SABINE HOSSENFELDER: MATH, PHYSICS AND GETTING THE RIGHT ANSWER | MARY MARCY AND LANDE AJOSE: THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION | MICHIO KAKU: THE GOD EQUATION
Commonwealth The
THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: OUT OF MANY, ONE Portraits of America’s Immigrants
$5.00; free for members | commonwealthclub.org
JUNE/JULY 2021
June is Reopening Month! Visit commonwealthclub.org/reopening-the-club for our first in-person programs in more than a year.
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Commonwealth The
FEATURES 10 The Positive Impact of Immigrants George W. Bush talks with Kori Schake about immigrants and the U.S. immigration debate. 16 The Future of Higher Education Mary Marcy speaks with Lande Ajose about retooling for (and after) the pandemic. 20 The God Equation Michio Kaku tells Kara Platoni about the theory of everything.
JUNE/JULY 2021 VOL. 115, NO. 3
“I say these arguments are not scientific arguments. If they’re not scientific arguments, well then what are they? Some people have told me that they’re metaphysical criteria. I think philosophically that’s probably the right word to use, but I call them arguments from beauty, because that’s the way that physicists think about them and also where they originally came from.” —SABINE HOSSENFELDER
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Theoretical Needs Sabine Hossenfelder in conversation with George Hammond about a theory of everything.
DEPARTMENTS 4 Editor’s Desk By John Zipperer
ON THE COVER: Former President George W. Bush shares the stories of immigrants in prose and paint in his effort to highlight the gifts they give to our country. (Photo by Paul Morse.)
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The Commons Remembering Chuck Geschke, California Book Awards finalists announced, and Alicia Garza at a virtual Club Women’s Day event; plus upcoming program highlights Program Info
ON THIS PAGE: Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder joined us from Frankfurt, Germany, to discuss math, physics and whether beauty is important—theoretically speaking. (Photo courtesy Sabine Hossenfelder.) JUNE/JULY 2021
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Commonwealth The
June/July 2021 Volume 115, Number 3
EDITOR’S DESK
BUSINESS OFFICES
The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org
VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL
John Zipperer
FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org instagram.com/cwclub ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2021 The Commonwealth Club of California. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub. Published digitally via Issuu.com.
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Photo by Tim Mossholder
Come on in!
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elcome back. In June, we are holding a series of member open houses, welcoming back Club members for visits to the Club’s San Francisco headquarters, complete with an art show, wine and refreshments. If you turn ahead to our highlights of some upcoming programs (starting on page 8), you see the dates and times of the member open houses. You’ll also see some of the first in-person speaker programs to be scheduled—by the time you read this, there will be even more, so check out commonwealthclub.org/ events and keep your eyes open for our event email newsletters. We recently asked you, Commonwealth Club members, what you wanted to see more of in the future. Perhaps the strongest feedback we received was that some people were really eager to get back into our auditoriums for in-person programs and social gatherings, some people were really pleased to be able to watch our programs—live or on-demand—online, and many people said they want both options for enjoying Club programs. We’re going to make everyone happy. In coming months, you’ll see us unveil in-person programs, programs for which you can buy online or in-person tickets, and online-only programs. We got lots of other ideas and feedback from our member survey, so you’ll see that reflected in other initiatives in future months and years. When the pandemic first hit, The Com-
monwealth Club was the first or one of the first organizations to transition to an all-online presentation of programs. Our amazing audio and video team turned on a dime and set us up to live-stream every single event. We had live streamed plenty of programs in the past, but never everything. This necessitated altering our planning, staffing, speaker outreach, event setup and marketing. It also required replacing, adding, or upgrading various bits of technology so our speakers could be seen and heard by audiences, whether the audience member was three blocks from our building or 3,000 miles away. Perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this whole experience was being able to bring speakers to the Club who might otherwise not be able to participate. We spoke with a pro-democracy activist from Hong Kong (shortly before he was arrested for his democracy activities), journalists direct from their offices at CNN and Fox News headquarters, former California Governor Jerry Brown from his ranch, Michael J. Fox from his home, and many, many more. I have always loved technology, but I’ll spare you an encomium to computers and the internet. Suffice it to say that all of these computers, smartphones, live-stream apps, high-tech microphones, and broadband connections helped the Club continue its mission even with a global shutdown. We’re back, but we also never really left. JO H N Z IPPER ER VI C E PRESI DENT O F MEDI A & ED I T O RI AL
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LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS
Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer James Strother
Hon. Tad Taube Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly TwomblyWu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Nancy Thompson
TALK OF THE CLUB
Photos by The Commonwealth Club, White House.
Remembering Philanthropist & Tech Pioneer Chuck Geschke
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he New York Times called him the “father of desktop publishing.” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called him “a guide and hero for decades.” Despite his many accomplishments, his wife called him “really a humble, humble man.” And pretty much everyone called him “Chuck.” When Charles Geschke passed away on April 16, 2021, at the age of 81, he left behind a lifetime of professional and personal achievement. The son and grandson of engravers in the world of traditional printing, Geschke would go on to change the way books, magazines (including The Commonwealth), newspapers, photography, documents and even church newsletters are produced. “We’re the agents of change,” Geschke told the Club in 2015. In 1982, Geschke and John Warnock left Xerox to form Adobe Systems, which was named after the creek flowing behind Geschke’s Los Altos home. Their small startup would evolve into one of the world’s largest tech companies, anchored in downtown San José. Over the course of nearly four decades, Geschke served variously as chief operating officer, president and ultimately co-chairman of the board of Adobe. Geschke and Warnock also created the now-ubiquitous portable document format (PDF), Photoshop, and other innovations that revolutionized the professional and home media worlds. “I could never have imagined having a better, more likable, or more capable business
partner,” Warnock told Narayen, according to InterestingEngineering.com. Geschke was also deeply committed to supporting many nonprofits and community organizations—in his local community and the national and global communities. He was a member of The Commonwealth Club’s Board of Governors for 18 years, and a generous supporter of the Club’s building campaign, which resulted in the successful completion of our waterfront San Francisco home, believed to be the first building in the world purpose-built for a public forum. He created the “U.S. Constitution in the 21st Century” speaker series at the Club in 2008, when he began to be concerned about challenges to our democratic process. And with colleagues from Adobe, he supported us in our time of need during the pandemic, for our gala last October. President Barack Obama awarded Geschke and Warnock the 2008 National Medal of Technology and Innovation “for their pioneering contributions that spurred the desktop publishing revolution and for changing the way people create and engage with information and entertainment across multiple mediums, including print, web and video.” Geschke and Warnock also shared the AeA Medal of Achievement and the Marconi Prize. In 2015, the Club honored him with our Lifetime Achievement Award. Chuck Geschke is survived by his wife of 57 years, Nan; three children; seven grandchildren; and literally millions of people whose lives were impacted for the better by his life and works. JUNE/JULY 2021
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Finalists Announced for the Club’s 90th Annual California Book Awards Competition
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elebrating its 90th birthday, The Commonwealth Club’s California Book Awards (CBA) has announced this year’s finalists for its 2021 awards. One of the oldest and most distinguished literary award programs in the nation has chosen 26 outstanding books in six categories, out of hundreds of titles submitted for consideration. From these finalists the book award jury will choose gold and silver medal award winners to be announced in July. “The California Book Awards has been honoring California books and authors for nine decades,” commented CBA jury chair Peter Fish. “We think this year’s finalists are especially timely, innovative, and thoughtprovoking.” The finalists, he notes, “demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of California literature.” Fiction nominees include a gripping, multigenerational account of the long shadows cast by American racism. Among the First Fiction nominees is an epic, poetic exploration of the Gold Rush West. Nonfiction contenders include a powerful analysis of the ways race, gender, and national origin determine what it means to “belong” in the United States. The California Book Awards jury is made up of published authors, award-winning editors, highly experienced librarians and professors who spend six months reading books submitted by publishers– large and small—from all over the nation. “We’ve held all our passionate book discussions and debates on Zoom,” said Fish. “We think the richness and depth of contemporary California literature is especially welcome in a challenging year.” The Club thanks the estate of Martha Cox for providing the funds for the prizes. And we are grateful to Roy and Betsy Eisenhart, without whom the selection process would have been difficult or impossible during this landmark 90th year of the California Book Awards.
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FICTION Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, Pantheon/ Vintage Members Only, by Sameer Pandya, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason, Little, Brown and Company These Women, by Ivy Pochoda, Ecco The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, Riverhead Books FIRST FICTION Fiebre Tropical, by Juli Delgado Lopera, Feminist Press Godshot, by Chelsea Bieker, Catapult How Much of These Hills Is Gold, by C Pam Zhang, Riverhead Books NONFICTION Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami, Pantheon Books Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, by Ben Ehrenreich, Counterpoint Press Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream, by Conor Dougherty, Penguin Press Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire, by Tom Zoellner, Harvard University Press South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to
Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, by Alice L. Baumgartner, Basic Books POETRY Bareback Nightfall, by Joshua Escobar, Noemi Press Borderland Apocrypha, by Anthony Cody, Omnidawn Letters to a Young Brown Girl, by Barbara Jane Reyes, BOA Editions, Ltd. Little Hill, by Alli Warren, City Lights Quiet Orient Riot, by Nathalie Khankan, Omnidawn YOUNG ADULT The Black Kids, by Christina Hammonds Reed, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers Dragon Hoops, by Gene Luen Yang, First Second Books, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group Private Lessons, by Cynthia Salaysay, Candlewick Press We Are Not Free, by Traci Chee, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt JUVENILE Efrén Divided, by Ernesto Cisneros, Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Mañanaland, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, Scholastic Press The Only Black Girls In Town, by Brandy Colbert, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Outside In, by Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Celebrating Women’s History Month with Alicia Garza and the Women Leaders of Tomorrow
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any years ago, a young woman walked past The Commonwealth Club in downtown San Francisco and thought to herself, “It would be amazing to speak there one day; it means you’ve really done something.” That young woman was Alicia Garza, principal of the Black Futures Lab, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and the honoree for our 2020 Women’s History Month celebration. On Tuesday, March 23, 2021, the Club hosted a special virtual event for a small group of students, young adults, educators, and a few Club members to celebrate Women’s History Month. The joy in the Zoom room was palpable as more than 30 women of all ages gathered to discuss “How to Build a Movement: The Power of Women Leaders” with Alicia Garza. Garza was joined by Lateefah Simon, president of the Akonadi Foundation, who asked Garza about her life’s work and the women who have inspired her along the way. Garza said she is emboldened by those who underestimate her or say she can’t do something, however big or small.
She doesn’t let nay-sayers stand in her way, and she emphasized that everyone has the potential to be who they want to be, if they surround themselves with people who build them up. Garza and Simon also a n s w e re d q u e s t i o n s from the students in attendance, a truly special and memorable experience for each of them. Renee Richard, CEO of Cinnamon Girl, said, “The young achievers in attendance were moved in such a way that they are considering their own movement, the work they will take on in the world. It’s experiences like these that expose our girls to greatness and inspire them to step up. Together, we are moving the needle and making a difference as we encourage and prepare the next generation to grab the baton and forge
ahead.” The Commonwealth Club was pleased to recognize Alicia Garza and her influential work and provide a unique learning opportunity for the women leaders of tomorrow. Our thanks to Applied Materials for supporting this event and to our community partners C i n n a m o n Gi r l a n d Alliance for Girls. If you are interested in participating in the 2022 Women’s History Month event at the Club, contact Kate Steffy at ksteffy@ commonwealthclub.org If yo u w o u l d l i k e to learn more about the Club’s education initiative, please contact the Vice President of Education Lauren Silver at lsilver@ commonwealthclub.org.
