The World Since Newton, and What It Means To Us, Today and Tomorrow

It’s the birthday of Isaac Newton, perhaps the best-known person in the history of science.  Though there was other genius to his credit, Newton’s celebrity derived mainly from his insight into universal gravitation and thus the Laws of Motion that apply to all things on Earth as well as celestial objects.  Ironically, his fame was amplified even further because of the stunning nature by which this paradigm was shattered in the 20th Century, not once, but twice.Within just a few years in the early 1990s, we had both the theory of relativity, showing how Newtonian mechanics break down in the world of very large spaces and velocities, and quantum mechanics, demonstrating that the world of the very small is similarly in gross noncompliance to Newton’s theories.

Where will humankind go from here in terms of bringing all this together into one unified understanding of the universe?  That chapter’s yet to be written.

Yet a chapter of at least equal importance is playing itself out here on Earth right now: With all the technology we’ve developed today, is it possible that we will be able to power our civilization without fossil fuels and the environmental damage they’re wreaking on our planet?  The Earth receives 6000 times more power from the sun than we’re using.  Might we have a solution that captures 1/6000th of that energy every day?

If so, we will soon forgot we ever struggled with emissions of CO2, C4, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, cadmium, arsenic, selenium, mercury, and dozens of types of radioactive isotopes that are rapidly destroying out planet’s capacity to support life. As if that weren’t enough, we have geothermal, tidal and ocean current hydro, and advanced nuclear (when it comes along)–all technologies that are bonuses, independent of the incidence of sunlight.

I believe that the final lines to this chapter will be: Hey.  We made it, because enough people demonstrated that they cared very deeply about the quality of life available to their own generation, and to all future generations here on Earth.  We got it done. Just in time.