SCIENCE IS THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH

 From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9    1093     4732       1185        246       82

July    22     1205     7128        1293      1120      572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242       835      130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136      1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571       703       85

Nov    25     2304    12025        620       518      118

Dec    30     3880    14748       1224       299     465

Jan     14       4142    15512        1151        189      712              

Feb      3       4005   14265       1209       107     398

Mar     2        1989     9490       1726       110      194

          17        1289      9736        2736       171       74 

          24         936    10206       3158       277       55

Summary:  Clearly, new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are on the decline.  

• We are up to 2.5 million vaccinations/day, and actually hit 3 million/day this weekend, twice.
• One in three adults has had at least one dose.
• Schools are beginning to re-open.
• One thing President Joe Biden has NOT done is to nationalize a vaccination card with photo, so that these individuals can wear them as necessary, and safely enter restaurants, bars, indoor sports games, cruises, planes and the like.  What is holding him back?  The one-third of Americans who seem to be avoiding this campaign needs to be convinced that their life can only be improved if they are vaccinated.  The laggards need this kind of incentive, and more.

Every so often I sit back and ask myself some of the ultimate questions.  Among them are:

• Why are we here?
• What is the Universe made of?
• How did life begin?
• Are we alone in the Universe?
• Are there other Universes?

Of course, there are numerous other fundamental issues, and, while religion has attempted to provide some of these answers, as this is Wednesday, I will take the scientific approach.

Scientific American and Nature regularly touch on these questions.  Let me cite Forbes, for they use language most of you understand.  Even then, here are two images from their attempt with We Must Not Give Up On Answering The Biggest Scientific Questions Of All:

I use these two merely to express some awe at how far science has advanced.  Researchers have:

• Identified something so small as a quark.
• Built a Large Hadron Collider, which found the Higgs boson. 

• 
  As of the first of this month, confirmed something they have not even seen, 4687 exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.  Of course, if NASA had selected the design Charles Townes and I came up with nearly half a century ago, there would have been millions, at a fraction of the cost.  We would not have found extraterrestrial life, as such, but we'd have been closer to Encyclopedia Galactica.
• Precisely calculated that our Universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.

I once worked for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser fusion.  That too was nearly half a century ago.  Today, ITER, near Provence, France, is 30 years away from commercializing fusion, at a speculated cost of $65 billion.  I thus wrote off this pathway as realistic in my lifetime.

However, science:

• Has developed a dozen vaccines to contend with COVID-19.
• Is close to allowing mothers to choose the traits of their baby (which won't come anytime soon because of morality).
• Built an Atomic Bomb (the one that dropped over Hiroshima was merely 1,500 times weaker than the Tsar H-Bomba tested by the Soviet Union--a frightening prospect if the Cold War went HOT) which ended World War II.
• Sent us to the Moon, and brought them back.

Yet, our best minds have no clue to questions like:

• How did life begin?
• Why only 5% of what we can see and measure is known--the field is befuddled by Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
• What is the meaning of life?

This latter question is more philosophical, theological and metaphysical, so don't wait for researchers to arrive at any kind of conclusion.  It could well be that there is no meaning.  We are part of a random process that led to us.  Where will we go?  Who knows if the Universe keeps expanding forever and enters the Big Freeze, or reverses course, leading to the Big Crunch, to perhaps re-start the Big Bang process.  Well, you can analyze this posting I provided, on a Sunday, five months ago.

Such is the nature of science.  It is the search for the truth. Some challenging questions will get answered.  Even something like how life began, or the existence of a parallel universe.  If there is alien life elsewhere, we might actually find a way to communicate, some day.  If we are alone, then not.  The meaning of life?  I'll return to this question some Sunday in the future.

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