Together, we are moving the needle and making a difference as we encourage and prepare the next generation to grab the baton and forge ahead.
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UPCOMING PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 1 / 10 a.m. PDT
What Do Otto Warburg, Nazis, Cancer and Diet Have in Common? LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 1 / 3 p.m. PDT
START Treaty Negotiator Rose Gottemoeller: How to Deal with Russia LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 1 / 5 p.m. PDT
Reading Californians Book Discussion: Home Remedies LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 1 / 6 p.m. PDT
Niall Ferguson: the Politics of Catastrophe LIVE STREAM WED, JUN 2 / 6 p.m. PDT
Dr. Jen Gunter with Samantha Bee: The Menapause Manifesto LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 3 / 5 p.m. PDT
LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 10 / 10 a.m. PDT
Healthy Society Series: Nobody’s Normal—The History, Culture, Stigma and Future of Mental Health LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 10 / 12 p.m. PDT
Guidance for LGBTQI Children in the AAPI Community LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 10 / 2 p.m. PDT
Collateral Damage: Connecting the Deaths of Marilyn Monroe, JFK and Dorothy Kilgallen LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 10 / 5 p.m. PDT
A Conversation with Jake Tapper LIVE STREAM FRI, JUN 11 / 10 a.m. PDT
Electrifying the Transportation Future: 12th Annual Mineta National Transportation Finance Summit
LIVE STREAM WED, JUN 16 / 9:30 a.m. PDT
What Is Trauma-Informed Care? LIVE STREAM WED, JUN 16 / 3 p.m. PDT
Islamic Activist Daisy Khan: Understanding Modern Muslim Women LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 17 / 9 a.m. PDT
The War on Drugs at 50: A Critical Reflection SAN FRANCISCO THU, JUN 17 / 2 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/17/21 SAN FRANCISCO THU, JUN 17 / 4 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/17/21 LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 17 / 6 p.m. PDT
Nancy Jo Sales: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
Clint Smith with Brittany Packnett Cunningham: Reckoning with Slavery’s History
LIVE STREAM MON, JUN 14 / 12 p.m. PDT
LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 22 / 9:30 a.m. PDT
LIVE STREAM MON, JUN 7 / 4 p.m. PDT
LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 15 / 10 a.m. PDT
LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 22 / 3 p.m. PDT
Shepard Fairey and the Power of Art LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 8 / 9:30 a.m. PDT
Healthy Society Series: Health Equity 101. Transforming the Health of Our Nation. LIVE STREAM WED, JUN 9 / 10 a.m. PDT
Annette Gordon-Reed: On Juneteenth
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Ben Rhodes: After the Fall
Theodore Johnson: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 15 / 12 p.m. PDT
George Packer: America in Crisis and Renewal
Ending America’s Forever War
Andy Slavitt: Inside the Doomed U.S. Coronavirus Response LIVE STREAM TUE, JUN 22 / 6 p.m. PDT
Secretary Ban Ki-Moon: Uniting Nations in a Divided World SAN FRANCISCO WED, JUN 23 / 2 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/23/21
ROSE GOTTEMOELLER NIALL FERGUSON JEN GUNTER SAMANTHA BEE CLINT SMITH JAKE TAPPER GEORGE PACKER DAISY KHAN ANDY SLAVITT BAN KI-MOON MELONIE AND MELORRA GREEN MEMBER OPEN HOUSES & MUCH MORE
SAN FRANCISCO WED, JUN 23 / 4 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/23/21 LIVE STREAM WED, JUN 23 / 5 p.m. PDT
Craig Melvin: Learning to Be a Son & Father LIVE STREAM THU, JUN 24 / 12 p.m. PDT
The Opulence of Blackness: Melonie & Melorra Green Elevate Black Artists
SAN FRANCISCO WED, JUN 30 / 2 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/30/21 SAN FRANCISCO WED, JUN 30 / 4 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 6/30/21
LIVE STREAM WED, JUL 7 / 4 p.m. PDT
The Hidden Palace: A Tale of the Golem and the Jinni SAN FRANCISCO THU, JUL 8 / 2 p.m. PDT
Member Open House: 7/8/21 LIVE STREAM THU, SEP 16 / 2 p.m. PDT
Which Comes First, Overeating or Obesity? Carbohydrates, Insulin and Metabolic Health SAN FRANCISCO & LIVE STREAM WED, SEP 22 / 6 p.m. PDT
A New Era of Experimental Medicine: From Video Games to Psychedelics
Note: Online-only programs are labeled “Live Stream”; hybrid programs, with online and in-person options available for viewing or attending, are listed as live stream and the city where the event will take place; and programs that are in-person
only are listed with the city name. New programs are added to The Commonwealth Club of California’s schedule every day. For the full list, event details, and to buy tickets, visit: commonwealthclub.org/events
JUNE/JULY 2021
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CELEBRATING A NATION’S IMMIGRANTS PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH HAS USED
the art of painting to honor the everyday heroes of America. His new book shines a spotlight on America’s immigrants and their stirring stories, highlighting how hard work, strong values, dreams and determination know no borders or boundaries. From the April 26, 2021, online program “President George W. Bush: Out of Many, One—Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, Author, Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants IN CONVERSATION WITH KORI SCHAKE, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute KORI SCHAKE: I am honored to have the opportunity to talk with President George W. Bush about his new book Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, which is a pairing of portraits he’s painted of American immigrants with discussion of their life journeys. The book profiles 43 first-generation Americans, all still living when he painted them. Mr. President, welcome. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Thank you Kori. And thanks to The Commonwealth Club as well. I appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts. SCHAKE: Let’s start by having you tell us about your purpose in creating the book. What were you hoping to do? BUSH: I’m hoping to bring some sense into what is a heated dialogue right now. The immigration issue has been an important issue to me. After all, I was a governor of Texas, and we dealt with a lot of issues
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with Mexico. And I tried as president to fix a broken system. It’s still broken. I’ve been troubled by the rhetoric, however, surrounding this issue. It just goes to show what a political football it’s been. And I hope to bring a positive perspective to the role immigrants have played in our [country]. So I picked 43 people, some of whom are famous, and then some of them people never heard of. All of whom are good contributors to our country. SCHAKE: You write in the book that “Americans can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time.” It reminded me of your emphasis on compassionate conservatism, which seems to be so lacking in our current political climate. Is that in your mind? BUSH: I am not trying to defend that political philosophy. I am trying to move the needle on fixing a broken system. And it starts with talking about positive things.
Former President George W. Bush. (DOD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos M. Vazquez II.)
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Left: Kori Schake interviews President George W. Bush for The Commonwealth Club. Right: The cover of Bush’s new book focusing on the images and stories of America’s immigrants.
Look, one of the bases of this book—and it may be compassionate conservatism to some—is that we’re all God’s children and every life is precious. Now I know that sounds corny to some, but if that’s the basis from which to approach an issue, all of a sudden individual stories become a part of a larger whole right now, [instead of just] “How can I win politically on this issue?” on both sides. Therefore the [current] rhetoric is [too] harsh. It’s not becoming of our country, and nothing’s going to get done. So my temper is to try to advance the agenda. The truth of the matter is we can’t reform the whole package at once. There are some small steps that can be taken, and we’re trying to advance the small steps that can be taken. SCHAKE: I love this quote from one of the people you profile in the book, [former PepsiCo Chair and CEO] Indra Nooyi. She’s talking about America, and she says, “It’s the one country in the world where creativity flourished, individuality was cherished, innovation was rampant and the future of the world was going to be determined by it.” You write that immigration is a sign of a confident and successful nation. Are you worried that we’re becoming a less confident nation? BUSH: Yes, I am. First of all, I loved Indra’s quote as well, and I hope she likes her portrait. A lot of people don’t know her history, but she came here to go to graduate school —and thank goodness she did, because she brought enormous brainpower, skill, management expertise, and she ran PepsiCo. A confident nation is one that says we can both enforce our border and treat people with respect. But throughout our history, there have been moments of high populist drama that yields isolation, as in protectionism and nativism. We’re kind of in a nativist period, and it’s going to require leaders to stand up and say “We can do better—and here’s an aspirational goal.” One of the goals is to enforce our borders, which we can do once we fix the system and treat people with respect.
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SCHAKE: I was struck by how personal a book this is. You quote your brothers and sister, your daughters. I especially like the way you conjured your mother so vividly, especially her posting rules on your bedroom doors. And that one of those rules was “Ask Paula if you can help her.” Tell the story of Paula Rendon. BUSH: I’m a teenager. It’s raining like mad in Houston. The doorbell rings. “George, go get the door.” “Yes ma’am. Yes, mother.” Anyway, so I go get the door and there’s a little woman, just kind of tiny, scared. It’s the introduction of Paula Rendon to our family. She had come up with a work visa; mother and dad hired her. She was with our family
BUSH: We think one of the underutilized assets in our country are the four presidential libraries down here. My dad’s, mine, LBJ’s and Bill Clinton’s. These libraries atrophy very quickly once the name disappears. So I want to make sure that we had a useful role beyond my life. One useful role is to use leadership lessons from the four presidencies to encourage a whole group of people to become engaged in our society. It’s nonpartisan. People say we need more bipartisanship This is pretty bipartisan when you think about it. So the Clinton library and my library, we figure out who should be in the program. And a lot of the people in this book are people I met through that program. SCHAKE: I laughed reading the story of Joseph Kim, the north Korean escapee, describing the Marine guards at the consulate in China, teaching them how to do push ups and flexing to show him what to eat, to grow strong. In that same recounting I was struck at how prominent a role faith communities
“A confident nation is one that says we can both enforce our border and treat people with respect.” —GEORGE W. BUSH from ’59 to like 2010. And maybe a little later than that. And she was our second mother. We watched her save money, buy a house, bring up three kids. The kids graduated from college. I mean, it’s unbelievable. It was my introduction to immigration. This is what immigrants mean. When I was a governor of Texas, I said family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande river. And I had Paula in mind when I said that, because I watched her work hard to support her family. It’s still the case today. A lot of people coming here, they’re doing work that needs to be done, are supporting their families and they care deeply about their families. So Paula is a good lesson for me. SCHAKE: Talk a little bit if you would about the presidential scholars program at the [George W. Bush] Institute.
