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Michelson Inferometer Photograph
A bewitching mirror splits an intense light beam into incandescent tubes that careen off more mirrors only to merge with an eerie, almost ghost-like transcendence that captures the wonder of this primitive-looking device that changed the world. Captured in a century-old black-and-white photograph is nothing less than the calibration for the speed of light.
Built by the University of Chicago’s Albert Michelson, this array of mirrors first confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. The two-pages devoted to that picture in the coffee-table book American Science and Invention still enthralls me as it did when I first saw it as a child. Einstein imagined riding on that beam of light. Today we have radically different dreams. Like those beams split by Michelson’s inferometer those two dreams present stark contrasts between our times and Michelson’s.
The trigger for this came from a comment by about my post on CAFE standards. pbm60 wrote:
When I was a kid it used to be said that the Japanese were great refiners of technology but that they weren’t very good at inventing it. Toyota and Honda have viable hybrids, Nissan has a decent Continuously Variable Transmission. Other than GM accidentally letting the EV-1 out of the bag for a couple of years I can’t think of a single innovation from the American Big-Three.
In short, pbm60 asks, “Whatever happened to good old American ingenuity?”
There was a time when coffee-table sized books like American Science and Invention celebrated this country’s creative spirit. That two-page wide picture all but asked, “Where else but in American could someone capture the speed of light?” The flurry of invention that burst from this nation in the second half of the nineteenth century literally remade the world. Half a century later innovation would win World War II for America, for make no mistake it was inventions such as breaking the Japanese code with the first primitive computer that turned the tide.
Later, startled out of our complacency by Sputnik, Laika and the first man in space, we again harnessed our ingenuity to put the first man on the moon. At about the same time came the beginnings of the computer revolution which grew directly from work done in World War II. America made the biggest, fastest, most sophisticated super-computers in the world. And after them came Microsoft, Netscape, Google.
Yet even as Silicon Valley sprouted microchips, America was losing its overall lead. People saw it coming as they watched the metamorphosis taking place on store shelves. Yet at the same time we did not want to believe it, clinging to the faith that just as we had withstood Sputnik we would gather ourselves together and retake the lead.
Today you can walk into one of those big box electronics stores that loom over malls across the country and stroll the aisles, carefully noting the names of the manufacturers. Too many products no longer bear an American name, come from America or were engineered by Americans. Perhaps the biggest wake-up slap came this summer when Toyota became the world’s leading auto manufacturer. This may prove even more devastating than if the Russians had reached the moon first.
A confirmation of our shrinking innovation lies in the rows of files lining the United States Patent Office. A paper by Michael McAleer, Felix Chana and Dora Marinova on patterns in patents held by Americans and those by foreigners tells an important and over-looked story: we are losing our innovation edge. The authors note:
Previous studies have indicated that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the number of patents by foreign countries in the USA surged at an unprecedented rate (see, for example, Patel and Pavitt, 1995; Kortum and Lerner, 1999; Arundel and Kabla, 1998)
The graph below shows the growth in Japanese-held American patents:
Of course, we all know who was president then and over the past week have seen graphs that show a decline in our infrastructure spending to a precipitous rise in mortgage foreclosures coinciding with the onset of the Reagan administration. Apparently those tax cuts and other breaks to American business appear to have stifled innovation rather than nurtured it. Corporations have been on such a binge of mergers and acquisitions they have forgotten what drives economic success.
In his best-selling book The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida maintains the situation is actually worse. He reports:
According to my research…the United States ranks fourteenth out of fifteen in growth rate for patented innovation compared to European nations. (p. 141)
Florida also glumly points out:
Foreign-owned companies and foreign-born inventors account today for nearly half (47.2%) of all the patents granted in the United States. (p. 141)
He believes:
Our country–for generations known around the world as the land of opportunity and innovation–may well be on the verge of losing its competitive edge. (p. 3)
The truly frightening part of this story sears through this country like one of Michelson’s light sabers. We aren’t just losing our innovative spirit in the patent office, we are losing it in offices across the country. We live in times that seem characterized by problems rather than solutions.
Take our schools. The alert about the decline of our schools first came two decades ago with A Nation At Risk. A quarter century later, the situation seems to have become worse, a monument to our lack of innovation.
Then come those social policy issues we have tried to cure since the 1950s when social scientists dreamed of being able to solve everything from violent crime to the break-up of families. After billions of dollars in grants, thousands of studies and countless programs and projects, our prisons have become so overcrowded we are actually renting space for prisoners. Meanwhile the situation for other social problems seems no better.
Finally there is the most obvious failure of all: Iraq. The war represents more than an absurdly stupid policy decision, it represents a failure of imagination, for only people with closed minds and narrow viewpoints make such serious miscalculations. Pick which ever analogy from history you wish, all of them stem from societies that became afflicted with cultural and intellectual Alzheimers.
More than one commentator has compared America to the erosion of Great Britain or even the fall of the Roman Empire. All of them raise a collective why that reverberates through the empty factories of Detroit, the police-patrolled hallways of New York schools and the boarded-up farmhouses and deserted downtowns of the Dakotas.
An answer to that question lies in something as common as books once were–little silver frisbees that reflect light like one of Michelson’s mirrors. Think for a moment what has happened to American popular music, entertainment, the arts? The last truly imaginative movement in popular music was rap which is now three decades old–and still not accepted by the mainstream. Hollywood has become so creatively bankrupt that its most popular tactics are to continue making sequels, recycle old television shows, or even make movies of comic books and video games.
And what of American art, fiction, classical music? The general public gave up on much of it a generation ago, which has pushed artists and critics to decry the stupidity of the American public. When you think about it, this is the defense of every failed scribbler who claims to have written the fabled Great American novel.
