Spring 2000 Issue

Features News SPECIAL REPORT 27 Does Time Really Precede Existence? 13 Develop the Amazon! AReflection on Prigoginism Brazilian Senator Asks: 'Why Dino De Paoli Should Brazilians Go Hungry to The distinguishing characteristic of life can best be seen in Please the Queen of England?' man's unique capability to create a culture that fosters'the continuing creative breakthroughs necessary for moving civilization NUCLEAR REPORT forward. It cannot be understood from the lower standpoint 20 South Africa Plans to Mass Produce of physical processes. Pebble-Bed HTR Nuclear Reactors Jonathan Te nnenbaum 36 A Note on Nonlinearity Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. 1999 INDEX 67 Subject Author 46 The Growing Evidence of Planets 68 Beyond Our Solar System BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Marsha Freeman 70 Promising Cancer Vaccines The discovery of 28 probable extrasolar planets, over the past Move from Lab to Clinic five years, has thrown conventional theories of planet formation Colin Lowry into turmoil. WASHINGTON REPORT 58 INTERVIEW WITH PROF. VLADIMIR VOEIKOV 72 Clinton Ups Budgets A Russian Biologist Comments on For Science, Space What Distinguishes Living Systems Marsha Freeman A leading researcher discusses the breaking frontiers of biophysics presented at the Second International A.G. Gurwitsch Conference, Dep'artments held in Moscow in September 1999. 2 EDITORIAL 3 LETTERS 5 RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS Discovery of H2 in Space Explains Dark Matter and Redshift Paul Marmet 8 VIEWPOINT U.S. Uranium Enrichment Privatized to Death? Richard Freeman 10 NEWS BRIEFS Before During 74 BOOKS Th ese diagrams represent mathematical portraits of three hard bodies colliding, ac cording to Prigogine's extended fo rmalism of quantum mechanics, Classical physics On the cover: A three-body collision cannot predict the behavior of three bodies interacting, In the Prigogine quantum me modeled using Dr. lIya Prigogine's quan chanical portrait, only the probability of a certain relative speed between bodies can tum mechanics, which may be able to de be predicted. The colors in the plot (on the cover) represent the probability of meas scribe systems that are time-irreversible. Illustration courtesy of the lIya Prigogine uring a certa'in value of relative speed. Prigogine's fo rmalism is unique in producing Center for Studies in Statistical Mechan the horizontal bar of probability plots, which appears in the "during" model, shown ics and Complex Systems, University of on the front cover. Texas at Austin. Cover design by Rose Source: © Matthew Trump, courtesy of the lIya Prigogine Center mary Moak. EDITORIAL Time ...and Philosophical Illiteracy n one way or another, an unresolved Newton, that this time, or this space, I philosophical question seems to lurk has anything other than an ideal exis behind the consideraQle responses we tence, is to indulge a prejudice. received to our last editorial ("Science: The matter was resolved already, To Be or Not to Be, or, How I Discov nearly 300 years ago, in the published ered the Swindle of Special Relativity"). correspondence between Gottfried If one criticizes Special Relativity, it is Leibniz ahd Samuel Clarke (the transla usually assumed that one thus supports tor of Newton's Optickst who served as the Gali leo-Newton conception of space proxy for the neurotic mathematician and time. If one criticizes Maxwell's magician in the debat e). As Leibniz conception of electromagnetic propaga stated his position: tion, it is assumed that one supports the "As for my own opinion, I have said concept of action-at-a-distance. more than once that I hold space to be The matter reminds us somewhat of something merely relative, as time is, some recent election campaigns we've that I hold it to be an order of coexis seen. Someone says: tences, as time is an order of succes "Gore ' or Bush- make your choice." sions." [Third letter, section 4J "But they're both bozos," you might And further: reply. "I have demonstrated that space is "Come on, be realistic. Those are nothing else but an order of the exis your choices: pick one," they retort. tence of things observed as existing to For myself I have the same answer on gether, and therefore the fiction of a ma all of the above choices: "Neither of the terial finite universe moving forward in two. I pick LaRouche." an infin ite empty space cannot be ad As we are a science magazine, we mitted. It is altogether unreasonable and will focus on the approach taken by impracticable. For besides the fact that Lyndon LaRouche, and his friends, in there is no real space out of the material cluding Gottfried Leibniz, on the ques universe, such an action would be with- . tion as it relates to the scientific matters. out any design in it; it would be