have played, not just in helping Joseph Kim escape North Korea, but throughout the stories of these Americans. Religion is such an important aspect of our immigration system. Would you talk a little bit about how that is represented in the book for you? BUSH: First of all, I think people who are generally religious people ought to be engaged in the immigration debate, because it goes back to what I said earlier—and that is in a positive way, by the way. In the immigration debate, all life is precious. I recognize not every oppressed person can come to our shores, but if we retreat, then a lot of people wonder whether or not we hear their voices. Joseph Kim is a classic case of somebody who went to enormous lengths to escape. One of the things in the story I think will shock people is that his mother was so
desperate that she took Joseph Kim’s sister to China and sold her in order to have enough food for Joseph and the mother to live. The father had already starved to death. The mother gets caught going over there to China and gets arrested and dies in prison. So this kid is 14 years old. Alone. Anyway, there are some underground missionaries in China—and they’ve got to be pretty underground in order to survive. But they helped rescue Joseph. Now you’ve got to understand these North Koreans don’t know what God is. I mean, the only guy they know is Kim Jong-un or his father. So religion has a major role in helping refugees and asylum seekers achieve their dreams. Religion ought to play a role here in the United States in terms of helping people because, well, it does. Catholic Charities has had an enormous
role in helping some of these immigrants resettle. As a matter of fact, the proceeds of this book go to these organizations that are helping people. America just can’t lose its way when it comes to this, Kori. It’s a really important part of our heritage. So this book talks a lot about people escaping unspeakable conditions. It talks about religious people, helping them resettle in a foreign land. Us. But it also talks about how they themselves end up helping others in this cycle of love that I hope is reflected in this book. SCHAKE: Several of the people portrayed in the book talk in different ways about the importance of retaining their ethnic background. It seems to me that one crucial advantage of our country is that you don’t have to give up your history or your pride
in the nation you came from to become an American. That is, we’re all to a large extent hyphenated Americans. It reminded me, as I was reading through the book about the Roosevelts challenging the Daughters of the American Revolution that we’re all immigrants, I think [about] that a lot when sizing up the challenge of a rising China. The Chinese government’s banking on the advantages of a billion people, but the United States is banking on our ability to attract talent. I wonder if you have thoughts about how our domestic debate about immigration might affect our ability to continue attracting immigrants like so many you celebrate in this book. BUSH: That’s a good question. First of all, the minute you start talking about China plus America’s willingness to accept people’s ethnic identities, I think of the Uyghurs or the Tibetans; there’s an example of where the Chinese are trying to wipe out their tradition and history. It’s the opposite of what we believe. If we don’t adhere to that, then people that are hurting for a better way will be discouraged. We say all this knowing full well that border enforcement is going to be very important in order to get anything done. Americans have to be assured that we’re doing our job. But by reforming the system, it means it’s easier to enforce the border. It’s hard to enforce the border with a broken system. I say all that as kind of a long-winded way of saying there are millions who still want to come here. The American people have got to be assured that not every million will arrive. But one thing that Americans have got to understand, though, is when we speak about the oppressed clearly and show our country as an example of how the oppressed can flourish, it has not only an effect on their psyche, it also is a clear example of what can be. It’s hard for us to be a living example if we don’t in turn treat people with respect here at home. SCHAKE: That segues to the story you tell of the Hermosa family, because it raises the difficult subject of people choosing to overstay their visas in order to remain in the U.S. As I understand, the majority of illegal immigrants in the U.S. are actually people who come into the country on temporary visas and then don’t leave when the visas expire. Could you talk a little about the difficulty of that from a policy perspective? BUSH: Yeah. I made a decision to include the Hermosas, but also to include others, two others who came here, broke the law. . . . By the way, all of them are now unbelievably important contributors. I think the Hermosa JUNE/JULY 2021
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ROYA MAHBOOB
Afghan-born Roya Mahboob became one of the first female tech CEOs in her native country before coming to the United States. She is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Citizen Fund, and her portrait is included in Out of Many, One. She recently spoke to The Commonwealth. THE COMMONWEALTH: Let’s begin with telling us about your life before you came to the United States. What was it like when you were a young child in Afghanistan? ROYA MAHBOOB: I lived in darkness. When I was a child, the Taliban had got [control of] our cities and the only thing that they loved was darkness. So I lived in darkness. I always wanted to escape from the life that I had, and then we went to Iran and I was a refugee for a while. In 2003 my family came back to Afghanistan, and then I had a chance to go to university. I finished my university—I got my degree in computer science—and then I started my own company. In 2014 I came to the United States. COMMONWE ALTH: You have the experience of having been a migrant to two different countries, in that you moved to Iran and later you move to the United States. Do you think you had a different experience because of your age or perhaps even the eras that you were in these two different countries? MAHBOOB: In Iran it was different timing. I had access to go to the schools, but every year we had challenges, because at that time [the] immigration system in Iran [was dealing with] a lot of immigrants; a lot of Afghans had difficult experiences going to the schools. Because we were Afghan, we were not allowed to go to certain places, get access to some extra courses, or get better jobs there. I still think that Afghans have these challenges there. But in the U.S. it was different. Because of where my background was, I had better opportunities in the U.S. in terms of my business, in terms of my work or studies, and I can’t compare my time when I was in Iran with the United States. That’s why I think that many immigrants have a dream to come here, because this is a land of opportunities. No matter your general or social status, you have the same opportunities and access to education, or
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
if you want to be an entrepreneur or even you want to pursue a politician’s career. COMMONWEALTH: Did you have a network of friends, business contacts or family in the United States before you came here? MAHBOOB: Yes. The first time I came to [the United States] was in 2019, and then I visited several times in the United States. Then I started a business in New York, and my business partner sponsored my visa, and that’s how I came to the U.S. COMMONWEALTH: You met President George W. Bush on a trip to Dallas. What was that like? MAHBOOB: I a lways appreciated President Bush, because he gave us a light in the darkness, and during his terms of president we had a lot of opportunities in Afghanistan. You know that many of the girls right now can go to the schools. . . . There was a night that we had been invited [to a dinner], and I saw that I am [sitting] next to Mr. President. I can’t even express the words that I was my feeling. So I meet with him and he asks questions and he wants to know, and I could say to him what he has done and what we are going to do, and he was very happy to hear that. I told him that in 2003, I was just introduced to this magic box the computer and [it] changed my life; today we have young leaders learning about robotics and going to the international stage and competing with the world on robotics. He was happy. He and his wife are very supportive of the women in Afghanistan. COMMONWEALTH: What was it like to have President Bush paint your portrait and be included in this book? MAHBOOB: He told me that night, and I was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t believe that the president of the country like the United States, the powerful and most respected the country in the world, wants to paint me. I loved my [portrait that he painted]. It looks very beautiful in my bedroom, so I love it.
example is one where they admit they made a difficult decision to stay. They were contributing citizens in the Plano area here in Dallas. They paid their taxes. But it really goes to show that had there been a system that said, “Okay, you’re doing a job that needs to be done and therefore there’s a legal way for you to stay here,” then it would have been a different story for them. They wouldn’t have had to overstay their visa. Secondly, there needs to be a tracking system for tourist visas. Now that’s very diff icult, particularly given the civil libertarian nature of our society, but surely technology will enable us to better get a feel for who’s overstaying and where are they. But I can see it’s a difficult issue. It’s just like the issue of people coming across the border to do work and hanging in there and hoping they don’t get caught—but nevertheless paying taxes. So I guess what I’m trying to say is if we had a better labor policy, high-skilled and low-skilled labor, then it would make a lot of issues like this less relevant. SCHAKE: Let’s talk a little bit about the art in the book. Tell us about the process of painting these portraits. Some have said your earlier paintings of Iraq war veterans must’ve been cathartic for you. Was painting these portraits cathartic in any way? BUSH: Not really. Unlike the Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans—who many of them suffered as a result of my decision—I was more joyful. I was joyful painting the war veterans, too; I was more in awe, let me put it to you that way. But I was in awe and joyful in painting these folks. I never painted anybody until I knew their stories. I had met everybody, except for two. So there was just taking a photograph and trying to copy it with no emotion. I put something into them, and it took me about a year. The amazing question is, “Why in the hell are you a painter in the first place?” SCHAKE: Why in the hell are you a painter in the first place? BUSH: People view me as a cultural cretin, but to answer your question, it’s because Winston Churchill inf luenced me. His leadership influenced me a lot and it turns out he was a painter. I read an essay, “Painting as a Pastime,” that he wrote. A fabulous essay. That was at a period in my life when I was busy, but I wasn’t learning enough. I said if he can paint, I can paint. I know it sounds cocky, but you’ve got to be pretty cocky [to] run for president in the first place, you know? Only me out of 320 million of you. Anyway, so I started painting. It turns out I
love painting portraits, because I love people. I paint all the time. [Former Republican National Committee Chair] Ken Mehlman said, “We need your voice in immigration.” I said, “No, you’re not going to have my voice, because I don’t want to be yet another talking head. Nor do I want to criticize my successors.” But I said, “You know what? I’m going to paint portraits and maybe they can tell the story.” Once I got going and [got to] know their stories, I decided to tell them myself. SCHAKE: One of the most powerful portraits was Gilbert Tuhabonye. Would you please tell his story? BUSH: He was here yesterday. He came to Dallas. I got to know Gilbert because he had a running program in Austin, and our daughter Jenna was a University of Texas student. Gilbert got her out of bed every Saturday morning to run. I said, “Man, this guy—if he can get my daughter out of bed Saturday morning to run, he’s got to be some kind of guy.” So I learned his story. He was in Burundi. He was a national track runner. Very successful runner. In high school, a bunch of Hutu surrounded his school during the genocide that took place in Rwanda and Burundi and burned the school down because he was a Tutsi. His body got severely burned; he ran to a hospital. But he never lost his dream of coming to the United States to run. And then [he went] to Abilene Christian [University]. His is a story of perseverance and forgiveness. He’s a joyful person in spite of the fact that his fellow citizens, one of whom was his friend, tried to kill him with fire. He runs his program there called Gilbert’s Gazelles. He also provides fresh water for people in Burundi. Which is by the way the best possible foreign policy for the United States—a foreign policy of effective compassion. And I painted Gilbert. You’re always a little nervous when they first see their portraits, but he’s like Thear Suzuki. I showed her her portrait; [she’s a refugee from the] Cambodian [genocide]. And she said, “Finally somebody sees me.” SCHAKE: What a beautiful compliment. BUSH: Yeah, it really was. It was a beautiful statement, really. But anyway, Gilbert’s a good man and there’s a lot of stories like Gilbert’s. I mean, it’s unbelievable what people go through in life and come here and are so appreciative of what our country offers. And that’s the spirit I’m trying to convey to people who bothered to pay attention to the issue.
ALFREDO DUARTE Alfredo Duarte is co-founder and CEO of Dallas-based Taxco Produce, which he started after settling in the United States following his childhood in Mexico. His portrait and story are included in Out of Many, One. He recently spoke to The Commonwealth.
