Confessions of a suspicious mind

Dear reader, this is not so much a column, but more a confession. No, I haven’t been caught swindling or murdering and my creditors still don’t know where I really live. It’s a philosophical confession. Whereas one thought that the world was an open book and one was a master practitioner and even manipulator and modifier of the various languages in which it was written, the truth is one knows less and less about more and more.

Take the simplest discipline, science, to which I was apprenticed by the zeitgeist of the time. I managed to get a damned good BSc (Hon.) from the University of Pune and went on to do a degree in natural sciences, with advanced physics as my option in Cambridge.
I absorbed it beyond the point where e=mx and grasped the idea that nothing could go faster than light. The Einsteinian proofs were mathematical, elegant and in the end quite simple. Then there were the lectures of Richard Feynman which said that sub-atomic particles could travel, at least mathematically, backwards in time. To grasp this one had to step outside physics and get philosophical and realise that being three-dimensional ourselves our minds couldn’t conceive a fourth space dimension.
There were indications to play with. Electrons, for instance, while going round and round the nuclei of atoms jump from one energy shell to another. This is represented as moving from a smaller to a wider circle. Only, they take no time in getting there, however small the distance. They must be passing through that fourth dimension!
Now the scientists at CERN in Switzerland tell us that they sent some neutrinos to Rome which got there faster than light. (Courier services from Delhi who haven’t yet delivered a book I’m expecting, please note!) If this is correct it puts the cat amongst the pigeons, or Einstein’s theory amongst the “more-or-less-correct” ones.
Since that experiment I have been wondering, as have millions of real scientists, about the nature of space. These neutrinos obviously travelled through another dimension inconceivable to us. Imagine for instance that shadows, which are two-dimensional, had minds and lived on a big globe. For them the shortest distance between any two points on the globe would be along its curved surface and what, to us 3D-wallas, looks like a curve would to the shadow-people be obviously a straight line. They would have no concept of “through” — being damned to flatness.
Now three cosmology professors have won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the universe is speeding apart at an accelerating rate. Something is pushing it. We know about forces that pull things together, but these scientists postulate a “dark energy” which propels them apart. Now anyone in a modern relationship will appreciate the fact that there are known forces that pull us together and rather mysterious ones that constantly push us asunder.
We may puzzle over these forces and come to some psychological conclusions or physical ones — she snores, his mouth smells of old socks, he plays golf, lives in Canada etc, etc. But the dark energy of the universe remains a figment of faith.
That the world has lost its certainties and it’s not only bewildered little me, gives me comfort — until I move to the realm of living.
I listen to the radio and read a lot of newspapers but I haven’t yet found a coherent explanation for why the world, at least Europe and America, are in such financial schtuck. The first time round they told us that banks had given money to sub-prime mortgage holders who couldn’t pay them back and so had gone bankrupt.
Britain and the US bailed its banks out by giving them money — rewards for failure.
What’s the problem this time? Surely not more sub-prime houses? No one explains. Everyone obfuscates. The new joke going the rounds is: “A Greek, an Irishman and a Spaniard go into a bar and order a round of drinks. Who pays? Answer: Angela Merkel.”
Athens is burning and Rome they say isn’t far behind. The governments in these capitals have debts they can’t honour. If they don’t, the banks to whom they owe money fail and the people who deposited money go broke. Germany, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have to bail them out by paying off some of the debt because Germany shares the same currency with these countries.
The rest of the equation eludes me. What if no one rescues Greece and it doesn’t pay its debts and renders thousands of investors penniless. That would be disastrous but it doesn’t sound like the end of the world.
What I would appreciate spelt out in idiot-proof terms is who is doing what to whom? Are the bankers to blame for having lent money to governments like those of Greece which then distributed it to the undeserving and couldn’t pay back? But where did the money go?
I started by confessing my puzzlement with modern physics and that poses a genuine limit of human understanding. With modern economics I have the sneaky suspicion that it’s a bit of Emperor’s New Clothes. America, Greece and the rest of Europe have spent more than they earned. China didn’t. The Indian poor
couldn’t because they didn’t have the money in the first place and no one extended credit. The Indian rich didn’t because they procured the cash by hook or by crook and stashed it in property, acquisitions and banks abroad. Both India and China have records and prospects of recent and future growth.
In Europe that seems to be the operative word. Growth! But at least in England it won’t come from the manufacturing sector because compared to service industries and finance that’s comparatively negligible.
In the coming weeks, they say, Greece will stand or fall. Perhaps then there’ll be an explanation of who saved it or what was it that broke that particular camel’s back.