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Gross
Gross
Physicist Gross delivers first lecture at the UP Centennial Lecture Series.
Regular faculty members of the University of the Philippines have been granted 10 days of sick leave credits for each year of service. The benefit, contained in the revised Proposal to Grant Sick Leave (Cumulative and Commutable) to members of the Faculty, was approved by the Board of Regents at its 1226th Meeting on October 25.
Streamed live over the Internet and viewed by constituents of other UP campuses, Gross in his lecture “Lessons of Science” argued that societies must be able to build an economic and political system that is not dependent on unlimited consumption and growth.
“I am very disturbed when I hear politicians…talk about global warming because they always say we can deal with this problem and still grow and consume more and more… If we continue to base our societies on consumption as the ultimate human goal then I think we are doomed no matter how we become energy efficient. We have to find some other way of building an economic system and political system where our politicians can run the office without promising more and more material growth,” Gross said.
He said, “We are all one family. The problem we face is the planet as a whole. The economic system is more and more a world economic system.”
A world system would produce true peace and true humanity. Gross pointed out the best example of internationalism is science.
“To be successful in science, we must allow people with different points of view to air their ideas…so we have learned to construct a scientific culture which is open and tolerant…It requires an open and tolerant society with free expressions of thought,” he said.
According to him, problems posed by basic science are not posed by governments or national organizations but by nature itself. In the pursuit of science, everyone is equal.
The many advances in science afforded man a level of control over nature. Breakthroughs in science saw the era of the industrial revolution, with man harnessing the powers of electricity and magnetism and the use of the steam engine. Lately, man applied quantum mechanics to modern technology that birthed instruments of communication and imaging machines and advances in medicine.
“Today, each of us has two lives because of the advances that science has made possible…Science has doubled the life span of humans, which is great, and has eliminated disease,” Gross said.
He however said man’s increased life span contributed to the continued ballooning of the human population. As Gross puts it, “The human population has taken off like a bomb.”
Rapid population growth meant more demands for more resources and more human activities. More human activities contribute to rapid global warming. A human population of 9 to 15 billion is a lot of people for a small planet such as the Earth.
Science’s immense benefits inadvertently gave man the ability to destroy species and pose grave dangers to Earth’s “health.”
Two effects of global warming are the melting of the Greenland ice sheets and coral bleaching.
“You might think that a one degree rise in temperature is not so much. But that one degree, with our current warming, we have less water available, more draught, wildfires, storms. With that one degree of increase, there will be a whisk of extinction from 20 to 30 percent of the known species and most corals will turn white. With two degrees increase, there will be major changes in natural systems. Widespread death of coral reefs and millions of people will face dying risks. With three degrees there will be substantial burden on health services and 30 percent of global coastal wetlands will be lost. With four degrees, more than 40 percent of known species will be extinct and economic GNP (Gross National Product) losses will be cut to five percent and there will be a partial meltdown of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets raising sea levels by 13 to 20 feet,” he said.
Furthermore, the many breakthroughs in science that allowed man enormous benefits also endangered man.
“An increase in life span by the factor of 10 is inevitable…As we begin to increaseour control over the genetic code and do genetic engineering…we will change our genomes so as to eliminate disease and then start improving ourselves: increase life span, increase intelligence. It could cause our strain of human homo sapiens (to change) into a different species…,” Gross said.
History has shown that almost any question in the basic science today is answered over a hundred years. With this, he predicted that the problems of today will be solved over time, with science becoming even more important to man. Control over nature’s forces will increase as man explores the galaxy, man’s next frontier, he said.
“Hopefully, the culture of science will inspire us to exploit the good and avoid the bad,” he concluded.
Two salient points raised in the lecture about science are: there are no absolute truths in science, only very good approximations to nature, such that all scientific theories are provisional; and one of the great resources of science is informed, intelligent ignorance, the kind of ignorance that leads a learned man to ask meaningful questions.
Gross, with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of asymptotic freedom. Asymptotic freedom holds that where the quarks (fundamental matter particles) are closer to each other, the nuclear force is weak and yet when pulled apart, the force becomes strong. The discovery was important for rehabilitating the quantum field theory and the development of quantum chromodynamics.
“Lessons of Science” is the first of the UP Centennial Lecture Series and coincided with the conferment of an honorary doctorate in Science on Gross on January 8 at the UP Film Institute.
—By Mariamme D. Jadloc