THE COMMONWEALTH: Tell us what your life was like before you came here. ALFREDO DUARTE: I grew up in the mountains of Mexico, [the] Durango— which is part of the Rocky Mountains— and very, very poor. My father was a farmer in those mountains and my mother was a teacher. It was a really small town with 50 people. So you know, it was challenging; it was a very different life. COMMONWEALTH: How did it come about then that you came to the United States? DUARTE: People growing up in those little towns in the mountains . . . have been coming to the United States for many, many years. So it’s always in our mind. We see some of the people that come here to the States, and then they send money back home and build little houses and they’re better off. So you can grow up over there in those towns kind of with your mindset that someday you’re gonna go to the States and make money. For me, at 12 years old, I started thinking about that. And when I went to work at 14 my father sent me to a [another town] and found me a job. [I was] there for a year, so I was 15 and 6 months when I went back home. [Eventually] I got close to my mom and my dad and I told them one night . . . that I’m gonna leave. I’m gonna be gone. They realized that they couldn’t do anything to stop me, so my father kind of redirected the idea. He said, “Well, you’re going to Tijuana.” He had a brother and a sister in the Los Angeles area, and he said “You need to go.” COMMONWEALTH: Was the actual border crossing scary? DUARTE: In 1975, if you remember if you were in the area, that was the worst flood that the river had. About a month after that happened, we went across the river. They did a human chain, put the shortest ones in the middle so we can pull them out; the girls—we put them on in the middle. That night was scary, very scary.
For a minute, I thought that we were going to perish; we were going to drown. But we went across and ended up in the safe house. At that point I realized my body hurt a lot, and I started checking myself. We were full of thorns from going across and hiding on the banks of the river. So you know, it was not an easy thing. The next day they put me in the trunk of a Crown Victoria—I never forget that. It was four or five guys inside the trunk with me. COMMONWEALTH: In the same trunk? DUARTE: Yes, sir, and it’s how I get to LA—in a trunk of a car. I remember that when I got out of that trunk, I couldn’t even walk. I was kind of paralyzed. COMMONWEALTH: [Later you moved to] Dallas and started your company when you and your brother-in-law took a risk. You got a truck and started selling tomatoes to restaurants. Tell us a bit about getting things started. DUARTE: When I first came in ’83 I got two jobs, and my brother-in-law had this one job selling for a company. I keep telling Jesse, “Yes, we can do this.” Imagine just me with no experience in that business trying to convince a man that has been there 24 years with eight kids, with the good salary, to quit his job and go build a company selling tomatoes. For me, it was an easy decision; when you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything to lose. For him I think it was a harder decision COMMONWEALTH: When you were growing up, was this a dream to be a CEO of a successful multimillion dollar business? DUARTE: No, sir. I don’t think that was the dream at all. A lot of people have asked me about the dream. I think the dream [is] what can we achieve, and then you continue to dream, and it’s a changing thing to your life. We live life in blocks of time. Because like every five years in our lives we have an adjustment [and] everything [changes]. JUNE/JULY 2021
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THE FUTURE OF HI SCHOOLS LARGE AND SMALL
innovated to deal with the pandemic. How will they fare in the future? And do small schools have a valuable niche to fill? From the March 30, 2021, program “Mary Marcy and Lande Ajose: The Future of Higher Education.” Dr. MARY MARCY, Ph.D., President, Dominican University of California; Board Member, The Commonwealth Club; Author, The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures In Conversation with Dr. LANDE AJOSE, Ph.D., Senior Policy Advisor for Higher Education to Governor Gavin Newsom LANDE AJOSE: I’m wondering if you could just share with our viewers what inspired you to write this book? MARY MARCY: We were trying to do this before the pandemic hit. The book was like one of those perfect bits of timing related to the pandemic; it actually was released on, I think March 9 or something last year. Perhaps there was a little bit of a noise in the system besides what was going on with The Small College Imperative. But what’s interesting, and I think what’s important in thinking about it now, is that the questions [about higher education] are continuing to be relevant and perhaps even more relevant as we come through the pandemic. Issues around financial sustainability, access to college, increasing diversity of students—those are crucial issues for every family, every community, all over the state and all over the nation. I really thought about the book as a way to understand, embrace and think about how higher education is changing and needs to change, to respond to some pretty significant shifts in the larger ecosystem, in the larger environment. [I’m] specifically talking about small colleges, because I think one of the great strengths of American higher education, and certainly a California higher education, is its diversity. In this case, I mean diversity of types of institutions. So you have a great community college system, a great state college system. We’ve got the UC system, lots of specialized institutions and some really strong independent institutions. The ecosystem matters. The idea is that there are great options for all students. The challenge is if part of that ecosystem is under great stress or falls apart, we lose the opportunity for higher education to do what it does best, which provides an avenue for personal and social transformation. I’m at an independent college, a small college. I know that arena well. A lot of institutions were under stress. I wanted to say what can make us successful, and how can we serve students and families and our missions more effectively. So that was really the genesis for the book. I would say, like many things as we come out of the pandemic, the questions that I had going in are probably more rather than less relevant today.
IGHER EDUCATION AJOSE: I went to a small college, and I was really interested in this idea of a typology—you lay out a typology for how these small colleges are structured. Can you talk about how useful a typology is to the average student or family? And tell us a little bit about where you placed Dominican within that. MARCY: I actually started thinking kind of internally about students and families and how they look at colleges. [It’s] really important to understand that even within a subset like independent colleges, it’s not one size fits all. And it’s not—as much as we talk about it—the athletics team or the beauty of the campus. They’re really very different institutions. So on the one end of the spectrum that I created, the typology, is the classic liberal arts college? Highly residential. You’re going to study the core liberal arts and sciences. You’re going to get a terrific education. You’re going to, hopefully, become a better citizen and a better member of society as a whole, as well as have great avenues to employment. That’s the classic liberal arts. The challenge for small colleges is that’s not by itself easily sustainable for a lot of institutions. So there’s been a lot of innovation going on. I know part of your focus [as an advisor to the governor] is also saying we need to be responsive to workforce needs. The liberal arts can provide real avenues to the workforce, but it’s not obvious to everyone how that fits. And some places have reinvented themselves a little bit. [On the] other end of the topology, much more online, much more just-in-time types of education, much more market-driven. [There are] lots of spaces in between, but those are kind of the [options]. If you’re a student or a parent thinking about where you go to college, you need to understand where the institution fits in that broader spectrum. Not just what it feels like on campus, but what will my experience be when I’m in college here and what does that prepare me for when I’m done? AJOSE: So are you thinking that student preferences for college have changed, or is it that the liberal arts model just hasn’t kept pace with the enormous pressures and the enormous changes of society as a whole in terms of how it’s preparing students? MARCY: It’s a great question. I think liberal arts is actually fairly misunderstood. If you look at the data, if you get out five or 10 years from graduating from college, it really doesn’t matter that much what you major in. In fact, a lot of students from liberal arts backgrounds do as well or better if you measure the end “return on your investment” like salaries. So students from liberal arts colleges who have majored in the liberal arts do extraordinarily well. Having said that, we have become very proficient at measuring higher education based on return on investment. And it is a big investment for the state. It’s a big investment for the family. So what’s our return? That tends to track more for many folks to “What’s my job going to be what I get done, and how sure can I be that that will happen?” So I think that one of the challenges has been for independent colleges to be able to kind of put the breadcrumbs out and say these are all the options that can happen as a result. One of the ways that some liberal arts colleges have started to reinvent—it’s certainly something we’ve done at Dominican with really good results—is focused less on what are you majoring in and more on what’s your hands-on student experience? At Dominican, every single student has some type of active community-
Photo by Nikolayhg.
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engaged learning. Every student has a digital portfolio that they can take with them to a job or apply to graduate school with. Every student has a mentor. Every student has a capstone project. So it’s really hands-on, and you can then tie it directly to: “Here are the skills I have, here are the things I know how to do,” and that can lead to all kinds of jobs. So we’re less interested in what you’re majoring in and more interested in creating a particular kind of experience. Now, I say that because I know Dominican really well, but there are a number of institutions that are really refocusing around that kind of handson engaged, active learning as a way to tie students’ experiences to life beyond campus. AJOSE: So when you think about that—the Dominican example in particular, which I love—I’ve been a strong advocate of a digital portfolio for a long time, because I think measuring quality in higher education becomes somewhat elusive and a digital portfolio actually shows a student’s work. I’m wondering though, as you think about where that fits in the typology, how standard that is for our liberal arts college, what that means in terms of your typology and what it means for the kind of experience a student will have on those different campuses. Obviously if you’re online, you’re having a very different kind of experience than a small residential liberal arts college, but for some of your other models of how colleges are evolving, is it that the intimacy that we expect to see, is it that hands-on experience at most of them, or does it really vary quite widely? MARCY: It varies a lot. I think one of the challenges for small colleges—we all say you’re going to get a very personalized experience. Well, yes, you will. Absolutely. But that by itself doesn’t make a great education. So the places that have adopted some type of educational model built on what we call—because we like jargon— high impact practices, things that make a difference to students when they’re in college, institutions that have adopted those and said every student’s going to have this are the ones that are making a difference. I can give you a pretty interesting data point. I think it was “Sesame Street” [that] was like “one of these things is not like the other”? About a month ago, some data from the Department of Education came out that said what institutions in the country are most effective at getting students access to high-paying jobs soon after graduation. It was controlled by major. So it wasn’t like every place was listed as a computer science institution. One of the things that came out
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of that was the top 10 institutions tend to be private colleges with a strong liberal arts core. What’s even more interesting is it’s this fascinating mix of places you’d expect and places you wouldn’t expect. Number one is Harvard, number nine is Stanford—I got to say this, Number 10 is Dominican—for salaries post-graduation. And it’s because of that kind of engaged learning. There’s a lot of institutions that are in this small, private college mode that are doing extraordinarily well for student outcomes. It tends to align when they’ve had a highly engaged student experience as an undergraduate. AJOSE: When I think about small colleges, I think about how they fit together with what we know to be the student population in California. We have a lot of what I think of as being next-generation students— underrepresented, first-gen to college, Black, Latinx, indigenous. One might assume that they might find a deeper sense of community at a large institution simply because they might find more people like them. Can you talk about how and whether small colleges are the right place for our diverse student population in California? MARCY: Yeah. That’s such a great question. And [I can] completely understand one saying, “Let’s go to a place where there’s 50,000 students; I’m going to find my tribe.” I think that [people] would be very surprised at the profile of students at most independent colleges in California. [Dominican is] about two thirds students of color, most from underrepresented [backgrounds]; about a third of our students were the first in their family to go to college. That’s not unusual. That’s actually typical of independent colleges in California. Okay, so that’s like diversityone, right? You have diversity in the room. What do you do with it? I think the question that the families and students should ask is not “Is it big enough to find my people?” but “What is the experience of diversity, equity and inclusion on this campus?” One of the things I try to profile in the book is the places that have been successful at adapting to a changing student demographic are the places who very intentionally said, “Demographics are changing and we need to live that.” So don’t wait for it to happen. Be intentional about what are best practices for this profile of students. How do we meet those students where they are? And I would say that’s particularly true for first-generation students who are still learning college. So it’s not that these students can’t do well at large institutions. They absolutely can. It’s not that they can’t do well at small institutions. It’s
“We had like two hours to turn things around and get the message out that we were going online like tomorrow and here’s the plan.” —MARY MARCY
“California could benefit from thinking about what role can distance learning play in helping us think about innovation in higher education.” —LANDE AJOSE
the questions that families and students ask that’s important. The other thing I’ll say about the question of where we fit is that we focus so much on access to college and getting in—and that’s a huge step and the first one—but the next series of questions has be, “What happens when I’m there?” And “What does it prepare me for later?” Getting in is not the prize; getting in is the first step. And the rest of these conversations are the crucial ones for student outcomes and student success. AJOSE: I’ll just say that I have a high school senior. So we are asking that question right now, as all of the college letters come in. I wanted to talk a little bit about colleges in the pandemic. Those of us here in the Bay Area sadly heard about the announcement at Mills College, that they’ll be making a transition [away from being a degreegranting educational institution and will become a research institute instead]. I’m wondering if you’re optimistic about the role of small colleges, especially given the pandemic and how the last 12 months has changed the prospects for small colleges. MARCY: I’m kind of a hard-headed or pragmatic optimist. I think that the work that small colleges and independent colleges do is so crucial and so central to positive student outcomes, that in a general sense I’m optimistic. I’m also, you know, really sobered by Mills, by our good colleagues at Notre Dame de Namur [which is transitioning to being only a graduate school]. I’m sobered, because I think we were struggling, as you mentioned, facing really tough challenges f inancially and other wise before the pandemic. I know and respect [the people at Mills College] and they did incredible work and valiant work to make things happen there. One of the things I really respect is that they have great clarity of mission. So, your question about am I optimistic? It would be one thing if Mills disappeared; it would be much more tragic if that mission was lost. There’s great focus there around women’s voices and women’s equity and social justice. Those are questions that a lot of small colleges are going to need to be asking. Do we need to reinvent our mission or do we need to reinvent around mission? And you asked the question earlier about liberal arts colleges. Are they failing to adapt, or [is there a problem in] the liberal arts in general? That’s a question we all have to ask—how do we adapt to be successful, but still with great clarity on what’s our purpose? Why does this institution exist and what needs to continue to exist?
