2003 I am Certain, I Think, About Uncertainty

May, 2003

Steven B. Zwickel

In 2003, someone in Guangzhou, China sent me a long email by mistake. It started out like this:

UNCERTAINTY  PRINCIPLE

IS

UNTENABLE

By reanalysing the experiment of Heisenberg Gamma-Ray Microscope and one of ideal experiment from which uncertainty principle is derived , it is found that actually uncertainty principle can not be obtained from these two ideal experiments . And it is found that uncertainty principle is untenable.

…and the article went on to describe, in great detail, two experiments (with formulas and equations) proving that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, probably, not right. I am guessing, here, because I lack the ability to interpret all the math and physics, but I did feel that my unknown correspondent deserved a response, so here it is:

I don't know why you sent me this. I am not a physicist.

My thoughts about Uncertainty:

Are there cockroaches in my kitchen?

✔ I think that there might be cockroaches in my kitchen. I have not seen them, but my neighbors have told me that they are common in our building. Mathematically, it would be surprising if I did NOT have cockroaches in my apartment.

✔ I think they come at night, but if I go into the kitchen and turn on the light, there is nothing there that I can see. If I leave the light on during the night, I won't see cockroaches either.

✔ To test my hypothesis that there are cockroaches in the kitchen, I left some crumbs on the floor. The next morning, the crumbs were gone. Something made the crumbs move.

✔ For the next test, I spread a thin layer of oil in a circle around a few crumbs. The next morning, the crumbs were gone but I was able to note a narrow trail of oil leading to the corner of the cupboard.

✔ Therefore, I conclude that there are cockroaches in my kitchen and they probably live under the cupboard. They can't be seen when you turn on the light, because the light makes them run away. The very act of looking for them makes it impossible to find them although there is other evidence that they were there.

✔ Final experiment: set a cockroach trap along the trail of oil between the crumbs and the cupboard. Statistically, this is the most likely place to find cockroaches. 

✔ But you never know. . .

Why family therapy works.

As a long-time psychotherapist, I know that I can help people if I can get them to talk about their problems. What is so surprising is how often talking about a problem is effective, even if I (as therapist) don't offer an new insights or help.

When you ask someone to talk about their parents, their spouse, or their children, they have to put their emotions into words. This process is still not terribly well understood, but language skills are extremely complex and it must use an enormous amount of brain power to do this.

What happens though, is that, as they convert their feelings into words, they actually change they way they view things. Something happens when you turn your emotions into phrases and sentences. Perhaps these things become more "real" or more managable to the speaker. It's amazing to listen to someone talking about his or her relationship to a parent, for example, and to hear them framing ideas in different ways. They leave therapy with a different perspective, even if nothing actually "happened" during the session.

Maybe Heisenberg was wrong about sub-atomic particles, but my experience has been that the act of examining one's relationship changes that relationship.

2002 My Political Rant

Steven B. Zwickel

November 18, 2002

What should we do when public servants put their own self-interests before those of the public? It seems that our elected representatives are caught in an endless cycle of fund-raising and campaigning that has plunged our whole system into a pit of corruption. They need help to escape this trap and to restore confidence in government.

Our representatives run for reelection for a variety of reasons. Some want to continue in office to press legislation on certain issues. They feel that public service is a noble calling that enables them to act as advocates for the issues that are important to them. Many of them see themselves as professional politicians and the process of getting reelected is a way of continuing their careers. All of those who run for reelection do so because they can, because there is no limit to the number of times a person can run for an office in this state.

The more times a politician gets reelected, the more seniority he or she acquires. In the legislature, seniority leads to an increase in power. The lure of power is a strong incentive to run for reelection.

This desire to get reelected is the root cause of all the problems our legislature has had in the past few years. When legislators have to worry about getting reelected, they can’t act on their principles—instead of doing what they think is right, they do what is popular. They try not to take positions on controversial issues, because these votes may be used against them in an election campaign. Even if a legislator has a strong opinion, he or she dare not express it, lest they give ammunition to their political opponents when they come up for reelection. This is why our legislators actually prefer inaction to action. No wonder so little gets done! And no wonder there is so much hoopla when a bill is enacted.

It also explains why all the candidates sound alike. They conduct polls to find out what the majority of voters think and then they try to please everyone. They all sound alike because they all base their campaigns on telling us what they think we want to hear. This is called “pandering” and it is a good indication of how rotten our political system has become. Our representatives no longer stand for anything.

The current system encourages politicians to avoid trying anything new. New ideas may be controversial and they can fail, so politicians have learned to avoid them. They have discovered that it is much safer to run on a platform that opposes new ideas. It is harder to defend an idea and to campaign in favor of doing something. It is the height of absurdity when campaigns become contests to see which candidate can come out against more things.

Perhaps the worst example of how our system has become dysfunctional is the political gridlock surrounding the issue of taxation. The candidates—every single one of them—promise to curb spending and cut taxes. If they are so absolutely determined to cut taxes, why haven’t they done so? The reason they have not cut taxes is because they can’t. They know it would be impossible to maintain the level of services we get from government if taxes were cut. We expect roads to be fixed, snow to be plowed, crooks to be caught and sent to jail, schools and libraries to be open and working, and cutting any of these would make the voters very angry.

The same legislators who can’t cut taxes can’t raise taxes either. All of them have pledged to never, ever raise taxes. This foolish oath, if taken seriously, means that, when the unknowable, unforeseeable, and uncontrollable come to pass (as they surely will) we can expect no help from the state. They are powerless to raise taxes, even in an emergency! In the recent budget crisis, any sane person would have (reluctantly, I think) concluded that a small tax increase would save the ship of state from deficits. Not one voice was heard in the legislature proposing this solution. The legislators know that a vote in favor of any tax hike is “political suicide”—something career politicians must avoid at all costs. Instead, they used the tobacco settlement windfall, which temporarily (at least until after the next election) solved the problem without raising taxes.

Are the voters opposed to tax increases? Of course we are. We don’t want to pay more taxes, but we aren’t stupid, either. Had the legislators raised taxes to balance the budget, we would have griped and complained, but I think we would also have recognized the importance of paying for all the things we want, and have come to expect, from the state. When taxes need to be raised, we need legislators who are not afraid to do the right thing.

Our politicians are constantly raising money to pay for the TV, radio, and newspaper ads for the next election. This need for money caused the scandals we have seen splashed all over the news. The need to raise money for campaigning has led some good people astray. Too many elected officials have given in to temptation and become deeply beholden to big campaign contributors and a lot less sensitive to the needs of their other constituents.

Who wins when a large donor’s interests conflict with those of the community? Can a politician afford to say “no” to a wealthy contributor? By saying “yes” and taking the money, he or she can more easily ignore the will of the public, because a big campaign warchest can be used to buy lots of ads that will put a positive “spin” on things. In other words, if you raise enough money, you can screw the public and later on persuade them that you actually did the right thing.

We have an elected body whose members are more concerned with getting reelected than with doing what is necessary to keep our state going. On some issues, like taxes, they seem to be completely immobilized. Their self-interest requires them to chase money in underhanded and illegal ways and to accept contributions knowing that they may have to vote against their consciences and against the best interests of their constituents. How can we get them out of this mire? Can anyone reform our state government?

The argument may be made that the legislators can reform themselves—that they can pass legislation that will solve these problems and end the abuses. If they could have, they would have. They can’t do it. They can’t reform themselves: they have too much at stake, they are too partisan, and they are much too much attached to power.

We, the people, will have to reform our own political system. We need an end to partisan gridlock. We need to stop the endless fund-raising and campaigning. We need to hold a convention, as described in Article XII, §2 of the State Constitution to put things right. And it needs to be a convention of the people, not of the politicians.

Let’s start by putting a clause in the Constitution limiting how much money anyone can contribute to a candidate. Make it a percentage of the salary for the office—say 1%—or use any formula, as long as it is applied fairly to all office seekers. This amendment needs to be airtight; there mustn’t be any loopholes. Let’s get rid of “deniability” as a defense. We can permit a candidate to make one “mistake”, but two violations of the law and you go directly to jail. Let’s treat candidates the way we are (finally) treating CEOs. They must be held personally accountable for what their campaigns do and they should be required to sign off on an outside audit.

It is also time to get rid of the career politicians whose pettiness, sneakiness, and partisanship got us into this mess. We need term limits. Other states have them and we would not be the first to try them out. Opponents of term limits argue that it means “throwing the good out with the bad” and that the end result is a terrible “loss of experience” when senior legislators are forced out. Needless to say, all the opponents of term limits are career politicians (and their backers) who have a lot to lose. Service in the legislature was never intended to be a full-time job, much less a career. Reelecting a batch of “experienced” politicians means bringing back all the old animosity, greed, and personality clashes that led to gridlock in the first place.

Term limits would free our elected representatives to devote their time in office to doing the job at hand instead of spending it fund-raising and campaigning. They could increase or decrease taxes as needed, regardless of how popular such a move might be. They could do the “right” thing and tell the special interests and big donors to take a hike.

We, the people, have to do a better job, too. More of us have to vote and all of us need to know more about the issues. But, we can solve the problems we face—in fact, we are the only ones who can do so.

More than 225 years ago, Tom Paine insisted that there comes a time when reform can’t be left to the politicians; when the people themselves must act. That’s why the authors of the Wisconsin State Constitution put in Article XII—so that we can do what needs to be done ourselves. Now, we must do it.

