better educated but the innate sense of finding a solution to a problem and “Gettin–er-done” has been the same.   One “mantra” that I learned somewhere along the way, something that kept my sanity in the face of overwhelming challenges was to repeat: “anything they can do I can do better.” I would find myself repeating that over and over again and convince myself that it was true and I would make it true.  I remember saying that in middle school, in high school, in college, graduate school and even at my job.  And, it most cases it worked.

My dad was an adventurer and risk taker but he always constrained himself by the walls of society and religion.  He knew his place and stayed in it, and that is where our characters parted.  I never let the chains of social classes get in the way of things I wanted to do.   I might have been able to go far up the economic ladder, unfortunately, not having a role model for economic advancement, I never developed the proper vision, or got the proper tools, or had the proper resources to “make it in the big time.”   It turns out that "money does lead to money" and with no initial capital, above average smarts and work ethics can only take you so far in one lifetime.  But, that was OK because it allow me to be part of a real life; getting married, having kids and chasing the American dream.  Unfortunately, I think I chased the American dream so much that I lost track of life when I was about forty and broke up the family in the process – the lowest point in my life.  I lament that very much and all the pain that I’m sure it caused.  But when one is down the only thing to do and pick yourself back up and try to fix thing the best you can.

As of this birthday, I hope to still have 10 good years left and with luck stick around for 10 extra more, but if I make it to 80 anything after that would be pure gravy in my journey of life.  Absent of some massive physical and possibly mental dissolution, I may yet live to be wise.  So many people grumble about getting older, as though it's some penance we have to pay for sticking around, and they totally forget the part about getting wiser.  I Can’t wait for the wise portion of my life to come around, I think I might like it.   So at 67, and well on my way down the road to the seventies: I realize that I’m certifiably old; that I'm set in my ways; even acerbic; but not too much down the path of senility where I cannot listen to new ideas and maybe even learn new things.  I think I am a little wiser than a decade ago, I hope that's true.  Although I must reserve the right to do some more stupid things.  The way I see it, I can either arrive to at my 70s a wise man and in cultural style, or I can arrive at them stumbling still in search of adulthood.  I think for me it's still too soon to tell.

As I mention in my blog, I have done many things, have met many people, and have seen many great things.  I have always been driven by an interest in truth and enjoy rational conversation.  I am a product of the Pontiac school system, Michigan State, Oakland and Stanford Universities, and for better or worse, the Catholic Church.  My personality has been molded by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the acid years of the 60s and the philosophy of Don Quixote de la Mancha.  I've been a Mexican farm worker, a worker on the auto assembly line, a construction worker, a teacher, an Engineer, a Research Scientist, an International negotiator for the U.S. government and industry, an international environmental consultant, an energy scientist, an economics and policy consultant for government and industry, and most recently a strategic and logistics analyst for the DOD.  I think I'm going to try my talents in video graphics next, and maybe to try to write the great American novel.  If this means something to someone, I sure like hell would like to know what is it.  It could mean that I have not found myself yet.  I hope I can find myself before I am seventy and reach my seventies a wise man and in cultural style.  Or maybe I am one of those people that will never be able to reach adulthood.

Anxiety and frustration from not knowing

I have been somewhat unease in the last few years; uncomfortable with a lack of knowledge.  This is no knowledge that I would ever need to know, but the fact that some things are unknown has bothered me tremendously.   All my life I have always pride myself of knowing what things are, how they work, where they came from, where they are going.  Of course, I don’t claim to know all the answers, but I have always had the confidence that an answer exists.  Curiosity has always guided me to information resources that have made me feel “comfortable” with the world around me.  If it has to do with science, arts, philosophy, religion, and whatever area, I always had the comfort that even if I could not answer all my questions, knowing where to find the information, and knowing that some “answer” existed was comfort to me.  My confidence in science and logic, and my education and experience in these areas has made me very comfortable with the world around me. 

I remember when I was a kid back in the third grade playing on our backyard's farm irrigation ditches with other kids who had to stay home because we had the mumps.  We had made toy soldiers and army tanks out of sticks and had whole armies facing each other.  I was a little creative and brought in helicopters, but I remember wondering to myself how helicopters flew without wings.  No one could tell me, not even my third grade teacher when I went back to school.  I found a book on helicopters in our small school “library,” but it did not explain how they worked.  Some months later while in one of the marketplaces in Monterrey with my mother, I noticed a bookstore across the street and made my mother take me there although we managed to miss the bus she was planning on taking back to Villa de Garcia and had to wait two more hours for the next bus (I suspect that she did not mind missing the bus since it allowed her more time for shopping).  I found a book that explained how helicopter flew and I remember being as happy as the pigs in our farm getting a fresh pail of slop in their trough.  I knew how they flew!

School to me was just one giant smorgasbord of information on anything I wanted to know.  I can’t say was I was best student, but spending just about every evening in the public library allowed me to look up anything I could possibly think of questioning.  And, if they did not have the information, the librarians were more than willing to help get whatever I wanted.  Later, the university seemed like a four star restaurant compared to the smorgasbord in high school.  Majoring in engineering was open season on knowing how the world worked, the arts were fantastic, and the introduction to classical music and western history, Chinese culture and history, psychology, and literature were “mind-popping” new experiences that I could not get enough.  Later in Stanford, learning economics introduced me to how the “real” world worked and introduced me to how government social and economic policy is formulated.  That led me to want to work in Washington DC and I made my way to working in the policy making center of the country.  Every day was a new experience in learning something new.

Through all this time I came coming back to questions I had in college.  Questions that I had manage to answer, but have never been confident that I really knew the answers.  The questions arose in a course in modern physics and had to do with Einstein’s theory relativity (special and general).  Having more of a visual engineering view of the world, the “mind experiments” explaining the concepts had a difficult time clicking in my brain; a cognitive dissonance that I had a difficult time overcoming.  I could work out the mathematics and it made sense, but a thoroughly understanding always seemed to be elusive.  So for the next twenty-some years I would seek articles and read whatever information I could find on this topic until I felt comfortable what it meant and how it applies to the world and the universe.   Once I overcame it, I was in harmony with the state of knowledge and content with the state of the universe.

Although I did not pretend to have all the answers to my questions, for information that was simply not known, I was confident that there was a path forward to obtain that knowledge and knew there were many very smart people working on them and that someday we would have the answers.  If I was still alive, I will be able to read up on them and learn the answers. 

But that confidence has been shattered and in its place, replaced by an anxiety that there is something out there that not only we do not know, but we don’t know how to get to know it.  Of course, I’m talking about the thing that scientist have given the terms “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter.”  It is all around us affecting our lives and yet we cannot see it, we cannot feel it, and worse, we do not know what it is!

Dark energy is causing the expansion of the universe, and the term “dark energy” is a placeholder for our ignorance, representing the fact of cosmic acceleration without indicating its identity.  Einstein faced this problem in his relativity equations but he conveniently refers to it as a “cosmological constant.”  I guess he assumed some smart person in the future would figure it out?  A cosmological constant, like pi, is something my brain can handle, but dark energy is not a constant.  It has been over 15 years since this was first discovered and our ignorance about it has remained constant.  It has become a central problem in modern cosmology.  Astronomers have measured the acceleration rate and determined that dark energy constitutes more than two-thirds of the energy content of the cosmos, How can one be in a cage with a 200 pound gorilla and not know it is there?  The frustration of it all!

What is strange about dark energy is that the more the universe expands, the more dark energy there seems to be, and the more dark energy there is, the more it drives expansion.

  

So what can dark energy be?

Some scientist think that dark energy is the energy from quantum fluctuations in empty space, what they refer to as “vacuum energy.”  From general relativity, any energy has a gravitational effect. In this case, the energy would serve to accelerate cosmic expansion.  The only problem with that theory is that the amount of energy predicted by quantum fluctuations is much larger than the observed amount of dark energy.  Scientist who lean toward “String Theory” provide a second alternative for dark energy but it provides an uncountable number of possible values in their “string theory landscape” that would be impossible to calculate and verify through experiments. 

A possible third explanation is that the Theory of relativity breaks down for large distances.  Astronomers measuring far away supernovas (giant suns that blow up) have come to the conclusion that the rate that the universe is expanding is increasing, maybe by knowing this they can calculate the dark energy – if it is measurable and observable, by inference we will know what it is? This will also mean making adjustments to Einstein’s Theory – the perfect theory. 

Then there is an explanation for dark energy that for a “three dimensional engineer type,” would sound like science fiction - but it is my favorite and I hope someone is able to design a test to verify it.  It goes something like this:  Suppose that gravity can be influenced by something that we are not able to see?  A theory, known as membrane theory, extend our three dimensional rules into a higher-dimensional reality.  To try to imagine it, let’s take the moon as an example, it has a surface – a membrane - with stuff inside.  Suppose the universe, our universe that we know and love, can be represented as a surface membrane with an interior that we can see, but with extra dimensions that we cannot see.  These extra dimensions could have gravity or negative gravity and could be influencing our portion of our membrane that is the universe we can see.  It is conceivable that these extra dimension exerting gravity and “negative” gravity manifests itself as what we consider dark energy.  These are called membrane world models or “Braneworld” models.  Some scientist indicate that the Big Bang was the moment when our universe collided with the neighboring membrane. 

Braneworld theory sounds cool and exotic, but a bit farfetched.  The least farfetched seems to be the quantum physics approach modification of gravity.  There are people that know gravity and there are people that know quantum physics.  The problem is figuring out how they relate to each other so that we can know what dark energy really is. 

 

I wish I would had studied quantum physics and astronomy and be able to jump into that research to figure out what dark energy really is, maybe I would not feel so anxious about the void in knowledge.