AJOSE: Speaking of adaptation, last year I thought it was remarkable to see every single college in the state of California pivot to distance learning in the space of three weeks. I was just like, wow, because it’s a huge enterprise. It’s a set of enterprises. I’m wondering how you think the pandemic is going to permanently change higher education. What should we be thinking about in terms of distance learning, and how will it change the student experience? MARCY: It’s going to have a profound effect, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this as you’re looking at the landscape, too. Everybody can remember where they were. I mean, we were literally in a cabinet meeting on campus talking about if we have to go online for a while. We had, I think, like two hours to turn things around and get the message out to everybody that we were going online like tomorrow and here’s the plan. For most of us, Dominican certainly included, the metaphor I used was last spring was like you’re driving down the freeway at 70 miles an hour and you blow a tire. So you put the donut on because that’s in the trunk and it might get you to the next stop, but it’s not going to carry you through. What’s interesting about that is that most of us spent the summer really investing in trying to do this right for the fall. So there’s a lot of investment in online education. There’s a lot of learning about what’s working for students and what isn’t. I know we’re not the only institution that’s been looking at student feedback and assessment and faculty feedback and assessment saying what’s important. So what are the outcomes from that? I’m going to suggest two or three, and I’ll bet you have some thoughts about this too. The first is that students very much miss the campus experience, but the campus experience is not the same as all of my learning takes place in the classroom, right? It’s the total campus experience. It’s being with their friends. It’s getting to know people in and out of the classroom, adults in and out of the classroom, not only faculty. It’s a total campus immersion experience that students want, and that’s understandable. But they appreciate the greater flexibility of being able to do more things online, whether it’s coursework or some of the other work that needs to happen. And they liked the just-in-time aspect of pieces of it. So I think what we’re doing, and I’m guessing a lot of other institutions [are as well], is saying, What did we learn? Which class has actually worked better online or in a hybrid format? Some trivial things: Do we really need to have wet signatures on all of
those pieces of paper? Can we actually do a whole bunch of this through DocuSign? I think how higher education is going to transform pretty significantly. But one of the surprising outcomes, and I’ve heard this from colleagues at institutions large and small, public and private, is that no one really sees this as everybody’s now going to go online or that’s going to be the predominant form, because students so missed the collegiality and the relationships and the campus experience. So we’re going to be more nimble. We’re probably going to have more options. But I don’t think we’re going to all of a sudden all be virtual. That’s my best read right now. But you spent quite a bit of time thinking about this question. So what do you think now? AJOSE: I think I would agree with you. There’s such deep desire to feel connected, beyond the little boxes that we find ourselves in. And I think that faculty missed that connection just as much as students do. Especially those colleges that are residential. It’s a huge part of the experience that students often choose to pay for. And they’re making kind of a proactive choice about what kind of institution they want to be at. So there’s so many ways in which the current environment doesn’t fit those choices. At the same time, I think California could benefit from thinking about what role can distance learning play in helping us to think about innovation within higher education. I agree with you there’ll be increased nimbleness. But I think and I hope that there are faculty out there who are saying, “Huh, I never would’ve thought that this actually might enhance my teaching and consequently enhance student learning,” right? It’s about the teaching and learning piece. I think those questions are now being asked in ways in which they weren’t being asked a year ago, and in ways in which we maybe assumed a year ago or two years ago that technology and this pivot that we’ve made could never have possibly had a beneficial outcome. Now we see that there are some silver linings. The state will never go to a model where everything’s going to be online, but integrating a little bit more of that actually could be quite beneficial. I’ve heard students talk about how asynchronous can be great for lectures, because I can listen to the lecture; I can rewind; I can go back; and then I can complement that with a discussion group. And I can do it on my own time. So some things are opportunities that we should grab onto, especially if they could result in potentially more students having access to higher education. JUNE/JULY 2021
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IN SEARCH OF THE Dr. Michio Kaku was interviewed for The Commonwealth Club by Wired.com’s Kara Platoni. (Kaku photo by Andrea Brizzi; Platoni photo by Rosa Furneaux; photo above by ipicgr.)
ONCE PHYSICISTS CAN
successfully combine theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, all forces in the universe will be recognized and tied into one. Physicist Michio Kaku seeks to document this epic journey of uniting theories of space in his new book The God Equation. From the April 16, 2021, online program “Dr. Michio Kaku: The God Equation.” Dr. MICHIO KAKU, Professor of Theoretical Physics, City College of New York; Author, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything In conversation with KARA PLATONI, Senior Editor, Science, Wired.com
KARA PLATONI: I wanted to introduce people to the big idea of your book. The theory of everything is a quest to unite the two big frameworks that we have for understanding the universe. There’s general relativity, which describes gravity and spacetime; and there’s quantum mechanics, which describes everything else—electromagnetism, strong nuclear force. So the first describes the biggest things in the universe, and the second describes the smallest things in the universe—and your quest is to unite them all under one umbrella. Why do you think there can be one theory that describes everything? MICHIO KAKU: Well, you know all of biology can be summarized in the language of chemistry; all of chemistry can be summarized in the language of physics. And all the physics can be summarized by these two great theories that don’t talk to each other.
They’re hostile theories. They have different mathematics, different physical [structures], and they don’t combine. So why should God have a left hand and a right hand that don’t talk to each other? You know, it’s amazing that the great theme of science for the last 2,000 years has been unification. Isaac Newton unified the laws of heaven with the laws of the Earth. Maxwell and Faraday united the laws of electricity with those of magnetism. Einstein with E=mc2 unified matter with energy. That’s the theme of the universe. So why should this grand theme of unification be spoiled at the most fundamental level? The level at which we have the Big Bang, black holes. And that’s why I think there has to be one unified theory that unites everything into the God equation. PLATONI: So you don’t think nature should be chaotic and messy and “red in tooth and claw,” just all over the place. KAKU: That’s right. In fact, I first heard about this idea when I was eight years old. When I was eight years old, a great scientist
E GOD EQUATION had just died and all the newspapers published a picture of his desk—just his desk—and the caption said, “This is the unfinished manuscript of the greatest scientist of our time.” I was hooked. I had to know why couldn’t he finish that. He could ask his mother, right? It’s a homework problem. I went to the library; I had to know what was behind this. I found out the man’s name was Albert Einstein, and that book was to be his crowning achievement. He wanted an equation one inch long, perhaps, that would unify all the great forces in the universe. He failed. For 30 years he tried to do that and he failed. I was hooked. When I was in high school, by the way, I built an atom smasher. I went to my mom and I said, “Can I have permission to build an electron accelerator in the garage?” And my mom said, “Sure, why not?” So I assembled 400 pounds of transformers, steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I built an atom smasher in the garage. Of course, every time I turned it on I blew out all the circuit breakers in the house. My poor mom would just shake her head and say, “Why couldn’t I have a son who plays basketball? Maybe if I buy him a baseball. And for God’s sake, why can’t he find a nice Japanese girlfriend? What does he have to build these machines in the garage?”
PLATONI: So was this the beginning for you of this quest to find the one-inch theory that describes everything, seeing this photo of Einstein’s desk? K AKU: That’s right. One photograph changed my life. I said to myself, “That’s for me.” This is the greatest challenge. The Holy Grail of science: unify all the laws of the universe into a single framework. And today, we think we have it. It’s not in its final form, but we call it string theory and it’s based on music. Now, let’s go back to the Greek philosophers 2,000 years ago. Pythagoras thought that the world was not made out of atoms, but made out of music. He saw a lyre string one day. He knows that the longer the string the lower the note. He went to a blacksmith shop and saw a sword; the longer the sword, the lower the note. And he said, “Aha! The mathematics of music, the mathematics of notes and resonances and chords, that is rich enough to explain the vast diversity of the universe. The universe is based on music.” Well, of course, that theory never went anywhere. The Roman Empire fell apart, for a thousand years there was darkness and superstition, but finally now we have a new theory on the block, string theory, which does believe that, yes, Pythagoras was onto something. If I had a super microscope that I could [use to] peer
into an electron, the electron would not be a dot at all. It would be a rubber band, and if you twang it it would vibrate at a different frequency. So an electron is one frequency like this, a neutrino would be like this, a quark would be like this, and nothing but different musical notes on the same string. So physics is the harmonies you can write on these vibrating strings. Chemistry is the melodies you can play when these strings bump into each other. The universe is a symphony of strings and the mind of God that Albert Einstein chased after for so many decades. The mind of God is cosmic music resonating through hyperspace; that is the mind of God. PLATONI: Let me make sure that I understand the basic idea of strength theory. So if we use your super microscope idea, we peer into the heart of the atom and we peer into the subatomic particles that make up the atom, and instead of a hard ball, a particle in the middle, what we see is a little vibrating filament, one-dimensional string of energy. KAKU: My God, she’s got it! PLATONI: Okay. And then each of these strings are vibrating at a particular frequency. KAKU: That’s right. PLATONI: And that makes it a certain thing. It determines its mass, its charge— what does it determine? KAKU: For example, we know that we have
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musical notes—A, B-flat, C-sharp—and these are just nothing but notes on the same string. The same piano string can give you A, B-flat, C-sharp, so on and so forth. So from a distance, this rubber band looks like a dot looks, like a point particle. So these particles can be then categorized by its quantum number, its harmonic frequencies, its mass and so on and so forth. Then this zoo of subatomic particles that we have— hundreds of subatomic particles when we smash protons—is nothing but musical notes, musical notes coming from vibrating strings. PLATONI: Okay, so the string, instead of giving us B-flat, it gives us the electron. KAKU: That’s right. PLATONI: Okay. So from these we build up to atoms and then molecules and then to all of the stuff of the universe today—earth, trees, air—all of these things. KAKU: The universe is a symphony, a symphony of these vibrating strings. You see therefore that a very simple paradigm—music —is rich enough, as Pythagoras thought 2,000 years ago, to explain the diversity of nature. Atoms are great, we know that of course atoms do exist. But how many kinds of atoms are there and how many subatomic particles are out there? What is the rhyme or reason? What is the paradigm that unifies all the notes, all the elements, that you can write from atoms and all the subatomic particles? Again, Pythagoras said the only paradigm rich enough, simple but rich enough, to explain the diversity of matter is music and it’s the music of vibrating strings. PLATONI: So one of these vibrating strings would be the graviton, right? KAKU: Exactly, that’s right. In fact, the lowest octave of the string contains the graviton, a particle of gravity. In fact, if
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Einstein had never been born, we would have discovered all of General Relativity is nothing but the lowest octave of a vibrating string. There it is, all of Einstein’s theory has nothing but the lowest notes on a vibrating string. This is amazing. PLATONI: The idea is that the graviton is one kind of vibrating string, the way the electron and proton and everything else is a kind of vibrating string, and this is what unites all of the fundamental forces. It all comes down to the same component part, which is the vibrating string. KAKU: That’s right. PLATONI: String theory unites gravity in spacetime with everything else. KAKU: Right. And the Standard Model with the scores of subatomic particles, gravity— they’re nothing but the lowest octave, and the theory predicts higher octaves as well beyond the musical octaves that we see around us. Everything you see around here is a lowest octave of the string. But there are higher octaves. Two weeks ago at Fermilab outside Chicago—big news! It turns out that the Standard Model of subatomic particles is very clumsy, very ugly, but it works. It does describe the quarks and the neutrinos. Nobody but nobody thinks it’s the final theory. It’s simply too ugly. It’s a theory that “only a mother can love.” And now we suspect that the crack found just two weeks ago, the mu meson, has a magnetic moment different from the theory, meaning that there’s other particles, other resonances perhaps, and that’s why string theorists are very excited. Is this the first clue in 50 years? In 50 years we have seen no deviation from the Standard Model—the “theory of almost everything”—except finally we found a crack, a new particle perhaps will
emerge, and we think that could be the next octave of the vibrating string. PLATONI: Explain to people a little bit about what we mean about new particles. The way that chemistry has a periodic table of the elements, the Standard Model of physics has a chart that lists all of the known particles and their properties, right? That’s the Standard Model. So the idea is, might there be something else we don’t know about that’s out in the universe? Might there be something that would kind of break the standard model and give us new physics, right? KAKU: Right, exactly. You see we physicists believe that at the fundamental level, nature should be simple, elegant, beautiful. But the Standard Model is ugly, clumsy, contrived. It’s sort of like taking an aardvark and a platypus and taping them together with Scotch tape and calling that nature’s finest evolutionary creation, the end product of millions of years of evolution on the planet Earth. [Laughter.] Even the creators of the Standard Model realize that it’s only a halfway house. But it seems to work at low energies. Now, at high energies, it seems to be breaking down, and you see that’s what’s causing all the excitement. We need a clue. We need a clue that there’s another theory out there that is beautiful, elegant, simple—because beauty is, believe it or not, one of the main drivers of physics. Physics shows that at the fundamental level the laws of nature are simpler than we thought and more beautiful and gorgeous than we thought. So why should the alternate theory be the ugliest theory known to science? PLATONI: I always liked that idea, that in physics and I think in math, elegance and simplicity is the most beautiful thing that you can have. KAKU: That’s right, but the Standard Model has 36 quarks and antiquarks. Three identical generations of particles and 23 parameters. You can’t think of a theory more ugly than that, but it works at low energies. But at high energies, we think it fails and a new theory is emerging right before our eyes. It could be string theory or—who knows? But this is big news. PLATONI: You don’t talk about this experiment in your book, but you mentioned the idea that looking for a new particle is a little bit like the way that earlier astronomers looked for new planets.
Our universe came from nothing. Our universe was a quantum fluctuation of a parent universe, which also had the quantum numbers of nothing
KAKU: Exactly. PLATONI: So the idea was they knew where some planets were but not the others, and they could infer that there must be something else out there, because something was tugging on the orbit of the planets that they knew about, right? So the same thing is going on with the muons that they’re studying at Fermilab. The muon is moving in a way that’s a little bit unexpected. KAKU: That’s right. Well, as Einstein said, “When you see the tail of a lion, you have to assume that there could be a lion at the other end.” This could be the tail of the lion. And remember there’s now something called dark matter that astronomers have discovered. Dark matter surrounds the galaxy, is invisible, holds the galaxy together. We don’t know what it is. It could be the next octave of the string. I tell young students, people who are listening to this program, for example, that if you ever find out what dark matter is, the first thing you should do is tell me first and we’ll split the Nobel Prize money, because that’s what it’s worth. A new form of matter out there, more plentiful than ordinary matter called dark matter, invisible matter, and we think it could be the next octave up of the strength. PLATONI: So with this whatever it is that’s making the muon move, wobble more than it should, you think maybe that might give us some clues about dark matter.
KAKU: Exactly. The muon is a partner of the electron. It weighs about 200 times more than the electron, but otherwise it’s identical to the election. And we now find out that its magnetic properties differ from the theory. The Standard Model says the magnetic property should be like this, but oh-oh, it’s actually measured to be something different. So that’s a deviation. The first deviation in 50 years, I should point out. For 50 years we’ve been stuck, stuck with the “theory of almost everything,” the Standard Model, because it works. But now we have the first clue that there could be new physics, a new force, perhaps the next octave of the vibrating string. PLATONI: Okay, so we talked a little bit about dark matter. What other physics or cosmology questions does the string theory help us examine? KAKU: Well, children when they hear about the Big Bang, they say “Mommy, Daddy, what is the universe expanding into?” At that point, mommy and daddy say, “Uh, ask your teacher,” right? Well, Einstein gives us a picture that the universe is a bubble of some sort. We live on the skin of the bubble, and the bubble’s expanding. That’s called the Big Bang Theory. String theory says that if it’s a quantum theory, there’s a certain finite probability that there are other bubbles out there. And when the bubbles collide, that’s the Big Bang. Or
the bubble fissions in half—that is what the Big Bang is. This is the multiverse idea. It replaces the single bubble with a bubble bath. a bubble bath of parallel universes. And then I know the next question that I always get whenever I talk about parallel universes is, “Is Elvis Presley still alive in a parallel universe?” There’s a certain finite probability that there is a universe out there where Elvis Presley is still belting out those hits, hit after hit in another universe. Not in our universe; in our universe, unfortunately, he passed away. PLATONI: Let me make sure I understand that you’re talking about this idea that people call the spacetime bomb. KAKU: Right, exactly. PLATONI: There’s is no real vacuum of space there, no nothing. KAKU: Exactly, that’s right. If I had a superduper microscope, it can see the fabric of space-time. Einstein thought it was curved, but even if you look carefully at the curved space time, it’s bubbly. From a distance, it looks curved like a trampoline net, but up close there’s no bubbles. Each bubble is a potential universe. They pop into existence and pop out of existence so we never see them. It looks like the vacuum. But one day, one of these bubbles actually did not pop back, it just kept on going and going—and that is our universe. So we think our universe came from a parent universe. We are going to launch a satellite in the future called LISA [Laser Interferometer Space Antenna]. It’s a gravity wave detector in outer space. It’ll give us the first baby pictures of the infant universe as it emerges from the womb of the Big Bang, and maybe just maybe it’ll pick up evidence of an umbilical cord. An umbilical cord connecting our infant universe in the womb to a mother universe. Maybe that’s where our universe came from. One of the predictions of string theory is the multiverse of universes, universes split off baby universes. In fact, that’s what Stephen Hawking called them: baby universes. That’s his nomenclature. JUNE/JULY 2021
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PLATONI: So in this idea, all the bubble universes are independent, they’re separate. What way then could they connect so that one universe could give rise to another? KAKU: Well, we don’t know. But we think that quantum mechanics says that there’s a certain probability that if you have a soap bubble, the soap bubble could fission in half. Now, let’s take a look at our universe. What is the net electrical charge of our universe? Positive cancels negative—we learned that in high school—therefore the net charge of the universe is zero. What is the net spin of the universe? Well, galaxies point in all directions; they average out to zero. What is the matter energy content of the universe? Gravity has negative energy, ordinary matter has positive energy; they add up to give you zero. In other words our universe is compatible with zero. Zero charge. Zero spin. Zero matter energy. In other words, our universe came from nothing. Our universe was a quantum fluctuation of a parent universe, which also had the quantum numbers of nothing. Remember the Bible refers to the “mist.” Well, perhaps that’s where our universe came from. It came from nothing. A quantum fluctuation out of the quantum foam. One bubble decided to keep on going, and that became our universe. PLATONI: So all of these little tiny universities popping in and out of existence, ours just takes off. It gets really big, and it lasts almost 14 billion years so far. KAKU: That’s right. In other words, universes are being born even as we talk. Even as we talk, universes somewhere far, far away have been exploding, giving you other Big Bangs throughout the multiverse. Again, this is the dominant picture coming from experimental data. Inflation fits all the experimental data, and inflation says that if the universe was born as a quantum event, it can happen again and
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again, because there’s a probability that it could happen again and again and again, so we’re naturally led to the multiverse idea by looking at quantum mechanics. PLATONI: When we study the formation of planets and the search for life in space, we have this idea of the Goldilocks zone for our planet. That it’s not too close to its sun and it’s not too far from its sun, so that it can support liquid water and therefore life as we know it. So we have this idea of the Goldilocks habitable zone for planet. Do we have that idea for universes—that there’s something that would make the perfect conditions for a universe to be stable and to last as long as our universe has? KAKU: Exactly, this is called the anthropic principle. If the nuclear force were a little bit stronger, the sun would have burnt out billions of years ago and we wouldn’t be here. If the nuclear force were weaker, then the sun would never have ignited to begin with and we still wouldn’t be here. If gravity were a bit stronger, the universe would have exploded and freeze to death, and we’d all be frozen in a big freeze. If gravity were a little bit stronger, the universe would have expanded and contracted to a big crunch, and we still wouldn’t be here. Now, there are many accidents. The universe is just right to make intelligent beings. What does that mean? Well, maybe there are other universes out there where the nuclear force is too weak, is too strong. Stars never ignite or they burn out, and therefore there’s no life on these universes. In other words: Congratulations, we hit the jackpot. We happen to be on a planet that is just right from the sun, and a planet that’s just right to have stars that ignite, and gravity that doesn’t freeze us to death. PLATONI: That’s one of the very mindbending ideas in string theory. Let me ask you
about another one that I have always found very hard to understand. String theory only works if there are 10 or 11 dimensions. KAKU: That’s right. PLATONI: And now we’re used to three spatial dimensions plus time. What are these other six and where are these other six? KAKU: Well, they are four fundamental forces and [when you] to write the equations for these four and put them together, they don’t fit. When you start to go to a higher dimension, then the forces begin to fit mathematically together. When you go to 10 dimensions [or] 11, there’s enough room. This is improved to fit all the fundamental forces together. So we don’t like it. We would prefer to be in a three-dimensional universe, but the math says no, no. In lower dimensions string theories are inconsistent, they have what are called anomalies. In other words, 2 plus 2 equals 5; you can prove in some of these other universes. Now, of course 2 plus 2 equals 4. So we want a universe which is mathematically consistent. The only mathematically consistent universes are in 10 and 11 dimensions. Why? Well, I don’t know; it’s just the math. That’s where the math takes us, okay? Now, some people think that’s too fantastic. I mean who can believe in hyperspace? This is something out of Star Trek. Well, get used to it. That’s the way the theories seem to go. I get we need proof. That’s where LISA comes in measuring the instant of the Big Bang. That’s where dark matter experiments come in trying to find dark matter in the laboratory as a higher ocular string. And then the Fermilab experiment of two weeks ago. There are measurements we can make to prove or disprove this theory. This theory is testable. It is reproducible, and it is falsifiable. That qualifies for it to be a science, even though at the present time we have no direct proof.
