Soviet Union, Lucent, and Suburban High Schools

These three topics do not seem to be related, nor do they seem to be relevant science; why do I bring them to this blog?

One reason is that I have experience relevant for all of them, and I collect them here.

I was teaching in a public university in Mexico when the USSR collapsed. I had colleagues that studied there and I talked to them. They had misfeelings, they got a free education in sciences and for that they were grateful. Nevertheless they accepted that not everything was good in Russia. Russians of light skin fought darker students from the third world, when they thought they were getting in their territory. As time passed and the extent of the catastrophe was becoming more and more evident, I thought that the problems in the Soviet Union had more to do with problems in the modern world, than with intrinsic problems of the communist system. Professor Batra, had published some scary ideas from his field in economics that applied to both the second and the third world.

I moved to the US in 1998 to work for Lucent Technologies in Naperville, IL. I only worked there three years, because the company collapsed. This American icon is now owned by the French company ALCATEL. In my opinion Bell Labs was the pinacle of what an industrial laboratory can be. Transistor, Laser, Big Bang, Information Theory, you name it; almost all the important communications technology was being developed there, and then some. Why could they not pay my salary anymore? I cannot help thinking that something funny is going on. One may think that now that Google is doing well, all that only means, that some companies go extinct, and some others take their place. But maybe not.

Finally I report on my experience at two highschools in the suburbs of Chicago.

What I see is not pretty; with a much bigger budget than what I saw in highschools in Mexico, less is accomplished. Maybe the sheer number of students is unprecedent in the Chicago area, and administrators do not quite know what to do; maybe two years is not enough for me to get a realistic assessment of efficiencies here and in Mexico. Be it as it may, put together with all the ominous signs I see coming from scholars in disciplines different than mine, which is physics, I want to present here a hypothesis.

Just to give more information to the reader, so he or she can make more sense of my hypothesis, I should add that at this moment I carry a heavy debt. Maybe is all my fault, but I am just thinking publicly so others can consider how relevant is this idea to their own situation.

As some thinkers like Buckminster Fuller have already said, we are facing Utopia or Oblivion, Hegemony or Survival, I add my hypothesis that we, and I in particular, are at a crossroads.

We can change the world for good, as Ray Kurzweil writes in his book, The Singularity is Near ( year 2045 ), or we can go extinct as James Lovelock writes in his book, Gaia's Revenge.

My original contribution is that depending on how we ( and I ) fight for our own survival, we will perish as a species or morph into something new. Something as big as the change we experienced going from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.

May all have wisdom to continue this heroic march we call human civilization.