THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 8, 1995 TAG: 9503080002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
Which of two recent stories was the more astonishing?
(1) Young man who flunked high-school math loses $1 billion and forces sale of 233-year-old London bank whose clients include Queen Elizabeth II. He didn't act alone, as initially reported, but he played the key role and his superiors, in the tradition of large organizations, have tried to lay all the blame on him.
Then moving quickly from the ridiculous to the sublime:
(2) Scientists discover the top quark. A quark is a building block of all matter in the universe (along with leptons and bosons). Scientists had previously found two pairs of quarks: the up and down, and the strange and charm. They'd found the bottom quark but until recently not its partner, the top quark, whose life span is a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, compared with which, a blink is an ice age.
Story (1) would suggest the world is endangered by idiots. We knew checkbooks could be hard to balance, but a billion-dollar boo-boo takes incompetence to dizzying heights. Possibly no one short of Monty Python's Flying Circus could satisfactorily explain what went wrong.
Story (2) suggests humans are incredible and some real thrills lie ahead. The New York Times raised these questions: ``Were the masses and other properties of these particles determined by random chance, or by some fundamental unifying plan? If so, what is that plan, and how might gravity, the least understood of the four forces of nature, be related to it?''
The simple question, then, is: Did some intelligence design all quarks, as building blocks for people and aardvarks?
The deeper question follows: If there was a fundamental unifying plan, whose was it? Was it some intelligence named God?
So the same week carried one of the silliest and one of the most profound stories of the year. The silly story was tragic. The profound one was a giant step in solving the ultimate mystery.
At least two morals should be drawn from the two stories:
Moral one: It pays to pay attention in math class.
Moral two: Progress is a two-edged sword. Nifty devices like computers contributed to a bank's collapse and a breath-taking discovery. by CNB