On the Road to Freedom: Native American Voices Understanding the Civil North Dakota, South Dakota & Colorado Rights September 26 - October 4, 2021 With Discussion Leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse
Bismarck l Fort Yatesl Keystone l Denver l Del Norte l Ignacio
Discussion Leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse
Dakota is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a Native American Studies instructor at the United Tribes Technical College, a Native American owned and operated college. He has his M.A in History from North Dakota State University and B.A. in Theology from the University of Mary. Dakota runs The First Scout blog which focuses on Lakota issues and traditional moon counts. Previously Dakota was an interpreter at the State Heritage Center and Museum in Bismarck. He is both Yanktonai and Húŋkphapȟa Lakȟóta, and was raised in Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation.
What to Expect Please note that our itinerary involves some time driving from city to city, as well as, a fair amount of walking around the sites including some stairs and uneven terrain. Most days have an early-morning start and include a full day’s schedule of activities. Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group. Drive times average is between 3-4 hours per day, sometimes over winding roads. The longest day of driving is 7 hours total with stops for touring along the way. Temperatures in the region average in the 55-65’s (°F) during the day, and 35-45’s (°F) in the evenings. This program will be covering topics that include violence, and that may be difficult for children. Therefore, we do not recommend this program for people under 16.
BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA
KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA
Independent arrivals into Bismarck. and to the Radisson Hotel Bismarck. Meet at 3:00 with our group to depart for an afternoon visit to the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum. Our discussion leader Dakota Wind Goodhouse will guides us through the museum. End the afternoon meeting with Danielle Ta’Sheena Finn, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and an acclaimed activist and artist. Enjoy a welcome reception and dinner with fellow travelers. Radisson Hotel D
Today begins with a visit to Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. The reconstructed ‘On-ASlant Indian Village’ provides an excellent introduction to the earth-lodges of the Mandan Indians who occupied this site. Continue driving along Highway 1806, the Standing Rock National Native American Scenic Byway, an 86-mile route that climbs up and down the Missouri River, past buffalo herds and eagle’s nests. History comes alive on this journey where the great Lakota spiritual leader Sitting Bull lived and died.
Sunday, September 26
BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA Monday, September 27
Depart the hotel and drive to Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, a National Parks Service site, which preserves the historic and archaeological remnants of bands of Hidatsa, Northern Plains Indians. This area was once a major trading and agricultural area. Continue on to the Double Ditch Indian Village, a large earth-lodge community inhabited by the Mandan Indians for nearly 300 years, and once a center of trade between the Mandans, their nomadic neighbors, and later, Euro-American traders. End the afternoon meeting with Emma Doll, a Native American who set up the Five Nations Arts Organization, a resource to artists and collectors of Native American art in the region. Also meeting the group will be Cheryl Kary, co-founder of the Sacred Pipe Resource Center (SPRC) which was founded by a group of residents of the Bismarck-Mandan area who are committed to the mission of maintaining a home-away-from-home for off-reservation Native Americans living in the area. Radisson Hotel B,L,D
Tuesday, September 28
Enter the Standing Rock Reservation, home to the Lakota and Dakota people. Meet with Rev. John Floberg, who is deeply committed to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests. With the endorsement of the national Episcopal Church, Floberg provided supplies to campers and hosted protestors in his church. Continue on to nearby Fort Yates, the main town of Standing Rock and enjoy a locally cooked lunch at the Community Center. After lunch, visit the original burial site of Sitting Bull who was assassinated on the western part of the reservation. End the afternoon visiting the Standing Rock Tribal Council Offices which were designed following authentic Native American architectural elements. Drive about three hours to our Keystone hotel, tucked deep in the Black Hills. Dinner at our hotel. K Bar S Lodge B,L,D
KEYSTONE, SOUTH DAKOTA Wednesday, September 29
This morning meet with Sequoia Crosswhite, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He is an accomplished musician, grass dancer and historian, as well as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe and a descendant of Chief War Eagle and Chief Swift Cloud. Drive just over an hour to the inspiring Thunder Valley Community Center. A Lakota run grass roots center with goals to “create models of change that will overpower intergenerational poverty and build momentum towards regional equity.” Head towards the town of Pine Ridge stop-
For additional information or to make a reservation, contact Commonwealth Club Travel Telephone: (415) 597-6720 — Email: Travel@commonwealthclub.org
ping at the site of the Massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. The “battle” was actually a massacre where hundreds of unarmed Lakota women, children, and men, were shot and killed by U.S. troops. Stop in at the Oglala Tribe Justice Center which houses courtrooms, a short term correctional holding facility, offices for law enforcement and justice officials. Funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the facility is the first of its kind to blend traditional tribal justice concepts with a technologically advanced design. End the afternoon meeting with artist Joe Pulliam Buffalo Dreamer whose work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Pulliam has dedicated his art to preserving Lakota culture. K Bar S Lodge B,L
DENVER, COLORADO Thursday, September 30
Accompanied by Sequoia Crosswhite spend the morning visiting the Badlands National Park and stopping at the Wind Cave National Park, an important spot in the Emergence Story. Continue to Denver making a stop in Boulder to meet with the Native American Rights Fund (NARF). NARF has provided legal assistance to Indian tribes, organizations, and individuals who might otherwise have gone without adequate representation involving tribal sovereignty, treaty rights and natural resource protection. Continue to Denver and checkin to our hotel. Enjoy dinner on your own. Downtown Renaissance Hotel B,L
DEL NORTE, COLORADO Friday, October 1
Depart the hotel and meet with Darius Smith director of the Denver Anti-Discrimination Office where he investigates, conducts administrative hearings and mediates civil rights discrimination complaints. Darius also serves as the American Indian Liaison to the Denver American Indian Commission that advocates for social and cultural awareness to promote economic and political equality. After lunch, drive through spectacular landscapes stopping at the Great Sand Dunes National Park, home to the highest sand dunes in
North America. The mountains, forests, and dunes in the park are sacred to the Apache, Navajo, Ute, and Pueblo Indians. Drive on to Del Norte and the Windsor Hotel, one of Colorado’s oldest hotels. Windsor Hotel B,L,D
IGNACIO, COLORADO Saturday, October 2
This morning drive about two hours to Chimney Rock, an intimate, off-the-beaten path archaeological site located at the southern edge of the San Juan Mountains. The site was home to the ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians. Enjoy lunch nearby before driving to Durango and the Native American Center (NAC). The center provides academic, cultural, social, and transitional support for undergraduate Native American students. Continue on to Ignacio and the Sky Ute Casino Resort, located on the Southern Ute Reservation. The oldest continuous residents of Colorado are the Ute Indians. End the afternoon with a discussion focusing on the social and economic impact of Indian gaming. Gaming has had a significant positive economic impact on the Native American community, yet is not without its detractors. We’ll hear from tribal experts on the economic and political realities. Sky Ute Casino Resort B,L
IGNACIO, COLORADO Sunday, October 3
This morning visit the Southern Ute Cultural Center and meet with Linda Baker, director of the Southern Ute Cultural Center. Owned and operated by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe to preserve and promote Ute culture. Here we will also meet with Edward Box III, Culture Director of the Preservation Department.
Price Per Person: $4,895 Single Supplement: $880 Based on minimum of 15 travelers Maximum 24 travelers, not including staff.
Tour Price includes: • Accommodations and meals as per itinerary • All sightseeing in an air-conditioned coach • Bottled water on the bus • All entrances and events as listed • Discussion Leader to accompany the group • Pre-departure materials and reading list • The services of a professional tour manager to accompany the group • Gratuities
Does not include: • Airfare to Bismarck and back from Ignacio/Durango • Alcoholic beverages except for wine and beer at welcome and farewell events • Excess luggage charges • Trip Insurance • Items of a purely personal nature
Meet with the staff at the Southern Ute Drum, the tribe’s biweekly community newspaper. Enjoy a farewell dinner this evening. Sky Ute Casino Resort B,L,D
DEPART
Monday, October 4
Independently transfer to the Durango– La Plata County Airport for flights home. B
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Reservations: A $1,000 per person deposit, along with a completed and signed Reservation Form, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check. Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply: •61+ days prior to departure: deposit is refundable •61-30 days to departure: 50% of fare •29-1 days prior to departure: 100% fare The tour can also be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor DH accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour. Trip Cancellation and Interruption Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.
