The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?

Breaking News

Photo: European Space Agency, Planck Collaboration

A front page picture in The Times with the title “The Cosmos Back in the Day," showed the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite’s “heat map of the universe as it appeared 370,000 years after the big bang.” The article that appeared on page l0 “Universe as an Infant: Fatter Than Expected And Kind of Lumpy” (NYT, 3/21/13) went on to describe a picture of what the universe looked like 13.8 billion, the new estimated age of the universe according to science reporter Dennis Overbye’s piece, minus 370,000 or 13,799,630,000 years ago. Not exactly breaking news. In the field of cosmology where the battle between, as Overbye described it, “dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together” is, of course, a big story. Overbye quoted Marc Kamionkowski, “an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University,” as saying that Planck was “cosmology’s human genome project.” Still, it’s nice to see a picture of way back when as you scan over column right to “President Urges Israelis to Push Effort for Peace" or center "Once Few, Women Hold More Power in Senate” and column left, ”Bronx Inspector, Secretly Taped, Suggests Race is a Factor in Stops.” The map of the universe described in the article “is in stunning agreement,” according to Overbye, “with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years” and it roughly corresponds to the period in which on-line journalism began to seriously challenge newsprint. Twenty years ago on-line reporting was where the universe was 13,799,630,000 years ago. Now despite all the dark matter, the dark energy, aided and abetted by the advent of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, has caused the universe of journalism to expand, for good or bad, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

The Hunch, the Pounce and the Kill

If there were a genre called business science fiction and fantasy (a mixture of Philip K. Dick and Malcolm Gladwell), then Azam Ahmed’s recent Times story about the infamous trade that put JP Morgan in the hole for a cool 2 billion and climbing (“The Hunch, the Pounce and the Kill,” NYT, 5/26/12) would definitely qualify. Consider the tale’s protagonists: Boaz Weinstein, Chrysler building based hedge fund trader, one time Stuyvesant High school grad, chess wunderkind and card shark who Warren Buffet once invited to a poker tournament and JP Morgan’s Bruno Iksil, aka “the London whale,” so named for what Ahmed described as “his outsize trades.” Iksil wasn’t Melville’s Great Whale, a creature who would have posed a slightly greater challenge in both life and art. He turned out to be easier prey for Boaz. When the initial reports of the JP Morgan loss originally appeared, most of the attention in the press concerned bank regulation. Here was 2008 with one of the most prominent and profitable financial institutions in America, taking a huge blow for trading in area that many think should be off limits to banks. However, the exact nature of the losses and what they derived from remained somewhat of a mystery. Even more important however was the fact that JP Morgan didn’t exist in a bubble. The bank’s loss had to be someone else’s gain. “The resulting uproar, in Washington and on Wall Street, has largely obscured a simple truth of the marketplace,” Azam Ahmed remarked. “Yes, Morgan lost big—but, as Mitt Romney has pointed out, someone else won. And that someone or, rather, those someones, turn out to be Boaz Weinstein and a wolf pack of like-minded hedge fund managers. In the London Whale, these traders saw a rich opportunity, and they seized it with both hands. That, after all, is the way hedge funds roll.” Like all fantasy fiction, there still is something unearthly about all of this, and for the lay person, who is likely to be stunned by all the zero’s, it’s the question, how does it all happen? Credit default swaps and synthetic derivatives still read like supernatural forces to those who aren’t versed in their workings. To the many who don’t understand these esoteric financial instruments, which are to financial journalists on the prowl for scoops what leveraged buyouts were in the 80’s, they’re the mysterious dark energy of the business world.