2012

Christmas morning is as good a time as any to reflect on the year that is about to end.  2012 has been a sad and discouraging year for many people all over the world, but I am encouraged by the youngsters whose company I enjoy often enough to keep me going, like the medical students whom I encounter occasionally in seminars. These students, and my grandchildren, reinfect me periodically with enough youthful enthusiasm to sustain me. I am 86 years old now, well past the average life expectancy of my birth cohort, and I am contented as I approach the end of a long and thoroughly enjoyable, worthwhile and interesting life. My beloved Wendy has been dead just over two years, and today I would be happy to follow her, except that I remain curious about what my grandchildren will do with their lives. All three are interesting young adults and full of promise.  I have an incentive to live another 10 years to see which direction their lives take, despite reminders from my aging body that various organs and tissues are wearing out.

I'm curious about and interested in much else. Theoretical physics and the Higgs boson, for instance.  I got seriously interested in theoretical physics in my last year at school and first year at university and I've stayed in touch by occasional immersion in the works of Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and others who can clarify this arcane discipline for amateurs. I understand why the large hadron collider at CERN has enough reason to justify the enormous expense of its construction because it has proved the existence of the Higgs boson, and I can understand that the Higgs boson is the essential keystone holding together all the other particles  that comprise every atom in the universe. I can understand the concept of the quantum computer and why it is orders of magnitude more powerful and versatile than the digital computer on which I'm tapping out this note to post on my blog. The theoretical physicists at the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo University say quantum computers are only a few years away from being a practical reality. Perhaps that's the ultimate in Good News to have emerged from 2012, which I have to agree with many pundits, has been a bad year on the whole.  

As I tap out this note I'm listening for the second time this Christmas to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I resonate to the aria "Why do the nations so furiously rage together," and I wonder whether humans will ever learn how to settle disputes by amicable discussion rather than by killing and maiming each other. Today the death toll in Syria has reached 45,000 according to latest UN estimates, and there is no sign of resolution to this ultimately futile conflict. 

Christmas Day is turning out as it should, bright sun shining down on crisp dazzling white snow, no wind, a day when it's good to be alive.