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To learn more about how to leave a legacy gift to The Commonwealth Club please contact Kimberly N WE AL TH Maas at kmaas@commonwealthclub.org or (415) 597-6726. 51 THE COMMO JUNE/JULY 2021 51
MATH AND THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT ANSWER GERMAN SCIENTIST SABINE HOSSENFELDER JOINED US LIVE
from Frankfurt, Germany, to discuss her concern that theoretical physicists have failed to make any major breakthroughs for more than four decades because they are obsessed with the goal that an accurate theory must be beautiful—at least to mathematicians. She argues that when this belief in beauty becomes too dogmatic, it conflicts with scientific objectivity and may be interfering with our ability to understand some of the big questions about the universe. From the April 20, 2021, online Humanities Member-Led Forum program “Sabine Hossenfelder: Lost in Math.” SABINE HOSSENFELDER, Research Fellow, Superfluid Dark Matter Group, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies; Blogger, “Backreaction”; Author, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray In Conversation with GEORGE HAMMOND, Author, Conversations With Socrates
GEORGE HA MMOND: I’m going to read something. We’re going to start at the latest news in theoretical physics, which is of course the research about the muon and whether the muon is upsetting things, because in the articles about this, whether this muon research at Fermilab is going to upset the Standard Model [of physics], several times I came across this quote, “Sabina Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study, tweeted, ‘Of course, the possibility exists that it is new physics. But I wouldn’t bet on it.’ So why not? SABINE HOSSENFELDER: Well, maybe to give you some context, this muon has been there for 20 years. So it’s basically been with me throughout my whole career, and I’ve had some time to think about it. The thing with the muon g-2 anomaly is that it’s pitching an experiment against a terribly complicated calculation in the Standard Model of particle physics. There are many things that can go wrong with this
calculation, and there have always been some parts in this calculation that have been kind of suspicious, that people have tried to improve upon. I suspect what’s going on is someone somewhere along the line is underestimating the uncertainty. So the uncertainty on the theoretical prediction is just too small, which is why the theoretical prediction is outside the measurement. HAMMOND: Well, it’s an of interesting Photo by Voice Americathing for outsiders to watch. In your book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, I thought, first of all, this is a nice repeat of something the ancient Greek philosophers discussed, which is, “What do we pursue, beauty or truth?” Beauty versus truth. And you’re basically coming down all these years later in the physics area [saying] that we should not let beauty lead us astray. You have a lot of great examples of it. You talk about the Standard Model of fundamental particle physics and the fact that JUNE/JULY 2021
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that hasn’t made much progress in the last few decades. You wonder whether it’s this obsession with beauty that is getting in the way. One question I have about that is, both of the famous recent ones—besides the muons, the Higgs boson—they’re both particles that disintegrate fairly rapidly. So it’s kind of interesting why they’re in a group of fundamental particles, because fundamental particles aren’t supposed to disintegrate into smaller pieces, right? They’re supposed to be the fundamental pieces that everything is built from, or do I have that wrong? HOSSENFELDER: Well, they don’t disintegrate; they decay into other particles. In a nutshell, the reason is that they’re too massive. So they can decay into particles with smaller mass, and that’s what they do. But they’re still fundamental particles in the sense that they don’t have a substructure. They can decay, but they’re not made of smaller things. At least not for all we presently know; it could always be that some point, we’ll find some. In particle physics terms, the muon is a long-lived particle; you know, it’s no comparison to Higgs boson. So measuring something with the muon is vastly easier than measuring something with the Higgs. HAMMOND: You said something very interesting. You said that it decays into other particles, but it’s not made of something else. Isn’t the decay into something which is also fundamental particles—it doesn’t mean that it was made up of those particles in the first place? HOSSENFELDER: No, it doesn’t. What the decay means is that it interacts with those particles. So you can also in principle have the same process backwards. It’s like you have a path that forks—that’s basically how we describe it in terms of Feynman diagrams. So you have one particle coming in and two particles coming out, but you could have come in from any path to the junction and go out into two other ends. All these possible iterations actually do occur in nature. It’s just that some of them are more likely than others. The heavy particles are likely to decay into lighter ones; basically it’s because entropy increases. HAMMOND: For our listeners, [in terms of] something that they’re a little bit more used to, how does that sort of analysis
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compare to, say, water made up of hydrogen and oxygen? Both hydrogen and oxygen are atoms; they’re pretty long-lasting atoms. And even when they come together in water, that’s a fairly long-lasting molecule. But what you’re saying is that water is not really made up of or, if the analogy were correct—it’s not, but if the analogy were correct—is it like water is made up of or decays into hydrogen and oxygen, and hydrogen and oxygen can also go in the reverse order and become water, as opposed to that water is made up of it? I’m using it as an analogy, because I understand that it’s not accurate about water, but in the case of these fundamental particles that are more massive, it would seem that you can look at it both ways. So there’s a reason why not, looking at it that way. Right? HOSSENFELDER: Yeah. You’re right. I understand that it can be confusing. So I needed to begin with water, luckily, usually doesn’t just decay, right? [Laughter.] The thing is with a water molecule, we can actually see the substructure. Like if you do a spectrograph or something like this, you can actually tell it’s not one homogeneous blob or something. That’s exactly what we don’t see for the elementary particles. For all we currently can tell, they don’t have any substructure. That’s why we call them elementary. HAMMOND: Got it. I want to talk about what you find uncomfortable about the current ideas that makes you doubt them, or that makes you wonder where we’re going to go with them. Then I’d like to go back to what we really do know. Atomic theory I think is one of those things. So we’ll go back to the Greeks in a little while. But one of the things that you talk about is fine-tuned versus natural in analyzing theories. I thought it was a really great analysis for people who aren’t familiar with that. Could you explain why that approach, which is related to your beauty argument, makes you feel uncomfortable about what’s going on? HOSSENFELDER: Maybe I should start with briefly explaining what all this talk about naturalness and fine tuning us about. In theoretical physics, we deal with theories that are basically pieces of mathematics. And we use those to make predictions—for example, for the decay rate
of some particles and stuff like that—and these theories all contain parameters. Some of those are dimensionless, so they don’t have units, they’re just numbers. All these dimensionless numbers in the theories are supposed to be “of order one,” which means close by one, but not exactly one, not very large, not very small. If that’s the case, then the theory is called natural. Theoretical physicists like theories that are natural. I call this a particular type of beauty. A theory that’s fine-tuned is just a theory that isn’t natural. The idea is that you have to pick a particular number very, very precisely. Like, say you have a small number, 0.0003 or something; the idea is that you would have to fine tune it to the zero-zerozero-three. That’s where the idea comes from. Fine tuning arguments can be good arguments in certain circumstances. The usual example would be a pen balanced on its tip. You would find that very unnatural in the sense that you would have to very finely tune the position of the pen and all the motions of the molecules around them, that kind of thing. You would correctly conclude the probability that the pen just happens to be balanced on its tip is vanishingly small. Therefore it’s very likely it’s held in place by something. So that’s how a good argument from naturalness or fine tuning works. Now, the problem in the foundations of physics is some people use these finetuning arguments for cases where you cannot possibly know anything about the probability distribution. So when we’re talking about the constants of nature that appear in these theories—we might be talking about, say, the fine-structure constant or the mass of the Higgs boson, that kind of thing—then we just can’t make any statements about whether or not that particular value of the constant is likely. That’s why I say these arguments are not scientific arguments, and if they’re not scientific arguments, well then what are they? Some people have told me that they’re metaphysical criteria. I think philosophically, that’s probably the right word to use, but I call them arguments from beauty, because that’s I think the way that physicists think about them and also where they originally came from. HAMMOND: In talking about those theories and different possibilities, you
make a really good point that there’s no proof for any theory. People in the popular press throw around the word proof all the time. I know scientists perfectly understand this, but I think it’s good for the rest of the people to understand proof is only in a few areas in mathematics. There is no physical theory that’s ever been proven. There’s been reliable evidence that we should keep looking in this direction. Maybe explain the distinction there a little bit to people—this idea that scientists don’t believe that anything is proven about any of these theories. HOSSENFELDER: Yes, of course. It’s somewhat an issue about the colloquial use of language. You know, if we use words like proof or truth, they don’t mean exactly the same thing as we would mean with them in science. I would say that really the only thing you can strictly speaking prove are mathematical relations, and that cannot contain any statements about nature. So if we have a theory of nature, like the Standard Model or the concordance model, which describes cosmology, that kind of thing, then we can collect evidence in favor of the theory. So we would say it’s been well confirmed, but we will never ultimately be able to prove that the theory is actually correct. There could always be a next measurement that contradicts the theory, and then we’ll have to go and look for a better theory. That’s how science works. HA MMOND: In your book, on the opposite end of the proofing, you said you cannot falsify a theory, but you can implausify it. I think that’s the other element of it. That’s another thing to explain about how science approaches this. Maybe you can expand out a little bit on that idea. HOSSENFELDER: That’s right. So there are some cases where they can actually falsify a theory, but they’re very, very rare, because if you get some kind of measurements that contradict your original theory, you can always twiddle with the theory. That’s something that scientists shouldn’t do, but they do it all the time and it’s not necessarily wrong, because you learn something from the measurement. So then you go back to the drawing board and you try to improve your theory. The problem is that what happens is that it makes the theories more and more complicated, more and more arcane, you
could say, and at some point what happens is the people just lose interest. If you have a theory that’s been fixed over and over and over again, maybe like the theory with the epicycles [an ancient Greek attempt to explain the movement of stars and planets to support their assumption that everything revolved around Earth—Ed.], then it becomes increasingly less plausible. And in particular, if there is a better theory that explains the data simpler, then practitioners will just go over and start using the better theory. HA MMOND: Your reference to the epicycle theory is at least something that a lot of people who pay attention to this, even from the outside, know about as an example where the mathematics was ever more elaborate and fairly accurate in predicting where the planets were going. Copernicus, when he first tried to rearrange it, his math was less accurate, until the elliptical idea [on orbits that were not perfectly circular]. Why don’t you explain how it’s a good example of where the math led in one direction and was more precise actually than the ideas coming back in another area. HOSSENFELDER: It’s a good example of how big a difference a simplification can make, even though people at the time thought that ellipses are ugly. One of the major reasons they kept doing these circles around circles around circles is that they had this idea that circles are the most perfect geometric shapes that you can think of. So certainly if you can do it with circles, then please do it with circles. But from what the calculation and effort is concerned, it just becomes very time consuming. So from a purely pragmatic point of view, it made sense to switch to ellipsis. I think today, if you ask any astronomer “Are ellipses ugly?” They would just laught at you. So our conception of beauty has entirely changed there. HAMMOND: I think they would say it’s much more beautiful because it makes it clear, more beautiful. It’s what we were looking for—an answer. I think when we are looking for an answer, an answer that makes a lot of sense is beautiful to us all right away. It’s an interesting part of the argument between beauty and truth. It’s rather an extreme form of chutzpah to believe that our intuition and our ideas about beauty would be more accurate rather than trying to figure out what’s really out there.
You bring up the point really well in your book about how scientists move in a direction, and within a certain amount of time they’re so emotionally attached to their theories or whatever that they always want that theory to win. It’s a normal human thing, but it doesn’t move us forward to trying to figure out what our reality is. We’re all trying to share an understanding of our shared reality. It’s not easy. In any case, we have millions of people working on it now, and we’re making more progress it seems more quickly, but some of the old ideas about how to go about it, emotional ideas, are getting in our way. You mentioned I think Kurt Weill or somebody who said that if it came down to an argument between beauty and truth, he would probably lean toward beauty in his decisions. And there are plenty of famous physicists like that. Another thing that you bring up in your book is you mentioned that [Nobel Prize-winning German physicist] Max Planck said over a hundred years ago that there are 25 orders of magnitude between what we can see and what he thought that the substantive reality was. Why don’t you talk about that and how far we’ve progressed, because you’re talking about that we see the Higgs boson and the muon as homogenous and undividable. But we’re at what level of order of magnitude on that scale that he was talking about? HOSSENFELDER: That’s right. So Max Planck had the great insight you could say that there’s a particularly I’d dare to say natural set of units that you can assemble from the already known fundamental constants. Those are called the Planck units. There’s the Planck mass, and there’s a Planck time and a Planck length. The reason that Max Planck introduced them was because—and that was literally his argument—that aliens would also use them. [Laughter.] Because they are just composed of these fundamental constants that you can just extract from measurements. Their relevance today is that you can estimate at which energies or distances the effects of quantum gravity should become important. That happens to be on the order of magnitude where the Planck energy is. So that’s about, 15 orders of magnitude beyond what even the Large Hadron Collider can probe. So it’s really a long, long way to go. JUNE/JULY 2021
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THE COMMONWEALTH
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