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Show The Saltl.kf Tribune, Sumlaw January ID, I Midi A17 Physicists Find Feasibility Of 5lh Force Fascinating Albert Svhlstedt Jr The Baltimore Sun The first cave man to drop a rock on his foot became painfully aware of one u( the four forces m nature gravity Now, a group of physicists, writing in the Jan. 6 issue of the Physical Reviews Letters has suggested the existence of a filth force which they call hypercharge, an idea that another scientist has characterized as potentially revolutionary." Force, which has so many diflerent meanings in everyday language, is an intriguing subject to physicists because it is intimately linked with the fundamental questions of how the universe works, and how the infinitesimal particles that compose all things react with one another. Gravity, the force which attracted that rock to the Earths surface when the caveman's foot got in the way, has been described as the glue that holds the universe together. Gravity affects every object, regardless of its size. However, gravity is by far the weakest of the four known forces, Bruce A. Barnett, professor of physics at the Johns Hopkins University, explained in a recent interview. There is, for example, the "strong force which holds the nucleus of an atom together, Dr. Barnett pointed out. This force binds together elementary particles called quarks to form protons and neutrons and other subatomic particles. "It the strong force is billions and billions of times stronger than gravity," Dr. Barnett said. How could gravity, which exerts a pulling influence throughout the universe, be weaker than something that only holds a tiny atomic nucleus together? Part of the answer lies in the fact that gravity, by its very nature, extends over infinite distances, weak though it may be. The enormously powerful holding force inside the nucleus of an atom extends over a very an unimaginably small short distance fraction of an inch and then it quickly dissipates. Distance between objects is of critical importance in discussing forces. Any of these forces is like a game of two people throwing a ball back and forth, said Dr, Barnett, who is a member of a team of Hopkins scientists conducting experiments in fundamental physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Palo Alto, Calif. If the two ball throwers stand 500 feet apart, they can't reach each other with the ball. If they stand 5 inches apart the game doesnt work very well either. A distance of. say, 60 feet would be ideal, and the ball would fly back and forth easily between the two people. There is, then, an appropiate distance for each force to act as nature intended. That is why the little space at the top of an autom-bile- s so the spark plug has to be precise spark will want to jump, but won t have to jump too far. That jumping spark is a manifestation of a third force, called electromagnetic, which elec- exists between an negatively-charg- e By - . Gramm, Rudman Will Get the Blame Bv Robert Reno Newsday William Philip Gramm was a former economics professor at Texas A & M. a practicing Episcopalian. honoree of the Freedom Foundation and author of the forgettable book "The Economics of Mineral Extraction" before fame struck him. Warren Bruce Rudman was a small-towlawyer, former capmember of the tain of infantry and remembered as a well-likebefore his of cadets at Academy corps Valley Forge Military name went down in history Only a hyphen separates the Texas economist and the New Hampshire attorney in the title of an undertaking that could soon become synonymous with parsimony, chaos, inconvenience and frustration to millions of Americans who'd never heard of these fellows four months ago. Former Sen. Howard Baker has called it "a riverboat gamble." Sen. Pat Moymhan called it a "suicide pact" and "the single most obvious and consequential disaster the U S. Congress will have tariff of 1930. enacted since the Smoot-HawleThat, of course, was the protectionist bill that precipitated the collapse of world trade, assured that world depression would persist lor a decade, probably assisted Hitler in becoming chancellor of an economically ruined Germany and. without stretching things too far. had more than a little to do with igniting World Wa II. If Gramm-Rudmadoes half as much mischief, its namesakes may have invited public scorn of such magnitude that no one will ever remember they were merely two inoffensive junior Republi n d y n A can senators who had a facile idea about how to balance the federal budget. Already, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, another of the bill's Senate sponsors, should be realizing he's just had a close call. The term never quite caught on in popular usage, possibly because it's so hard to fit in a headline. Anyway, Holling s staff stiM insists he is one of the rightful and proud sponsors. This makes you suspect that Hollings, an astute and realistic will man, doesn't really believe that ever really be fully implemented and that President Reagan will be forced to accept some major tax Increases instead of the