whyroots

I know what you're thinking: Bush studied physics?  Probably not.  As in other areas, the president's gut feelings seem to have left him with an education that is about 400 years out of date.

In Newtonian mechanics, objects obey ‘laws’ – mathematical scriptures – that ‘govern’ their behavior.  The only type of causality in the Newtonian framework is mechanical.  Like billiard balls, nothing in the universe moves unless it is struck by a moving thing.  In this 17th century framework, hunting causes is easy: Find the thing that struck the object of interest.  Your bullet wound was caused by the explosive force of the powder in the gun.  Universal attraction, or gravity, is caused by tiny invisible particles that move things toward each other – because what else could cause something to move?

When events are simply determined by the mechanical causes that produce them, then it is relatively easy to make predictions about events.  When an event is wrongly believed to have simple mechanical causes, then it is quite easy to make wrong predictions.

George Bush is using Newtonian mechanics to solve problems in quantum field theory. 

Ahmed Rashid is just another journalist to point out recently the major error in the Bush Administration’s Iraq problem solving.  They have consistently failed to apply field theory; in other words they treat US-Iraq relations as an isolated system.  Kill Saddam causes Democracy causes Good.  Maybe in a vacuum; most likely not in the field between Iran and Israel.  Again, the context of the field must be considered when we are solving the exit strategy equations.  Fortunately, I think Obama and his team have got a more up-to-date physics.

-- Jacob Levine

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