The Physics Of Real Debt Ceilings: When Nature Says No
by Adam Frank
NPR blog 13.7
August 2, 2011
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/08/02/138917521/the-physics-of-real-debt-ceilings-when-nature-says-no#more

Pity the politicians as they struggle to a hammer out a
deal on the US debt: the endless negotiations, the late
agreements that collapse by the morning news cycle.
Everywhere they turn they seem to constrained - hemmed
in - by forces pulling in every direction.

But their real problem is not that they have too little
freedom in choosing a direction but too much. Nature, it
turns out, knows the meaning of ceilings - the hard kind
you can't escape from. There are lessons in those
ceilings, which, perhaps, we could all learn from.

Much of modern physics is built on principles called
Conservation Laws. Conservation of charge holds for
electromagnetic systems like radio broadcast towers.
Conservation of angular momentum rules rotating systems
like an Olympic skater executing a spin. And then there
is the holy of holies: the conservation of energy.
Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only
transformed from one form into another.

The principle of energy conservation is absolutely,
positively, no-you-can't-break-it-even-this-once central
to our understanding of the Universe. Many times
physicists have been stuck in a corner facing an
experimental result they did not understand. Many times
someone, in response, suggested a breakdown of energy
conservation. Always they have been proven wrong.

Sometimes the solution came when physicists recognized
some new form of energy that needed to be added to the
balance sheet. This is what happened when Albert
Einstein demonstrated that matter itself was a kind of
energy (or at least equivalent to energy via E=mc2).
That addition happens rarely, however. Usually
scientists simply recognize new pathways of
transformation from one form of energy to another
(magnetic to thermal for example) that had eluded them
before.

Ironically the constraint of energy conservation (or any
form of conservation law) can be blessing and not a
curse for physicists. The world is both subtle and wild
in its changes.

Tracking how vast spinning clouds of interstellar gas
collapse to become stars is not easy but the
conservation of angular momentum gives you at least one
measure of the system that has to stay the same even as
everything else changes. Following the dance of
subatomic shape shifting as particles collide in the LHC
would be impossible without the conservation of energy
providing a sheltered place of constancy during the
chaos.

When formulated in the language of mathematics,
conservation laws can be unpacked to become the poetry
on which all physics is built. While Newton's laws of
forces were a triumph for science they could be very
difficult to work with (like woodworking tools with ill
shaped handles). In the early 19th century physicists
like Sir William Rowan Hamilton re-expressed Isaac
Newton's force-centered view in terms of energy
conservation producing simple, elegant expressions that
became the foundation for modern physics. The
development of quantum mechanics, for all its weirdness,
relied heavily on these energy conservation
formulations. (Quantum mechanics, it should be noted,
does allow a kind of "borrowing" violation of
conservation but only for the briefest of instants).

So what do these conservation laws tell us about the
imaginary human world of debt ceilings? Exactly that -
they are imaginary. Our economic systems are the
creation of human activity and human imagination.

And while conservatives appear to demand a kind of
conservation by demanding a hard debt ceiling, they -
like all the rest of us - want to dine on our cake while
still leaving it on the table. We want our ever-growing
economies to be free of real conservation. We want to
ignore that we live on a finite planet that has it own
very finite resources - water, oil, viable habitats.

Physics has known for a long time that there are real
physical ceilings in the physical world. We appear to be
living in the first human era that will be forced to
watch that fact move from abstraction to global reality.
Perhaps when our imaginary worlds of economics take
those real constraints seriously it will give our
beleaguered politicians firmer ground to stand on.

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