deep and unselective reductions in spending that the plan would otherwise require. If this doesn't happen the great middle class is about to get a real lesson in budget cutting. When their police dont answer the phone on the 10th ring, theyll realize that Gramm and Rudman have cut local revenue sharing. When they stand in three-hou- r lines to get through customs, find their national park closed every other weekend, buy tainted meat missed by federal inspectors, fail to get their new passports in time, wait for a bed in a VA hospital or discover their Social Security checks coming later and later, the names of Gramm and Rudman will ring in their ears. Of course, Gramm-Rudma- n is only a nickname. Still, your average American isnt going to go around sullenly cursing the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985. Sense of "Oneness' Arabs Naturally Rally to Khadafys Flag By G H. Jansen Special to the Los Angeles Times When the United NICOSIA, CYPRUS States and Israel began threatening Libya with military reprisals after the Palestinian attacks on the El A1 counters at Rome and Vienna airports, it was easy to predict that Arab governments would rally in support of Col. Moammar Khadafy. To Americans, that may seem paradoxical The Arab states have even more reason to hate and fear Khadafy than Western governments have. Over the years, many Arab regimes, and not just Liyba's neighbors, have been directly endangered by subversion Yet they all backed the colonel. Apart from the radical regimes like Syria and South Yemen, who chose to support their ally, for most other governments there was no choice. In this last crisis it was the Arab people who rallied to Khadafy. and though many Arab regimes are firmly repressive. they did not. in this case, wish to run 'he risk of popular dissatisfaction and possible protest. There are about half a dozen positive reasons and two negative ones why Arabs support Khadafy. The first and perhaps strongest is Arab family or fellow-feelinThis is expressed in the common Arab saying, "I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I and my brother and our cousin against the outsider. The United States may be most concerned with how to fight terrorism; Arabs are most concerned with how not to fight each other. This sentiment cuts right across the endless squabblings of the Arab governments. This emotional, perhaps even sentimental, oneness the deep feeling that the Arabs is based on the solid fact are one people Libyan-sponsore- that Arabs from Marakesh to Muscat all speak the same language and are all Moslems, sharing the same millenial society, culture, traditions and historical experience, most recently that of colonial domination. No other multinational group shares the same sense of underlying oneness, not even the Spanish-speakin- g Roman Catholics of Latin America. Any outside government that does not acknowledge ihe feeling of Arab oneness as a fact of great political significance is in for trouble, as the United States is in the process of discovering. The Arab people know, however vaguely, that Khadafy has used his oil wealth to better the daily lot of his own people, and that his record in providing them with roads. d G.II. Jansen, author of Milita.t Islam, has covered the Middle East for max? fears. schools, hospitals and so on is better than h states. Libya's many of the other current austerity is seen as part of a general recession in the oil world. Then there is the colonels unwavering cause of the ensupport for the tire Arab nation Palestine. He is particularly admired for the fact that even while he was under fierce political pressure during the last few weeks he reiterated his backing of the Palestinians struggle. He has wavered in supporting this or that Palestinian group or leader, and at one time he even expelled Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization from Libya, but he has always been loyal to the cause as such. His one big blunder on this issue was when he asked the PLO leadership, besieged in Beirut by the Israelis, to commit suicide. But Arafat has since forgiven that gaffe. oil-ric- - Since the Arabs feel they are one people, it is inevitable they should dream, however unrealistically, of Arab unity, of one Arab national federation or confederation. So strong is the pull of this dream that President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led Egypt from 1958 to 1970, shrewdly and realistically made it part of his program and it remains one of the three main elements in the charter of the Baath Party, now in power in Iraq and Syria. But Khadafy has tried to do something about the dream: He is forever trying to marry off his rich but scrawny Libyan bride to a poorer but bigger and stronger Arab bridegroom. And although the Arabs smile at the folly or impetuosity of his efforts, they believe him to be, at heart, on the right track a proof that the spirit of Nasser, the greatest modern Arab leader, is not dead. Khadafy is admired for having another he stands up to Nasserist characteristic bullies, particularly Western ones. When under pressure, he, unlike the leaders of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or the gulf states, becomes all the more defiant. The Arabs are a proud people. It is universally accepted that Khadafy is his own man, if only because no one else wants him. He is no ones stooge but, in true nonaligned fashion, is everyone's headache. That, in the Arab world, is a very positive quality. Moreover, the colonel has made Islam one of the bases of his appeal to the Islamic Arabs. After all, is not the plain green flag of Islam the flag of Libya? Militant Islam bulks large in Libyan policy and would attract more support for Khadafy if he had not, running true to form, propounded his own heterodox ideas on the faith. Buttressing these positive reasons for Arab admiration and exasperated fondness for Khadafy are two negative ones. Khadafys particular, almost personal, enemies are the enemies of all Arabs peoples and governments: the United States and Israel. The United States was first considered an enemy because of its total support to Israel, the Arabs main enemy; for years, hundreds of cartoons in Arab publications have depicted Uncle Sam as Israels slave. But of late, after Lebanon and now Libya, the United States has emerged as an Arab enemy in its own right, as President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz quarrel with the Syrian and Libyan leaders. So pressure on or threats against an Arab government from the United States, with or without Israel, automatically produce Arab fury. Lastly, there is a popular predisposition in favor of Khadafys often erratic and dangerous policies towards other Arab states, because his two main recent Arab enemies, Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Sudans Jaafar Numelri, were, in the end, spurned by their own people. Th brief border war that Sadat waged against Libya in 1978 was extremely unpopular outside and inside Egypt, even in the ranks of the Egyptian army. It violated the sense of Arab family oneness, of Arab unil, and was against the wrong enemy, an Arab, instead of against Israel. Those deep atavistic Arab feelings have more or less compelled Arab governments to rally round even that very Improbable objoct of support, the Libya of Moammar Khadafy. said. Indeed, the big question about the which is so small it can zip through people, buildings and. planets without running into anything else, is whether or not it has mass Since there are many quadrillions of flying around the universe, the question is a large one If these almost invisible and unmoasureable specks have any kind of mass at all, that fact could mean that the universe is so heavy it may eventually collapse upon itself, instead of continuing to expand forever Now comes a group of scientists -Ephraim Fischbach, of Purdue University, and his colleagues who suggest in the Physical Review Letters that there may be a fifth force, a repulsive force called a hypercharge. that operates between two protons The hypercharge takes the form of a very small object called a "hyperphoton, according to the new theory Beyod all this is the consideration that there might be other forces in nature past, that are yet unknown to present or future . science. For instance, Dr. Gabop Domokos, a theoretical physicist at Hopkins, said the other day that a hundred forces may have existed after the first moment of the Big Bang, the unexplained cataclysm which scientists believe may have triggered the formation of the universe perhaps 12 oC 15 billion years . - . ago. .. With respect to the. four known forces, there is an intriguing question that physicists have been wrestling with for years and hope one day to answer. Are gravity', electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force all expressions of a single, universal phenomenon? Scientists jefer to this question as the grand unification theory. '. ; The National Science Foundation's magazine, Mosaic , discussed that possibility in a 1979 issue and put it this way: It would produce a single.set of uniform rules so powerful as to help predict and explain all phenomena everywhere in.the universe, tlm decay of atoms and the swirl pf and the nothgalaxies, the blast of ingness of black holes, the workings of television and the soaring flight of eagles" Governments Meddling Into Cable TV Must End By Patrick D. Maines Special to The Tribune The concepts of free speech for individuals and editorials rights for media outlets are taken for granted in this country as rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Print and broadcast journalists are perhaps the quickest to challenge even the slightest hint of government interference, and are adamant about asserting and protecting their First Amendment rights. Given this mood, which has been reinforced over the years by the courts, it is almost as inconceivable as it is outrageous that one of the countrys major media systems is now controlled by government to an extraordinary degree. This medium, cable television, is subject to extensive controls beginning at the municipal level and extending to Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. What is even more inconceivable is that this regulation has come at the expense of the First Amendment and that this abuse has been largely ignored by regulators, Congress, the press. First Amendment advocates, and even the cable industry itself. The time has come to regulation of the cable industry. If constitutional concerns are given due consideration, it is evident that, among other things, cable franchising should be abandoned, and that parts of the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 must be considered unconstitutional. The courts recently have taken important steps in this direction by ruling that cable-Toperators should be free to decide for themselves which local TV stations they will carry, and by holding that Los Angeles violated the Constitution by granting an exclusive cable franchise, But it is not enough for those concerned about First Amendment abuses to simply wait on the sidelines for random cases to set things right. The key player in setting things right is the cable-Tindustry. The industry must decide what it wants to become: an unregulated "electronic publisher" with full First Amendment rights, free to compete in the string of marketplace, or a government-ru- n monopolies. The public interest (and in the of the cable indus-t-v- ) long-ruthe demands that it opt for the former. Historically, problems have stemmed g from the fundamental structure of the process, In which a municipal government awards a franchise conferring on the cable operator what amounts to an exclusive "right" to wire a geographic area and offer cable service. Local governments, however, typically extract a stiff price for granting monopoly benefits. Cable operators are compelled to pay a franchise fee. In addition, cable operators have been coerced Into providing a range of expensive and often unworkubte ex self-intere- . i tron and a positively charged proton, two of the fundamental particles m an atdm Electromagnetism, which also extends over an infinite range, is actually a manifestation ot two forces - the attraction between particles with opposite charges, and magnetism, the force that nsikesp ngil jump tuward a i tuld's hprsestgif magnj't The fourth known force in nature is called the "weak force." which is much weaker than eeft?om;ygr)ciic fpites but plays a'significant role in rtuiure." i Dr Barnett explained that the weak force exists between an electron, the negatively charged particle that orbits the nucleus of an atom, and a nutrino, an even smaller particle. "A nutrinos mass is so small we have never been able to measure it,.I)r Barnett 1 1 m Patrick D. Maines k president of the Meresearch organiza- dia Institute, a non-prof- it tion in Washington, D.C. cable TV though it operates over a privately owned coaxial cable, and thus does not traffic in the "public's airwaves is actually regulated far more than broadcast TV. One can easily imagine the reaction of radio and TV broadcasters to a government edict that they set aside airtime for official government proceedings, or. that they had to surrender their studios to any person or party desirous of "public access." There would be cries of "Big Brother," and they would be right. Yet these are precisely the kinds of demands local governments have.routincly forced on cable TV. This would be bad enough if cable car. ried nothing but sprogram-mingBut cable TV i$ qTready.much more than that, and in' trie futufe Will be still more Already, cable is carrying conventional broadcasting, UBS broadcasts, satellite programming and even "print programming, a la the wire service cablecast in alphanumerics. In the very near future, cable may be carrying the "print" material stored in databases and offered through systems. cable-originate- d over-the-a- ir There also is every reason to believe that, unless First Amendment Concerns begin to find forceful expression, these cable systems will continue to be controlled by K) cal governments,, operating through their franchise authority, and that these governmental bodies will continue to decide not only who shall own and control the cable systems, but the very mix and nature of the ' programming to be offered by them. Surely such a situation should arouse concern not only umong the parties directly affected the cable systems and program but among legal experts, First providers Amendment advocates, and indeed people in all walks of life who believe the nose of the government camel must bo kept out of the tent of a free press. .... .. t i tras, some of which have nothing to do with cable. One winning cable franchise offered to plant 20,000 trees. The cable industry has been slow, however, to assert the primacy of the First Amendment. This is perhaps understandable because from the start the industry has had to cope with the reality of the need for a franchise to operate, which some operators consider worth the sacrifice of their own and the public s First Amendment rights. As a result, government regulation of the industry has gone unchallenged To a far greater degree Mian in other media. Indeed. m m 1 |