2016 Baby Boomers and TV

Steven B. Zwickel

May, 2016

I got caught a while back by some click bait on-line that promised me a listicle of ten TV shows that were most influenced the Baby Boomers.  I read the list and I don’t agree with it at all. 

Baby Boomers, for those who don’t know, are a huge group (nearly 80,000,000 people) who were born in the 20 years after WWII, about 1946 to 1964. (I have written this piece so people who are not Baby Boomers can follow it). It was an era marked by the “Generation Gap” and adolescent “alienation”, terms used to describe how teens came to distrust adults and to challenge the values they were raised with.

I divide the Baby Boomer (BB) generation into two groups— older and younger. Older BBs are those who were old enough to understand the events of November 22, 1963. Younger BBs did not. The two groups had different experiences growing up and the impact of TV was different on the two groups. Television changed in an attempt to attract younger BBs and to win back older BBs. The older BBs drifted away from TV in the 1960s and spent more time pursuing other interests (think sex, drugs, politics). 

TV was different in the 1950s-60s, when the BBs were growing up. The target audience for most shows was the whole family, and advertisers were terrified of offending viewers. This meant that there were strict rules about content and language—no discussion of personal issues, no sex, no swearing. 

The networks filled prime time—the hours between dinner and bedtime—with family fare and that is when most people watched TV. No one watched much TV in summer—it was all re-runs, except for baseball games (which were played in the middle of the afternoon until the TV people persuaded the owners to move games to a later time when more people could watch on TV). Up until the mid-1960s, we watched TV shows in black and white—few people could afford color TV.

The listicle I disagree with contained soap operas. I don’t know who was influenced by the soaps. And, as I remember it, the BBs were in school all day and it was only stay-at-home moms who watched the soaps. 

The listicle also included the Tonight Show, but in the 1950s, few people stayed up late to watch TV because most had to get up early for work or school. Tonight started in the mid-50s and didn’t really become an institution until Carson took over in the early 1960s.

The listicle mistakenly included Sesame Street, which came along in 1969, long after the older BBs were toddlers. We did have TV shows for kids, but most had little-to-no educational content. The exception was Ding Dong School with Miss Frances, which only ran for a few years in the 1950s. Other shows for kids were the Mickey Mouse Club, Wonderama (both started in 1955) with people like Captain Video, Sandy Becker, Bill Britten (Bozo the Clown), and Sonny Fox. Total slapstick was found on another show that started in 1955 called Lunch with Soupy (Sales), but only preschoolers and sick kids who were home at mid-day got to see that show.

Well into the 1960s, radio was much more influential than TV. Radio was the source of the BBs music, which was a key part of the BB culture. And most families had a single TV, which was watched by everyone, while teenagers had their own portable “transistor” radios on which they listened to “their” music. 

In the 50s and 60s, Hollywood movies were in a period of decline. The big stars of the 1940s were fading and the quality of the scripts and productions was weakened by the blacklisting of many writers. Attendance in movie theaters fell off and, to save the industry, movies wound up being shown on TV. NBC started the trend in 1961, with NBC Saturday Night at the Movies and the other networks followed until there were movies on TV just about every night of the week.

My list of the TV shows that most influenced the older BBs. 

These are not the most popular shows, but the ones I think were most influential. I Love Lucy was extremely popular, but not influential. For contrast, not everyone watched Watch Mr. Wizard (starting in 1951) with Don Herbert, but those who did were influenced by it and became a lot more interested in science than they might have been.

1. Evening News. The networks started boosting their news coverage right around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and TV news really took off at the time of the Kennedy assassination in 1963. It was something everyone watched. We knew Huntley and Brinkley (Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC ), even if we couldn’t tell them apart. We trusted “uncle Walter Cronkite” (CBS Evening News 1962–81). The networks’ coverage of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had huge influence on how the BBs saw the world and their future role in it.

2. Variety shows. People today talk about an event “going viral” on the internet, but the BBs grew up in an era where the whole country watched an event and it became a shared cultural experience. Weekly variety programs, like The Ed Sullivan Show (1948 to 1971),The Perry Como Show (1955-59), and a dozen others not only created a shared culture, but they gave exposure to performers from every field. We saw comics, opera singers, Broadway shows, jazz bands, magicians, puppeteers, and everything else.

3. Rebel heroes. Walt Disney was so completely mainstream and conservative it’s hard to believe how much influence his TV shows Walt Disney's Disneyland (1954–1958) and Walt Disney Presents (1958–1961) in promoting rebels as heroes. These were anthology shows, running multi-week series, often about a single historical character. History, in this case, meant action, and the characters were rebels like Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. This was TV for boys and it gave young BBs the powerful message that it is OK for men to rebel against authority, especially when the authority is in the wrong.

4. Career shows. The BBs were told that they could be anything they wanted to be, and TV played right along. We had Perry Mason (1957-66), who made us want to be lawyers; Ben Casey (1961 to 1966) and Dr. Kildare (1961 to 1966), who made us want to be doctors. The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), Mission: Impossible (1966–1973), Checkmate (1960-62), The Wild Wild West (1965-69), and I Spy (1965 to 1968) made us want to be detectives and secret agents. I have no idea how many people chose careers based on these shows, but they certainly made BBs consider them.

5. Westerns. These “oaters” were a TV staple of every BBs childhood and most had interchangeable plots and characters. Their significance lies in how they promoted a cultural norm they called the “Code of the West” or the Code of the Cowboy. The Code was never stated overtly, but it was implied by the cowboys’ (good and bad) conduct. It was a code of honor that required a man to fight for his property, his woman, and his dignity. Real men used guns. The worst thing a man could be was a coward. If you must fight, you follow the rules (kicking, biting, and sucker punches are for cowards, but see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [1969] for a hilarious take on this part of the Code). When you hear politicians talking about how women need to be protected, they are reciting part of the Code. It is still with us.

6. Bonanza. I grouped the other westerns together, but Bonanza (1959 to 1973) was in a league of its own. The all-male cast took on topical issues like sexism and intolerance. The Cartwrights stood up for people of other religions, races, and ethnic groups. Not all the scripts were first-rate and some of the plots were sappy, but the show gave a whole new perspective to the BB audience that they didn’t get from the other westerns.

7. Annual Events. Everybody watched: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Miss America Pageant, The Oscars, the Olympics, the Jerry Lewis Telethon. For many years, these gave all of us a sense of being part of a common culture, but for the BBs in the 60s, they also came to symbolize the influence of corporate America. These shows were on the other side of the Generation Gap—for older people—and irrelevant to the many social, economic, and political changes the BBs were experiencing. 

8. Star Trek. Thousands of words have been written about the little show (79 episodes in just three seasons 1966-69) and its impact on viewers. For BBs, who grew up watching the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions on TV, Star Trek was “reality” TV. Space travel was real and we truly believed that some day we would be able “to boldly go” where no one had gone before. We were inspired.

9. Music. TV had a strained relationship with music. Radio was perceived to be TV’s biggest competitor for the BB audience and it was a real struggle for TV to lure teens away from the Top 40 Hit stations. Musical tastes changed very rapidly from the mid-50s to the mid-60s when rock ’n roll was replaced by Rock. Just before the British Invasion (the arrival of the Beatles), the networks tried shows featuring songs the whole family could enjoy. Thus, we had Hootenanny (1963), Shivaree (1965),  Hullaballoo (1965),  Shindig! (1964), and the granddaddy of them all,  American Bandstand (starting in 1952 and featuring the ageless teenager Dick Clark from 1956-1989). Bandstand concentrated on rock ’n roll dance music from the Top 40, but the others brought folk music and protest songs into the BB’s lives. Some were silly, some terribly dated, and others were truly sappy. But these songs and the people who sang them (Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and many more) became an important part of the BB hippie counterculture.

10. Topical humor. The majority of the comedies in the 50s and 60s were sitcoms, and most of them were predictable slapstick and fairly low-brow. The sit-com scripts and acting ranged from mediocre to awful. We watched them because we liked the characters and every once in a while they were funny, but they were not really influential. 

The listicle included The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis because the author believes that the character of Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) engendered the beatnik/hippie/flower children counter-culture. I can’t imagine anyone seriously emulating Maynard. 

Many of the other sitcoms relied on what passed for irony—kids are so much smarter than their parents and other dumb grownups. The show may have been called Father Knows Best, but it was clear that, like most TV dads, father was an oblivious idiot. 

But, there were some smart comedy shows, based on topical humor, like Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (started in 1968) and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (started in 1967) and those were influential. These shows made fun of authority figures and disparaged “serious” politicians and leaders, especially those who were seen to be liars. The BBs heard that it’s OK to rebel against people who haven’t earned your respect. The lesson that was not learned was how to disagree respectfully with others and the result of that was more than a decade of political and social chaos.

These shows, taken together, form a pattern of sorts. The view of the world they promoted was cynical and distrusting and I think it got worse as the younger BBs moved through adolescence. 

It’s not fair to generalize, but I will do so anyway. The older BBs responded by dropping out and becoming anti-establishment. They became the flower children and the Hippies. The younger BBs were more focused on beating the system and moving up into the establishment. They became the Yuppies —Young, Upwardly-mobile, Professionals.