Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

when they do succeed, a spinoff is likely to be a spaceship that is in no way a

rocket ship-and the Galaxy is ours! (Unless we meet that smarter, meaner, tougher

race that kills us or enslaves us or eats us-or all three.)

Particle physics: the situation is even more confusing than in 1965.

Physicists now speak of more than 200 kinds of hadrons, “elementary” heavy

particles. To reduce this confusion a mathematical construct called the “quark” was

invented. Like Jell-0 quarks come in many colors and flavors.. . plus spin, charm,

truth, and beauty (or top and bottom in place of truth and beauty-or perhaps “truth”

doesn’t belong in the list, and no jokes, please, as the physicists aren’t joking

and neither am I). Put quarks together in their many attributes and you can account

for (maybe) all those 200-odd hadrons (and have a system paralleling the leptons or

light particles as a bonus).

All very nice.. . except that no one has ever been able to pin down even one

quark. Quarks, if they exist, come packaged in clumps as hadrons-not at random but

by rules to account for each of that mob of hadrons.

Now comes Kenneth A. Johnson, Ph.D. (Harvard ’55), Professor of Physics at

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which certainly places him in the

worldwide top group of physicists) with an article (Scientific American, July 1979,

p. 112, “The Bag Model of Quark Confinement”), an article which appears to state

that quarks will never be pinned down because

they are in sort of an eternal purdah, never to be seen even as bubble tracks. –

Somehow it reminds me of the dilemma when the snark is a boojum.

I’m not poking fun at Dr. Johnson; he is very learned and trying hard to

explain his difficult subject to the unlearned such as I.

But, in the meantime I suggest reading The Hunting of the Snark while

waiting patiently for 2000 A.D. We have a plethora of data; perhaps in twenty more

years the picture will be simplified. Perhaps-

15. 1950 We will not achieve a “World State” in the predictable future.

Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.

1965 I stand flatly behind prediction number fifteen.

1980 I still stand flatly behind the first sentence of that two-part

prediction above. The second part I could weasel out of by pointing out that on this

planet no state that calls itself Marxist or Socialist or Communist has ever

established a system approximating that called for by the works of Karl Marx and

Friedrich Engels. And never will; Marx’s utopia does not fit human beings. The state

will not “wither away.”

But I shan’t weasel as I am utterly dismayed by the political events of the

past 15-20 years. At least two thirds of the globe now calls itself Marxist. Another

large number of countries are military dictatorships. Another large group (including

the United States) are constitutional democratic republics but so heavily tinged

with socialism (“welfare state”) that all of them are tottering on the brink of

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bankruptcy and collapse.

So far as I can see today the only thing that could cause the soi-disant

Marxist countries to collapse in as little time as twenty years would be for the

United States to be conquered and occupied by the USSR- and twenty years ago I

thought that this was a strong possibility. (I’m more optimistic now, under the pres

ent three-cornered standoff.)

If we were to be conquered and occupied, the Communist world might collapse

rather quickly. We have been propping them up whenever they were in real trouble

(frequently!) for about half a century.

16. 1950 Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the

population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines

while retaining the semblance.

1965 No further comment.

19801 goofed. I will be much surprised if either half of this double

prediction comes to pass by 2000-at least in the form described and for the reasons

I had in mind. The franchise now extends to any warm body over eighteen years of age

and that franchise can be transferred to another state in less time than it takes