work Let us confine ourselves in this short ing without doing anything, in acting space to a brief consideration of the as nothing would be done by the action. sumptions underlying the conceptiori of There would happen no change which time, which also relates to items raised could be observed by any person what in this issue's cover story and some re soever. These are the i magi nations of lated articles. philosophers who have incomplete no Time, as it is conceived by most peo tions, who make space an absolute real ple (especially those trained in the phys ity. Mere mathematicians who are only ical sciences), is a product of the human taken up with the conceits of imagina imagination, not of nature. It is, in a tion are apt to forge such notions, but word, a prejudice. When we divide the they are destroyed by superior reasons." passage of time into homogeneous [Fifth letter, section 29J parts, as by a mechanical clock or other Although Immanuel Kant famously device, we make an assumption, just as attempted to restore the discredited no we do when we picture space, as tions of an absolute space and time arranged along three mutually orthogo (through the back door of an alleged nal axes, along which we make homo built-in intuition of same) to respectabil geneous divisions to measure length. To ity in Germany, a towering figure in the assume, with Paolo Sarpi, Gali leo, and sciences, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was 2 Spring 2000 21 st CENTURY EDITORIAL Gau ss was the first to pose the problem :«bE. II " of the curvature. of space, recognizing that there is no reasol'l , other than preju dice, to assume a Eu clidean space. His prized student, Bernhard Riemann, ad dressed the problem more openly in the closing portion of his famous Habilita Letters tion dissertation, "On the .Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundations of Geom ;ii etry." Riemann wrote: On Understanding "The qu estion of the validity of the The Fraud of postu lates of geometry in the indefi nitely small is involved in the qu estion James Clerk Maxwell concerning the ultimate basis of rela tions of size in space ....A decision To the Editor: upon these qu estions can be fou nd only Among the criticisms of James Clerk by starting from the structu re of phe Maxwell in the editorial of you r Winter nomena that has been approved in ex 1999-2000 issue [" Science: To Be, or perience hitherto .... Not to Be, Or, How I Discovered the "This p.ath leads ou t into the domain Swindle of Special Relativity"] the only ' of another science, into the realm of specific one was his "introducing the physics, into which the n.atu re of this concept of a magnetic field." According present occasion forbids us to pene to my oid college texts, it was Faraday trate." (born 40 years b.efore him, in 1791 ) Lost Ground who first conceived of magnetic and Unfortunately, because of the condi electric fields and their (imaginary) lines tion of almost perfect philosophical illit of force. And how would you disprove eracy that has overtaken us today, we su ch fields? have mostly lost ground in respect to An electrical engineer, I forced myself the investigation of so important a qu es to read Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity tion as this. and Magnetism all the way through, The pendulum clock (ca. 7658) de We are thus pleased to present in ou r about 20 years ago. The man took the ex signed by Leibniz's collaborator Christi cover story a thought-provoking exam perimental researches of others (giving aan Huygens. The pendulum is sus ination of the work of Nobel laureate them credit), i:md, making some assump pended by a flexible band which wraps Ilya Prigogine, which we hope will tions (which he admitted), assembled a around a segment of a cycloid curve as serve as partial antidote to the refer textbook of clear explanations and the it swings. Because the cycloid curve is enced unlettered ness, that so pervades mathematics involved. Without Maxwell, its own evolute, and is isochronic, the and enmires ou r cu lture today. There, electrical engineering wou ld not have clock keeps equal time regardless of the au thor De Paoli contrasts LaRouche's advanced as rapidly. Maybe the man was amplitude of swing. totally unique conception of "the si wrong here and there, maybe the elec mu ltaneity of eternity," conceived in tron theory of electricity is not entirel. y among those who opposed him, even if part in reflection upon the notions of right, bu t Maxwell's work is internally too qu ietly. time-reversibility taken up by Andrei consistent and checks experimentally. The assumption, made by the propo Sakharov, as opposed to the linear There is hardly a modern theoretical nents of an ideal time, is that there ex "time" of Prigogine.

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