What all these cries of creative shrinkage share can be summed up in one word: concentration. Innovation in America, whether in automobiles or popular music has usually not come from giant corporations. Back in the nineteenth century a generation of garage mechanics built the first airplanes, telegraphs, electric lights. Later a generation of garage geeks essentially reprogrammed the world.
Now, Silicon Valley has tightened up. Creative popular musicians find the only way they can be heard is on the Internet. Ah, the Internet. I can remember giving speeches as recently as five years ago about the potential of the Internet to give American innovation a much-needed jolt. Those times are passing quickly.
What Skippy the Bush Kangaroo has christened blogtopia has become blogdom. In his must-read article “New Establishment Rising? The End of the Flat Blogosphere,” Chris Bowers notes the 1% of all progressive blogs receive 95% of the traffic. He goes on to note that the entry costs to this “short head” of the national, progressive, political blogosphere have become so high:
That it has become a near impossibility for a new independent, individual actor to join the elite ranks of the national, progressive political blogosphere.
Bigness is not necessarily badness, unless it is also accompanied by policies that discourage innovation. pbm60′s example of the SUV could serve as a symbol for why innovation has been stifled in this country. From auto manufacturers to record and book companies to foundation grants and government programs the predominant policy relies on putting lots of money into large, high-profile, safe projects.
Book and record companies, for example, spend huge amounts on producing and promoting best-sellers from well-known names and “safe” formats instead of discovering new talent. Foundations have their own version of this. The Gates Foundation spent millions on a program creating smaller high schools without any systemic data about or from these schools which is a bit like testing a new drug by trying it out a group of people without gathering any in-depth information about them. Another foundation tactic also parallels the record companies with a small inner circle deciding ahead of time what intervention to fund and even which group will get the money the way record companies decide ahead of time which types of music and artists to back. As for government, ask science and medical researchers how easy it is to get innovative projects funded.
If you don’t buy any of this drive down the main street of any American town. First, there is the likelihood that Main Street is probably deserted because everyone is at the mall outside of town. Second notice the absence of any local businesses. What I term the strip mall syndrome afflicts this country like a cancer so you can drive down a street anywhere and find the same chain restaurants, electronics, building supply, furniture and clothing stores, all, of course, sporting exactly the same architecture to better promote corporate “branding.”
But the brand is seared into us. The role of Wal-Mart in destroying rural downtowns has been much-discussed, but less commented-on is the monoculture that has spread itself over all of America, like those pods in the 1950s horror movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The equivalent of those pods lie everywhere today quite openly, acculturating our society to desire the safe, the expected. We patronize the pizza chains over the local pizza maker because we know what to expect–bland, but safe food that is the equivalent of a Britney Spears record, a Scott Turow thriller, another Spiderman sequel.
The chance that a new idea, a new voice, a new policy will emerge amidst this concentration and emphasis on the large and the safe is unlikely. We have become an intellectually gated community where the gatekeepers are CEOs, marketing nerds, accounting bean counters who get rewards not for taking risks or for pioneering new paths but for sticking to the middle of the road. And what would be the fate today of a Michelson and his miraculous device?
In Strange Death I wrote:
[If] concentration had prevailed over the life of this country it is a good bet neither Elvis Presley nor Louis Armstrong would have ever become some of America’s most influential artists, since early in their careers both were ignored by the major media outlets of their time. Armstrong and many other early African American jazz artists recorded for what were then called “race records.” As for Presley, his story is an American legend of how a poor truck driver with a high school education scraped up enough cash to record a demo record with a visionary named Sam Phillips, who realized that he had a diamond in the rough when he heard the slick-haired teenager sing.
When I wrote about the despicable murder rate in Philadelphia it generated lots of mail asking whys and suggesting answers. To me, Murderdelphia represents the proverbial canary in the mine shaft. Murder and violent crime testify to a failure of imagination. By that I don’t mean a lack of solutions but something a great deal more troubling.
As many hop hop artists affirm, the common thread running through the gunshots is lack of alternatives. Young men with guns not only see no future, they see a society with no cultural or intellectual creativity.
Standing on street corners on stifling streets, living in stifling neighborhoods, facing stifling city law enforcement and government who in turn are stifled by corporate and government forces, life comes to resemble the infamous box used to discipline prisoners . The future must seem like a life sentence.
In “Hip-Hop Is Dead” Nas raps:
Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game
Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business
It forgot where it started
From turntables to MP3’s
to commercials on Mickey D’s
But we fool ourselves if we think this is confined to one place or even one race. While the burden may fall unfairly on people of color, you can find the same stares Field Negro calls “the look” in rural America where meth not crack is the drug of choice and black donuts spiraling on remote country roads testify to a lack of imagination and alternatives.
It is, of course, a venerable American tradition to write jeremiads bemoaning the nation’s lack of innovation. For example, every high school student knows of Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”–or, on second thought, maybe they don’t.
Yet there is something particularly troubling about today’s situation in that the pattern seems to stretch across so many areas of our society, the frustration seems particularly acute and in the present global economy, the stakes are extremely high.
The optimist in me hopes we will pull out of this like we did with Sputnik, but in order to do so will require changes in our corporate, government and nonprofit cultures (some believe they are all synonymous) that are unprecedented in our history. History has stories of whole nation’s reinventing themselves–China and Japan, to cite two recent ones. However, many of those changes were made by top-down dictates.
In Michelson’s device the beams of light ultimately merge, producing an amorphous glow, which researchers refer to as an interference pattern. These inferometer images can be stunningly beautiful, symbols of the diversity that can be produced even when a simple beam of light is split apart.
Our challenge is to somehow manage to produce a cultural equivalent of those images. It’s not too soon to start.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
