It is surprising how few people it takes to make a big difference–for better or for worse.
Take Vladimir Lenin and Adolph Hitler. Seldom have so many suffered so much at the hands of so few.
What about for the better? Are there times when the many have benefited so much at the hands of so few? Yes, indeed. Here are some examples.
Start with very big changes indeed. Say the change from a hunting/gathering lifestyle to agricultural one. We don’t know who or how many first found out the secrets of growing food and husbanding animals. My guess is it was a very small group.
The second really big change in human history was the discovery of reading and writing, the beginning of literacy. This happened maybe five or six thousand years ago and may have been accompanied, according to psychologist Julian Jaynes (see my previous blog on April 5), by the origins of consciousness in the human species. Probably a small group again.
The third really big change was the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. This world-changing event is arguably due to a single individual, Isaac Newton. He discovered the first of the four main forces in the universe, gravity. His equations for the universal law of gravitation and the laws of motion formed the base knowledge that led to the bewildering variety of machines that make up so much of our modern world.
The fourth big change was the birth and explosion of electricity and electronics. For this change we can thank the small group who discovered the second basic force, electro-magnetism, in the 19th century. Men like Thomas Edison, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.
The fifth big change was nuclear power. The discovery of the third and fourth basic forces, the weak and strong nuclear forces, is credited mainly (like the first force, gravity) to one individual, Albert Einstein.
There is still another basic force to go that no one has yet discovered. This basic force is the one physicists hope will unite all four forces, explain the Big Bang, explain the dark matter that makes up most of the universe, and complete our understanding of just how the universe is powered then and now. This is the force that physicists are now looking for in experiments on the Swiss-French border with the just completed Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Just as the understanding of the first four forces led to surprising and revolutionary changes in the lifestyles of everyone on this earth, so the understanding of the final of the basic forces may lead to … ? Who knows? It will probably be surprising. It will probably be basic and revolutionary. It will probably make a big change in the lifestyles of everyone on earth.
The story of how the LHC came to be in Switzerland instead of the United States is sobering. Back in 1983 then President Ronald Reagan convinced Congress to appropriate a billion dollars to build a SuperCollider in Texas that would have been three times as powerful as the European one. They spent the money digging a hole and beginning construction, but by 1989 Congress got cold feet and spent another billion dollars filling in the hole and abandoning the project. The Europeans kept going on their LHC and so by default became the leaders in the quest for the final fourth force. They will probably also be the leaders in exploiting the discoveries it leads to.
In a way it will be fair. During and after the Second World War a few hundred top European scientists fled their home continent to work and to make their home in North America. This small group led the way in many scientific discoveries as well teaching a new generation of American scientists who went on to pioneer the explosion of knowledge, invention and economic growth in North America in the second half of the 20th century.
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
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