Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 28, 1991 TAG: 9103270243
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A. We went to the man himself, Mike Wallace, for the answer. The first thing we learned was that, astonishingly, the famous voice of TV - metallic, filled with outrage andmake-believe astonishment, a tabloid sort of voice - is how he talks all the time. That's his normal voice. Wow.
"We have very little difficulty getting people to go on camera," Wallace told us. "At the beginning, nobody knew who we were, so they came on. Then they began to understand, so they didn't come on." Now, he said, people are once again willing to tell their side of the story. "I think they know they're going to be treated fairly," Wallace said, without a hint of sarcasm.
It helps that many guilty people don't think they're guilty. They have endless reservoirs of self-delusion. For example, Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret convicted of murdering his family, was only too happy to go on camera with Wallace. What MacDonald didn't know was that Wallace had seen the galleys of Joe McGinnis' book "Fatal Vision," and that, rather than being a defense of MacDonald, it was a journalistic indictment.
"He was still under the impression that McGinnis was still his best friend," says Wallace. When Wallace confronted MacDonald with the truth, "he blanched, he couldn't believe it."
Great TV moment. But nasty!
"He knew what `60 Minutes' was and he knew me. Why did he [go on camera]? Because MacDonald believed he could persuade any reporter of anything."
One other factor: Wallace doesn't take any pains to warn his interviewees that they're going to be publicly humiliated. Rather he sort of toys with them. He feigns innocence for a while and then moves in for the kill. Nowadays some reporters find such techniques distasteful if not unethical.
"I think any reporter who is trying to get a story has to occasionally role play," he said. "Sometimes you do it with syrup and sometimes with vinegar."
Follow-up
We can't quite shake this question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" In our previous stab at it, we argued that the universe might be infinitely old, because it would be impossible, under the laws of physics, for something to emerge out of absolute nothingness. So simple! If this doesn't win the Nobel Prize, then we know the vote is rigged.
Seeking further insight, we spoke to Sidney Coleman, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, someone who thinks about pretty far-out stuff, like whether or not our universe is connected to innumerable others through cosmic "wormholes." (Sounds right, doesn't it?) He pointed out that it's silly to speculate about where our universe came from originally, because everything we know about the universe suggests that, long ago, it was in a condition in which there was no time.
"You go back and back and back and after a while you find you can't go any further back, not because you hit a barrier, but because `back' ceases to have any meaning," Coleman says.
This is, admittedly, a dense subject. (Uproariously funny physicist joke.) See, the scientists think they can trace the history of the universe almost all the way back to Time Zero, when the infinitely dense and hot universe suddenly began to expand and cool, a moment known as the Big Bang. But it's impossible to draw a time line that includes Time Zero.
That's because time and space do not exist independently of objects, but are merely dimensions that describe those objects and how they move about. Unfortunately, there is this annoying theory of quantum mechanics, which says that no distance can be shorter than something called the "Planck length," and no period of time can be briefer than "Planck time." (Length and time are related, you know, because they're part of the same thing, the "space-time continuum.") And when we look back in time, we see, early on, a universe that was no larger than the Planck length - a universe so small it had no "time" dimension.
So the question of what happened before the Big Bang is a bit like asking how tall a year is. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB